Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete lineup of graphics cards is scheduled for launch this quarter. We are getting some performance benchmarks of the DG2-512EU silicon, representing the top-end Xe-HPG configuration. Thanks to a discovery of a famous hardware leaker TUM_APISAK, we have a measurement performed in the SiSoftware database that shows Intel's Arc Alchemist GPU with 4096 cores and, according to the report from the benchmark, just 12.8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. This is just an error on the report, as this GPU SKU should be coupled with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The card was reportedly running at 2.1 GHz frequency. However, we don't know if this represents base or boost speeds.

When it comes to actual performance, the DG2-512EU GPU managed to score 9017.52 Mpix/s, while something like NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti managed to get 8369.51 Mpix/s in the same test group. Comparing these two cards in floating-point operations, Intel has an advantage in half-float, double-float, and quad-float tests, while NVIDIA manages to hold the single-float crown. This represents a 7% advantage for Intel's GPU, meaning that Arc Alchemist has the potential for standing up against NVIDIA's offerings.

For a significant period, Intel's Next Unit of Computing (NUC) series has featured soldered processors on the PC's motherboard. However, according to the latest leaks from Twitter hardware leaker @9550pro, we have a potential Alder Lake-based NUC featuring desktop processor versions and a dedicated LGA1700 socket. As the leaked image shows, it looks like Intel's NUC 12 Extreme edition will feature an LGA1700 socket that features support for desktop-class of Alder Lake processors. If this leak is correct, we could see a compelling NUC solution filled with Intel-only processors, meaning an Alder Lake CPU and Arc Alchemist discrete graphics card.

There is room for PCIe expansion, which means that theoretically, you could connect any GPU to the mainboard. However, it is natural to assume that Intel could force their own GPU SKUs to launch this mini PC. We have to wait and see what Intel presents at tomorrow's CES 2022 event for more information.

As much as we love teasers of new products, it's frustrating when said teasers give away zero information about the actual product and that is sadly what Intel's first Arc video manages to do. The only conclusion we can draw is that the in-game footage, at least in some games, was recorded at 1440p, as the video was uploaded in 1440p rather than 1080p.

The games being showcased are Riders Republic, Age of Empires IV, Back 4 Blood, Rift Breaker, Hitman III and Arcadegeddon. No frame rates are being displayed and only a few games have any comments to go with the footage. Rift Breaker for example, has a notification saying it's using AI-enhanced upscaling and Hitman III is supposed to be using "next-gen graphics with ray tracing" although no obvious ray tracing effects are noticed in the three second clip. The end of the video shows off a rendered PC and laptop, both with Intel ARC displayed on them, suggesting that Intel hasn't decided if it's Arc or ARC that its new graphics cards are going to be called. At least the Q1 2022 date gives us an idea on when some more information should be revealed.

Intel has dropped plans to build Xe-HP server GPUs commercially. This line of products would have powered cloud-based graphics rendering instances, for cloud-gaming or cloud-rendering applications. An announcement to this effect came from Raja Koduri, overseeing the development and monetization of Xe. Koduri stated that Xe-HP based instances were originally set up to power Intel's oneAPI devcloud as a software development vehicle for oneAPI and the upcoming Aurora supercomputer of the Argonne National Laboratory.

The company will now focus on Xe as a compute accelerator in the form of Xe-HPC "Ponte Vecchio," and discrete graphics in the client segment, leveraging the Xe-HPG graphics architecture. The smallest derivatives, the Xe-LP, powers integrated graphics solutions found in the company's Core processors (11th Gen and later). Back in the August 2021 Architecture Day presentation, Intel's technical brief for Xe HPC revealed that the silicon itself features certain on-die hardware relevant to graphics rendering (more here). This would have gone on to power the Xe-HP server GPU solutions.

Intel's Arc Alchemist lineup of graphics cards, based on Xe-HPG GPU configuration, is nearing the launch. With the current situation with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs outputting graphics card prices over the default MSRP, we wonder how Intel would place pricing of its upcoming GPUs and fit inside the market. And today, we got the first round of speculations based on Intel's Arc Alchemist GPU giveaway called Xe-HPG Scavenger Hunt. There are two principal bundles: one worth $900 that includes Intel Arc merchandise, Xbox Game Pass PC for six months, Intel Premium Arc Alchemist graphics card, and one worth $700 that consists of three months of Xbox Game Pass PC, Intel Arc merchandise, and Intel Performance Arc Alchemist graphics card.

According to some preliminary calculations from Tom's Hardware, we assume that with the $900 bundle containing one Premium Arc Alchemist GPU and other prizes, the card will cost as much as $825 when all things get removed. Going down the ladder, Intel has paired a bundle worth $700 with a Performance Arc GPU, which is roughly worth $650 on its own. It indicates that the two Intel Performance and Premium Arch Alchemist graphics cards are respectfully worth $650 and $825. What will the final pricing look like? We don't know. However, we assume that it could be very similar to this. For more information we have to wait for the official launch.

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter 2021 financial results. "Q3 shone an even greater spotlight on the global demand for semiconductors, where Intel has the unique breadth and scale to lead. Our focus on execution continued as we started delivering on our IDM 2.0 commitments. We broke ground on new fabs, shared our accelerated path to regain process performance leadership, and unveiled our most dramatic architectural innovations in a decade. We also announced major customer wins across every part of our business," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "We are still in the early stages of our journey, but I see the enormous opportunity ahead, and I couldn't be prouder of the progress we are making towards that opportunity."

In the third quarter, the company generated $9.9 billion in cash from operations and paid dividends of $1.4 billion. Intel CFO George Davis announced plans to retire from Intel in May 2022. He will continue to serve in his current role while Intel conducts a search for a new CFO and until his successor is appointed. Third-quarter revenue was led by strong recovery in the Enterprise portion of DCG and in IOTG, which saw higher demand amid recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19. The Client Computing Group (CCG) was down due to lower notebook volumes due to industry-wide component shortages, and on lower adjacent revenue, partially offset by higher average selling prices (ASPs) and strength in desktop.

Intel's VP and GM of Client Graphics Products and Solutions Roger Chandler has recently confirmed in an interview with Gadgets 360 that the companies upcoming Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards will not ship with any software or hardware cryptocurrency mining inhibitors. Roger Chandler didn't rule out the possibility of Intel implementing such a lock in the future simply stating that it is not a priority for the company. Intel SVP and GM of Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Raja Koduri also noted that they cannot guarantee sufficient supply will be available to meet consumer demand. These graphics cards are not expected to be released until Q2 2022 with mobile versions coming earlier in Q1 so we cannot be sure how they will affect availability and pricing for the general GPU market. The full interview which also covers reference board designs, workstation products, and XeSS super-resolution technology can be found at the link below.

Roger ChandlerAs far as like software lockouts and things of that nature, we're not designing this product or building any features at this point that specifically target miners. As far as actions we're taking to avoid or lock them out, it's a product that will be in the market and people will be able to buy it. It's not a priority for us.

Intel Senior VP and GM of Graphics Group, Raja Koduri has recently been interviewed by Japanese site ASCII where he revealed some new details about the companies upcoming Arc Alchemist gaming graphics cards. The cards will be manufactured on the TSMC N6 process instead of Intel's 7 node due to limited capacity however he did confirm that future cards could be manufactured directly by Intel. Raja also confirmed that Intel was currently offering reference boards to their partners to develop custom Arc Alchemist cards. This reference board is likely the same one we saw in early leaks from Moore's Law is Dead and the design featured by Intel in their promotional videos. The board partners may use the same cooler design in their cards or create semi-custom solutions.

Raja KoduriPartners and I think there will be a differentiation of ODM, and that will lead to the ultimate customer interest

Intel Vice President and General Manager of Client Graphics Products and Solutions Roger Chandler has recently announced that the companies upcoming Arc gaming graphics cards will include overclocking support at launch through the official driver UI. This offering may resemble that of AMD's with their Radeon Software that offers various overclocking tools including clock speeds, power settings, and fan curves. Intel has also been working on various other driver improvements in the lead-up to release including enhancing shader compiling and improving throughput. The post also confirmed the implementation of complete DirectX 12 Ultimate compliance which will enable variable-rate shading tier 2 and mesh shading. Intel is expected to release the first Arc gaming graphics cards for desktops and notebooks in Q1 2022.

IntelWe're even integrating overclocking controls into the driver UI to give enthusiasts the tools they need to push the hardware to the limit.

In its 2021 Architecture Day presentation, Intel revealed that its first performance gaming GPU, the Arc "Alchemist," is built on the TSMC N6 silicon fabrication node (6 nm). A more advanced node than the N7 (7 nm) used by AMD for its current RDNA2 GPUs, TSMC N6 leverages EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography, and offers 18% higher transistor density, besides power improvements. "With N6, TSMC provides an optimal balance of performance, density, and power-efficiency that are ideal for modern GPUs," said Dr Kevin Zhang, SVP of Business Development at TSMC.

With working prototypes of "Alchemist" already internally circulating as the "DG2," Intel has beaten AMD to 6 nm. Team Red is reportedly planning optical-shrinks of its RDNA2-based "Navi 22" and "Navi 23" chips to TSMC N6, and assigning them mid-range SKUs in the Radeon RX 7000 series. The company will build two higher-segment RDNA3 GPUs on the more advanced TSMC N5 (5 nm) process, which will release in 2022, and power successors to the RX 6700 series and RX 6800/6900 series.

Intel plans to go full tilt with gaming graphics, with its newly announced Arc line of graphics processors designed for high-performance gaming. The top Arc "Alchemist" part meets all requirements for DirectX 12 Ultimate logo, including real-time raytracing. The company, during the technology's reveal, earlier this week, also said that it's working on an AI-accelerated supersampling technology. The company is calling it XeSS (Xe SuperSampling). It likely went with Xe in the name, as it possibly plans to extend the technology to even its Xe LP-based iGPUs and the entry-level Iris Xe MAX discrete GPU.

Intel claims that XeSS cuts down 4K frame render-times by half. By all accounts, 1440p appears to be the target use case of the top Arc "Alchemist" SKU. XeSS would make 4K possible (i.e., display resolution set at 4K, rendering at a lower resolution, with AI-accelerated supersampling restoring detail). The company revealed that XeSS will use a neural network-based temporal upscaling technology that incorporates motion vectors. In the rendering pipeline, XeSS sits before most post-processing stages, similar to AMD FSR.

While AMD's FSR technology is purely shader based, the Intel algorithm can either use XMX hardware units (new in Intel Xe HPG), or DP4a instructions (available on nearly all modern AMD and NVIDIA GPUs). XMX stands for Xe Matrix Extensions and is basically Intel's version of NVIDIA's Tensor Cores, to speed up matrix math, which is used in many AI-related tasks. The Intel XeSS SDK will be available this month, in open source, using XMX hardware, the DP4a version will be available "later this year".

Intel has recently released a promotional video teasing the dual-fan cooler design of their upcoming Arc gaming graphics card with 1000 drones. The company used 1000 drones fitted with lighting to create various shapes including a dual-fan desktop graphics card which has a strong resemblance to the previously leaked design for a DG2-512EU engineering sample. The two images also both include 9 blades on the fans giving further authority to the previous rumor. The first Intel Arc "Alchemist" products will begin shipping in Q1 2022 with the flagship desktop graphics card rumored to feature 512 Execution Units paired with 16 GB GDDR6 memory targeting RTX 3070 Ti performance. Intel is also preparing a NVIDIA DLSS/AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution competitor codenamed XeSS and will include hardware-accelerated raytracing support with the Arc lineup.

Intel today surprised us with the reveal of its new high-performance gaming graphics brand, Intel Arc. Competing with the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce brands, Arc enables Intel to take a stab at the gaming graphics market that's been a duopoly for the past 2 decades; and the company doesn't intend to only make low-cost e-sports chips. As if a statement of intent, the company revealed the codenamed of the first three generations of Arc: "Battlemage," "Celestial," and "Druid."

Of these "Battlemage" is likely the fancy new codename for the Xe HPG graphics architecture, which has been implemented in a working prototype referred to as the DG2, and which Intel is now referring to as "Alchemist." Intel revealed that "Battlemage" is being designed to meet DirectX 12 Ultimate requirements, which means it will support hardware-accelerated real-time raytracing; mesh shaders, sampler feedback, and variable-rate shading. Intel also announced that the chips will feature an AI-accelerated supersampling feature. This will rival NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Intel announced that the first consumer products based on the "Alchemist" silicon will release in the first quarter of 2022, the company will put out more specifics throughout 2021, in the run-up to this launch.