Intel’s Flagship ARC Alchemist Gaming Graphics Card With 32 Xe Cores Spotted: On Par With NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti, Up To 2.1 GHz Clocks

A brand new entry of Intel’s flagship ARC Alchemist Gaming graphics card has been spotted within the SiSoftware Sandra database.

Intel ARC Alchemist Flagship Gaming Graphics Card Spotted In Leaked Benchmark: On Par With NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 Ti at 2.1 GHz Clocks

The Intel ARC Alchemist graphics cards for desktop PCs are scheduled for a launch in the coming months. Despite being so close to launch, Intel hasn’t shared a lot of info regarding product specs, names, and performance although they had several opportunities to do so with the most recent one being CES 2022. Instead, Intel decided to announce that 50+ desktop and notebook systems from its partners will be ready for launch.

With that said, a brand new entry of Intel’s flagship ARC Alchemist graphics card based on the Xe-HPG architecture has been leaked within the SiSoftware Sandra database. The new entry is for the 32 Xe SKU (DG2-512) which features 4096 ALUs and a clock speed of up to 2.10 GHz. There’s also 4 MB of L2 cache and the GPU most likely features 16 GB of GDDR6 memory configured along a 256-bit wide bus interface. It’s easy to tell that this is still an engineering sample considering that it has no official branding attached to it whereas the ARC A380 has already shown up in SANDRA with its naming scheme.

As for performance, the Intel ARC Alchemist flagship graphics card scored up to 9017 Mpix/s which is slightly above the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti that scored 8369.51 Mpix/s. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 scores 10,607.29 Mpix/s in the same benchmark while the Radeon RX 6700 XT scores 7910.91 Mpix/s. The Intel ARC A380 scored 2956.10 Mpix/s. So we know that the flagship is over 3 times more powerful than the entry-level DG2-128 graphics card which should be correct considering it packs 4 times more cores.

Here’s Everything We Know About Intel’s ARC Alchemist Graphics Lineup

Intel will have at least three configurations of ARC Alchemist GPUs ready for launch in Q1 2022. These will include two configurations based on the top 512 EU die and one configuration based on the 128 EU die. Although there are more GPU configs that we have seen in leaks, it looks like those may be used in future products though that cannot be confirmed. So let’s start with the top-end configuration.

Intel Xe-HPG 512 EU ARC Alchemist Graphics Card

The top Alchemist 512 EU (32 Xe Cores) variant has just one configuration listed so far and that utilizes the full die with 4096 cores, 256-bit bus interface, and up to 16 GB GDDR6 memory featuring a 16 Gbps clock though 18 Gbps cannot be ruled out as per the rumor.

The Alchemist 512 EU chip is expected to measure at around 396mm2 which makes it bigger than the AMD RDNA 2 and NVIDIA Ampere offerings. The Alchemist -512 GPU will come in the BGA-2660 package which measures 37.5mm x 43mm. NVIDIA’s Ampere GA104 measures 392mm2 which means that the flagship Alchemist chip is comparable in size while the Navi 22 GPU measures 336mm2 or around 60mm2 less. This isn’t the final die size of the chip but it should be very close.

Intel ARC A780 Graphics card leaked renders. (Image Credits: Moore’s Law is Dead)

NVIDIA packs in tensor cores and much bigger RT/FP32 cores in its chips while AMD RDNA 2 chips pack a single ray accelerator unit per CU and Infinity Cache. Intel will also have dedicated hardware onboard its Alchemist GPUs for Raytracing & AI-assisted super-sampling tech.

The Xe-HPG Alchemist 512 EU chip is suggested to feature clocks of around 2.2 – 2.5 GHz though we don’t know if these are the average clocks or the maximum boost clocks. Let’s assume that it’s the max clock speed and in that case, the card would deliver up to 18.5 TFLOPs FP32 compute which is  40% more than the RX 6700 XT but 9% lower than the NVIDIA RTX 3070.

Also, it is stated that Intel’s initial TDP target was 225-250W but that’s been upped to around 275W now. We can expect a 300W variant with dual 8-pin connectors too if Intel wants to push its clocks even further. In either case, we can expect the final model to rock an 8+6 pin connector config, The reference model is also going to look very much like the drone marketing shot Intel put out during the ARC branding reveal. That reference design was leaked a while back by MLID too. There’re also talks about a custom lineup being worked upon by Intel’s AIB partners.

Intel ARC Alchemist vs NVIDIA GA104 & AMD Navi 22 GPUs

The post Intel’s Flagship ARC Alchemist Gaming Graphics Card With 32 Xe Cores Spotted: On Par With NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti, Up To 2.1 GHz Clocks by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.