After a number of months of assorted teasers, Intel is lastly beginning to put the band collectively for his or her first high-performance discrete GPUs and video playing cards. This morning the corporate is kicking its pre-launch advertising and marketing sport into excessive gear by asserting a brand new model title that these video playing cards will bought below: Arc. As nicely, the corporate is lastly giving us our first actual (albeit broad) launch window for the {hardware}. The first Arc video playing cards, based mostly on the “Alchemist” era of {hardware}, might be launched within the first quarter of 2022, kicking off Intel’s formal foray into high-performance discrete client graphics for desktop and cellular.
Although it has taken just a few years now to return to fruition, Intel has made it clear for some time now that the corporate has meant to develop into a viable third participant within the discrete graphics area. Intel’s odyssey, as earlier advertising and marketing efforts have dubbed it, has been pushed primarily by creating the Xe household of GPU microarchitectures, in addition to the GPUs based mostly on these architectures. Xe-LP was the primary out the door final yr, as a part of the Tiger Lake household of CPUs and the DG1 discrete GPU. Other Xe household architectures embrace Xe-HP for servers and Xe-HPC for supercomputers and different high-performance compute environments.
But maybe essentially the most fascinating – and least talked about – of those microarchitectures is Xe-HPG, Intel’s first high-performance structure for high-end client graphics. After months of hypothesis, the corporate launched He-XPG simply over a yr in the past, and with it the title of the primary GPU from the household: DG2. Intel is way sufficient alongside that they’ve been testing DG2 of their labs since final fall, and now eventually, they’re starting the lengthy gear-up to carry DG2 to the market. And that course of begins with names each for the product lineup and the architectures.
First off, Arc might be Intel’s new model title for his or her client video playing cards, in addition to the related software program and companies. And whereas the basic i740 title nonetheless holds a particular place in our hearts, Arc definitely rolls off the tongue much more easily. At this level it’s not completely clear fairly how far Intel’s branding will lengthen right here, notably if it’ll even be used sooner or later for built-in graphics or the eventual successor to the DG1 dGPU.
Meanwhile, Intel can be disclosing the codenames for the following few GPU generations that may make up the GPUs that go into the Arc model. The first Xe-HPG structure, which is getting used for DG2, might be referred to as Alchemist. That in flip might be adopted up by Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid. It goes with out saying that Intel appears to have a little bit of a love affair with excessive fantasy right here, which is definitely acceptable for gaming GPUs. Intel can be briefly confirming that, as we suspected with final yr’s revelation of {hardware} ray tracing assist, that Alchemist might be totally DirectX 12 Ultimate compliant – which means that alongside RT, it should provide variable fee shading, mesh shaders, and sampler suggestions. Which will make it comparable in core graphics options to current-generation AMD and NVIDIA {hardware}.
But, extra importantly for Intel, disclosing so many product generations up-front is a method to showcase that Intel is that this for the lengthy haul, and that they are already engaged on a number of successive generations of merchandise. Despite their vital historical past with built-in GPUs, Intel continues to be successfully the newcomer within the discrete GPU area, so one of many battles the corporate will face is convincing potential patrons that they will put money into an Intel-based video card with out ending up in a dead-end or having assist dry up just a few years later.
| Intel Arc Generations | |||
| Codename | Release Date | ||
| Alchemist | Q1 2022 | ||
