We aren’t too far off from the rumoured 2022 launch of the first of Intel’s Arc GPUs, codenamed ‘Alchemist’. Intel has been rather reticent since it officially announced the line of GPUs back in August but now a YouTube channel called ‘Moore’s Law Is Dead’ has revealed some images of the actual cards and they look a lot like the renders we’ve seen.
Intel is keeping us waiting
A few things stand out from the images. The 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors might indicate that the new cards won’t be using the new PCI-E Gen 5.0 standard and is congruent with the rumoured thermal design power (TDP) of 225W. We also got a look at the cooler design, at least on the reference card. It too looks like the renders, except this time the dual-fan shroud is silver.
The high-end card is reported to have 512EUs (execution units) and up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory. That puts it in competition with the RTX 3070 from Nvidia and the RX 6700 XT from AMD. How well it does in that competition will depend, in part, on the price.
Along with images of the high-end card, the YouTuber also revealed renders of the slower GPU, although he said there was no guesswork here. He has the pictures but can’t show them. Based on his accuracy with the last renders, there’s a good chance this is it.
The smaller Alchemist card will apparently feature 128EUs and up to 8GB of GDDR6 memory. With no external PCI-E power connectors in sight, we’re probably looking at a TDP of around 75W. That puts it in line with Nvidia’s 1650 Super.
We’ll have to wait and see if Intel can live up to the rumoured performance and offer a better deal in terms of either price, performance or, ideally, both with its new Alchemist GPUs.
Source: Videocardz / Moore’s Law is Dead
