Intel’s ARC Alchemist Flagship GPU Featuring 512 Xe Cors Spotted Mobile Chip For High-End Gaming Laptops
Although the Intel ARC Alchemist CPUs will soon be available for consumer use on laptops and desktops in Q1-2022, we have already seen several entries. Intel has been evaluating next-generation graphics on Rocket Lake, Tiger Lake, and Alder Lake platforms. The most recent entry was tested on Tiger Lake’s 11th-gen reference platform.
This chip comes with 512 Cores (Compute Units), which equals 4096 ALUs. The chip is clocked to 1800 MHz. However, it is reportedly the highest frequency that it could reach. Given that this is an early sample, final variants may clock even higher. Intel uses TSMC’s latest 6nm processor node.
As for the performance of this specific variant, well it’s a 4.5x increase over the last entry for the same chip which shows that the earlier benchmarks were still from early silicon with drivers that weren’t really optimized at all. While the drivers are not as good as what you will see in the final samples of the chips, you can see that performance is improving on this particular bench. At the same time, the ARC Alchemist 512 core chip is 88% faster than the 256 core SKU that leaked out earlier. This is nearly linear scaling for two cores.
This could be because Intel tested it on a Tiger Lake laptop. Although it might indicate that Intel intends to introduce its ARC Alchemist graphics on Tiger Lake-H notebooks first, they could be evaluating the performance on a Tiger Lake motherboard. The final version will be integrated on Alder Lake -H laptops. That remains to be seen but if Alder Lake laptops ship in Q2 or Q3 2022, then an intermediary Tiger Lake-H refresh with ARC Alchemist GPUs makes sense.
At the moment, performance is not as good as GPUs from AMD or NVIDIA. This flagship has performance comparable to NVIDIA GTX 1650 or AMD RX 500, both of which are very old cards. Intel’s ARCalchemist GPU lineup launches in approximately 6-8 months.
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