Intel Arc: A-series of mobile graphics chips presented
Intel's Arc is officially a third player besides Nvidia and AMD in the graphics card market as of today. For now, however, only the weakest chips of the lineup for notebooks.
For fans of desktop cards right up front: Apart from an animated clip showing an Arc card, Intel has not said anything about the desktop cards - except to reaffirm that they are due sometime in the summer.
Like the Core-i processors, Intel divides the ARC GPUs into performance levels. They are called Arc 3, Arc 5 and Arc 7, which are based on two chip designs. One with up to 96 and one with up to 512 Xe Vector Engines (XVE). These are execution units (EU), 16 of which are located on each Xe core.
These are the mobile ARC GPUs
The smaller of the two chips, the ACM-G11, is launched today. It powers the Arc-3 GPUs. It starts with the A350M and A370M. The Arc 5 and Arc 7, both based on the larger ACM-G10 chip, are to follow in early summer. Here is a comparison of the two chips on the Intel Slide.
In addition to the XVE, each Xe core contains so-called Matrix Engines (XMX), which are used in AI calculations. The Xe Media Engine (MFX) in turn is responsible for encoding and decoding videos. It also includes the first AV1 encoder in a GPU. Last but not least, there is a ray tracing unit on each Xe core. Here is an overview of the presented GPUs on a slide from Intel.
What do they do?
So far, only benchmarks from Intel are available. The manufacturer compares the Arc A370M with the SoC graphics unit Iris Xe from their own company. It is only logical that the A370M performs better. Here is a slide from Intel about it:
A comparison is already difficult because Intel does not specify the frames per second (FPS) for the Iris Xe. It can only be guessed from the bars how much faster the A370M is. However, the specs suggest that the A350M and A370M are comparable to the Nvidia MX350 and MX450 or the MX550 and MX570. Thus, they definitely only offer a small performance boost compared to integrated graphics.
Independent tests will show what they actually do. The first notebooks with the A350M and A370M should arrive in April. More performance can then be expected from the Arc 5 and Arc 7 GPUs.
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