No longer integrated - Intel launches ARC GPU for laptops.

[williamcll]

 

After a few months of delay, intel has announced their dedicated graphics lineup, including a desktop gpu that will come later.

 

Quotes

Quote

Today, we are officially launching our Intel® Arc™ graphics family for laptops, completing the Intel platform. These are the first discrete GPUs from our Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, with our desktop and workstation products coming later this year. You can visit our Newsroom for our launch video, product details and technical demos, but I will summarize the highlights of how our Intel Arc platform and A-Series mobile GPU family will deliver hardware, software, services and – ultimately – high-performance graphics experiences.

New Laptops with Intel Arc Graphics: We’ve partnered with top OEMs to co-engineer an amazing lineup of laptops that feature new and improved gaming and content creation capabilities with Intel Arc graphics and 12th Gen Intel® Core™ processors. Many new systems with Intel Arc 3 graphics will feature the Intel Evo platform’s trademark responsiveness, battery life and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity in thin-and-light form factors. Laptops with Intel Arc 3 graphics offer enhanced 1080p gaming and advanced content creation, and those with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics will offer the same cutting-edge, content-creation capabilities coupled with increased graphics and computing performance. The first laptops with Intel Arc 3 GPUs are available to preorder now and will be followed by the more powerful designs with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics in early summer.

Community Experiences: Our Intel Arc graphics are more than another piece of hardware in your PC. They are your portal to play and create. We have a dedicated team focused on delivering Day 0 game-ready drivers, which you’ll be able to track in our new Intel® Arc Control interface, an all-in-one hub that puts you in full control of the gaming experience. Intel Arc Control includes custom performance profiles, built-in streaming, a virtual camera, integrated Game ON driver downloading, automatic game capture, and more. The app supports Intel® Iris X e graphics and Intel Arc GPUs for a unified software experience. By working with our developer partners, we are making a growing portfolio of Intel-optimized games and multimedia applications available to discrete graphics customers through special launch bundles. Bundles will vary based on the system and the region, but the first of these gamer and creator bundles is rolling out in April with the launch of our A-Series mobile products. Our goal is to deliver something new and fun to the community every day of the year. We invite you to connect with us and join the conversation on our Intel Insiders discord.

My thoughts

Hard to say how good they are without a clear comparison against other competitors, but more choices are always good. though it's interesting to see intel going straight ahead with a 16GB laptop gpu, though it seems mid-high at most looking at the specs.

 

Sources

https://videocardz.com/press-release/intel-launches-arc-alchemist-discrete-gpu-for-laptops

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

9 minutes ago, williamcll said:

 

After a few months of delay, intel has announced their dedicated graphics lineup, including a desktop gpu that will come later.

 

Quotes

My thoughts

Hard to say how good they are without a clear comparison against other competitors, but more choices are always good. though it's interesting to see intel going straight ahead with a 16GB laptop gpu, though it seems mid-high at most looking at the specs.

 

Sources

https://videocardz.com/press-release/intel-launches-arc-alchemist-discrete-gpu-for-laptops

Kinda weird they are starting with laptop gpus. How many people even use laptop gpus?

[CephDigital]

1 minute ago, Ryan829 said:

Kinda weird they are starting with laptop gpus. How many people even use laptop gpus?

... Everyone that uses a laptop? 

[mr fobs]

I'm glad they announced it with a Video that was probably rendered with an NVIDIA GPU lol

[igormp]

12 minutes ago, CephDigital said:

... Everyone that uses a laptop? 

I believe they meant "laptops with dedicated GPUs", since those are mostly used in those gaming laptops, workstation ones or other large models with a low/mid-range GPU (such as the bigger XPS models).

[leadeater]

lol this looks familiar, wonder who's homework they were copying 

 

[porina]

If lowest ones are indeed "available now" then someone will buy and test them.

 

How big is AV1 hardware encoding support? Might have a niche there itself.

 

They also took a dig at nvidia when they showed the control panel saying words to the effect "no login required".  

 

55 minutes ago, williamcll said:

After a few months of delay, intel has announced their dedicated graphics lineup, including a desktop gpu that will come later.

Technically mobile isn't entirely delayed since it was only ever stated as a Q1 launch. Desktop has been delayed to Q2.

 

55 minutes ago, williamcll said:

it's interesting to see intel going straight ahead with a 16GB laptop gpu, though it seems mid-high at most looking at the specs.

Might be aiming at compute use cases, not just gaming. 

[Lightwreather]

FINALLY!

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, CephDigital said:

... Everyone that uses a laptop? 

90% of laptop userds only need GPU to just display a picture so they can work on spreadsheets. People who need GPU brute force in laptops are in huge minority.

[Lightwreather]

41 minutes ago, leadeater said:

lol this looks familiar, wonder who's homework they were copying 

 

Nah pretty certain Apple and Samsung copied Intel on this one. /s

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

lol this looks familiar, wonder who's homework they were copying 

 

Hm, this looks like Ubisoft presenting all the incredible lootboxes and NFT's...

[saltycaramel]

4GB

8GB

12GB

16GB

 

One could say, compared to up to 64GB of unified memory on competing fruity laptops: are these VRAM sizes for ants? 

[AndreiArgeanu]

Cool, we'll have to see how good the drivers are since I recall intel having issues with compatibility with certain games where performance just tanks for no apparent reason.

[Quackers101]

4GB not as great, 6GB when?
oh well. AV1, those guys do like AV1 and oh. Wonder how it will perform now and on intel GPU.

Also death stranding seems to have XeSS now, so we might see a "review" or look into it at some point.

 

Edited March 30, 2022 by Quackers101

[Ydfhlx]

Apparently, A370 is 25-50% faster (according to Intel) than fastest Intel integrated GPUs currently on the market. Trouble is, the new RDNA2 integrated Radeon 680M is also about 35% faster than fastest Intel integrated. Things going for it are encoding etc, but my expectations are low, since a separate die is bound to cost more.

 

Now, considering A350 is to have less cores with lower clock than A370 I fully expect it to be DOA.

[Quackers101]

19 minutes ago, Ydfhlx said:

Now, considering A350 is to have less cores with lower clock than A370 I fully expect it to be DOA.

got to wait and see, but I guess the A3 series is maybe not as great for gaming.

Do wonder how good for the price and to performance per watt those higher end laptop GPUs will be, and some of the hinted at stats before release.

[porina]

53 minutes ago, Ydfhlx said:

Apparently, A370 is 25-50% faster (according to Intel) than fastest Intel integrated GPUs currently on the market. Trouble is, the new RDNA2 integrated Radeon 680M is also about 35% faster than fastest Intel integrated. Things going for it are encoding etc, but my expectations are low, since a separate die is bound to cost more.

 

Now, considering A350 is to have less cores with lower clock than A370 I fully expect it to be DOA.

Generally speaking iGPU/APU graphics performance are scaled to available bandwidth. I had to look up what a 680M was, it's the GPU part of the Ryzen 6000 series APUs? DDR5 4800 coupled with Ryzen would give around 75 GB/s bandwidth shared with CPU. At A3x0M is GDDR6 on 64-bit bus, and I'm not aware of a stated clock for them. If we look at the 3060 laptop version as guide, then it would translate to around 110 GB/s of dedicated bandwidth. Of course, it may be higher or lower than that according to performance and power targets, and design choices may make one or other more/less sensitive to bandwidth availability.

 

We're going to have to look at like for like tests to get a clear picture. It will likely depend on the test settings also.

 

Also will throw in gaming performance isn't the only thing, with many compute use cases which may be interesting.

 

31 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

Do wonder how good for the price and to performance per watt those higher end laptop GPUs will be, and some of the hinted at stats before release.

It wasn't quoted to this thread but there was a slide indicating typical power of the mobile range. A770M is listed as 120-150W, which puts it into 3070 range (the one in my laptop is 130W).

[cmndr]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

lol this looks familiar, wonder who's homework they were copying 

 

Do you think ARC is compatible with Windows 8?

[leadeater]

25 minutes ago, cmndr said:

Do you think ARC is compatible with Windows 8?

Officially likely no, Intel would not be creating and releasing drivers for it. You could however try and get different OS drivers to work on it as that can sometimes work.

 

Quote

Windows 8.1 reached the end of Mainstream Support on January 9, 2018, and will reach end of Extended Support on January 10, 2023

Support is currently no new features etc so something like this wouldn't be covered typically for an OS at this status.

[CephDigital]

5 hours ago, igormp said:

I believe they meant "laptops with dedicated GPUs", since those are mostly used in those gaming laptops, workstation ones or other large models with a low/mid-range GPU (such as the bigger XPS models).

Ah forgot the /s, my bad. 

 

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

90% of laptop userds only need GPU to just display a picture so they can work on spreadsheets. People who need GPU brute force in laptops are in huge minority.

I do agree with this though. There's very few people who need a dGPU for a laptop excluding gamers. 

[LAwLz]

Holy crap, when I saw people talk about AV1 I thought "we've already had decoding for quite some time now, why is everyone talking about it?", then I realized Intel supports encoding.

That is fantastic news.

 

I am optimistic about all the features Intel have shown so far.

Not that much info about the two most important things though, pricing and how it performs. Hopefully we will get some good indications of those two once people start getting the Arc 3 GPUs in their hands.

[Lightwreather]

9 hours ago, Ydfhlx said:

Now, considering A350 is to have less cores with lower clock than A370 I fully expect it to be DOA.

Ah dear Bidoof, the Tech nerd and avgeek withinn me are going to war over that naming scheme.

[WereCat]

17 hours ago, porina said:

 

 

How big is AV1 hardware encoding support? Might have a niche there itself.

 

[porina]

@WereCatmy question was more about the potential userbase for it. How many use AV1 now? How many more would use it if it had higher encoding performance?

[starsmine]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

@WereCatmy question was more about the potential userbase for it. How many use AV1 now? How many more would use it if it had higher encoding performance?

I dont like that line of thinking.
Thats like saying how many people use HEVC encoding, or 10 years ago, h.264 encoding.

Not many when the first chips with hardware encoding came out, but many do now. AV1 is a good codec and its past due for this.