Intel Corporation today reported second-quarter 2023 financial results. "Our Q2 results exceeded the high end of our guidance as we continue to execute on our strategic priorities, including building momentum with our foundry business and delivering on our product and process roadmaps," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "We are also well-positioned to capitalize on the significant growth across the AI continuum by championing an open ecosystem and silicon solutions that optimize performance, cost and security to democratize AI from cloud to enterprise, edge and client."

David Zinsner, Intel CFO, said, "Strong execution, including progress towards our $3 billion in cost savings in 2023, contributed to the upside in the quarter. We remain focused on operational efficiencies and our Smart Capital strategy to support sustainable growth and financial discipline as we improve our margins and cash generation and drive shareholder value." In the second quarter, the company generated $2.8 billion in cash from operations and paid dividends of $0.5 billion.

Today, Intel introduced the Intel Arc Pro A60 and Pro A60M as new members of the Intel Arc Pro A-series professional range of graphics processing units (GPUs). The new products are a significant step up in performance in the Intel Arc Pro family and are carefully designed for professional workstations users with up to 12 GB of video memory (VRAM) and support for four displays with high dynamic range (HDR) and Dolby Vision support.

With built-in ray tracing hardware, graphics acceleration and machine learning capabilities, the Intel Arc Pro A60 GPU unites fluid viewports, the latest in visual technologies and rich content creation in a traditional single slot factor.

Intel's newest Arc Pro A60/A60M professional graphics card has been spotted in CompuBench database, revealing what appears to be the highest performing graphics card in Intel's Arc Pro lineup. Unlike the already available Arc Pro A50, A40, A40M, and the A30, which are all based on the ACM-G11 GPU with up to 8 Xe-cores, the upcoming A60/A60M could end up with a cut-down version of the ACM-G10 or the rumored ACM-G12, considering it packs 16 Xe-cores or 256 Xe Engines/Execution Units.

Unfortunately, Intel's Arc Pro graphics cards are pretty rare and so far, these were only available through the OEM channel. According to the CompuBench database, the Arc Pro A60 has a maximum clock frequency of 2450 and 256 maximum compute units. Unfortunately, CompuBench entry does not confirm the actual memory amount or the memory interface, but it could possibly end up with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit memory interface.

Intel's Arc Pro A40, A30, and Arc Pro A30M for laptops were announced back in August last year, these are still only available to OEMs, and it appears that Intel is not focused on driver updates for its Arc Pro series as it is for its gaming Arc series graphics card lineup. The latest Arc Pro 31.0.101.4092 WHQL driver is the first driver update in 4 months.

The previous driver was released back in December last year, and while we do not know how popular Intel Arc Pro series is, since there are currently only two desktop and one mobile graphics card, four months are still a long time between driver updates. The latest one focuses on certification for professional applications, including various Autodesk software, Siemens, Vectorworks, Dassault Systèmes Solidworks, and others. It also includes several fixes for some of those applications.

Intel has today unveiled another addition to its discrete Arc Alchemist graphics card lineup, with a slight preference to the professional consumer market. Intel has prepared three models for creators and entry pro-vis solutions, called Intel Arc Pro graphics cards. All GPUs are AV1 accelerated, have ray tracing support, and are designed to handle AI acceleration inside applications like Adobe Premiere Pro. At the start, we have a small A30M mobile GPU aimed at laptop designs. It has a 3.5 TeraFLOP FP32 capability inside a configurable 35-50 Watt TDP envelope, has eight ray tracing cores, and 4 GB of GDDR6 memory. Its display output connectors depend on OEM's laptop design.

Next, we have the Arc A40 Pro discrete single-slot GPU. Having 3.5 TeraFLOPs of FP32 single-precision performance, it has eight ray tracing cores and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. The listed maximum TDP for this model is 50 Watts. It has four mini-DP ports for video output, and it can drive two monitors at 8K 60 Hz, one at 5K 240 Hz, two at 5K 120 Hz, or four at 4K 60 Hz refresh rate. Its bigger brother, the Arc A50 Pro, is a dual-slot design with 4.8 TeraFLOPs of single-precision FP32 computing, has eight ray tracing cores, and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory as well. It has the same video output capability as the Arc A40 Pro, with a beefier cooling setup to handle the 75 Watt TDP. All software developed using the OneAPI toolkit can be accelerated using these GPUs. Intel is working with the industry to adapt professional software for Arc Pro graphics.

Intel is preparing to enter the professional visualization graphics card market with its upcoming Arc Pro series. This would put it in competition with graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD, such as the Radeon Pro W-series, and RTX A-series. At least two SKUs have been confirmed in SiSoft SANDRA screenshots, the Arc Pro A40, and Arc Pro A50. Both appear to be based on the smaller 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon that physically features 1,024 unified shaders across 128 execution units (EU), or 8 Xe Cores, and up to 6 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 96-bit wide bus.

Intel could take a swing at entry-level pro-vis solutions from AMD and NVIDIA, such as the Radeon Pro W6400, Pro W6500M, NVIDIA RTX A2000, etc. There could be a design focus on multiple display connectivity options, as the cards could be targeted at commercial environments where workstations feature multiple high-resolution displays. The company could also develop mobile variants of these SKUs for mobile workstations. Intel could extensively advertise the media-acceleration and AI capabilities of the Xe-HPG architecture, including hardware-accelerated AV1 encode, and AI neural-net building, training, and inference acceleration. Another key differentiator for these cards could be validation by leading content-creation software vendors; and an elevated support level by Intel.