Architecture

At the heart of the Intel Arc A380 is the ACM-G11 silicon, also known as the DG2-128, for its 128 execution units. Built on the TSMC 6 nm silicon fabrication process, this chip is based on the Intel Xe-HPG graphics architecture. The silicon-level hierarchy sees the Global Dispatch crossbar move data among the five key IP blocks of the silicon. The I/O block, with the chip's PCI-Express 4.0 x8 bus interface, a 96-bit GDDR6 memory interface, and the Display Engine supporting up to four displays. The Xe Media Engine provides hardware-acceleration for encoding and decoding of various video formats, including AV1, and H.265 HEVC. The Memory Fabric shares an L2 cache among the other components, and cushions data-transfers with the memory interface. The star attractions, however, are the Render Slices, where the actual graphics rendering happens. The DG2-128 has two of these.


Each Render Slice packs four Xe Cores—the indivisible SIMD muscle of the Xe-HPG architecture. There are also four Ray Tracing Units, one per Xe Core. These perform hardware-accelerated ray intersection calculations. Also shared among the four Xe Cores are four Samplers, a Geometry Engine, a Rasterizer, and two Pixel Backends.


The Xe Core is the main number crunching machinery of the GPU, featuring 16 XVE SIMD units, and an equal number of XMX matrix-multiplication engines; along with a load/store unit, and certain level-1 caches. Each XVE (or Execution Unit) amounts for 8 unified shaders. There are hence 16 EUs per Xe Core, 64 per Render Slice, and 128 on the DG2-128 silicon.


The Xe Display Engine is capable of up to two display outputs at 8K 60 Hz + HDR; up to four outputs at 4K 120 Hz + HDR, and up to four 1440p or 1080p with 360 Hz + HDR. VESA Adaptive Sync and Intel Smooth Sync features are supported. The latter is a feature that runs the GPU at its native frame-rate, while attempting to remove the screen-tearing from the display output. A typical A380 desktop graphics card has two each of DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.0b connections. The Xe Media Engine provides hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding of AV1, and accelerated decoding of H.265 HEVC, and H.264 AVC.