Intel ARC Alchemist GPUs Have Just Leaked in Great Detail

Intel’s ARC Alchemist line-up is no longer shrouded in mystery! Moore’s Law Is Dead (or MLID, for short) just came out with a metric ton of information and, needless to say, the hype is starting to mount! Almost everything pertaining to the whole product line-up has now been leaked, including power targets and launch timelines.

The most important bits — a TL;DR, if you will — is that Intel plans on competing with NVIDIA’s RTX 3070/3070 Ti on the desktop side of things, with laptop offerings that’ll compete with “team green’s” entire RTX range, from an entry-level RTX 3050 equivalent to an RTX 3080-esque behemoth. More interesting, however, is the fact that Intel’s GPUs will be about 10% more powerful (drivers permitting) and about 10% less expensive.

That last part should be taken with a grain of salt as we still don’t know how fast these GPUs will fly off the shelves — crypto miners are always first in line whenever there’s a new product launch, and the ARC Alchemist GPUs could very well be another “victim” of this novel trend. Heck, we’d be surprised if that didn’t happen. In other words: don’t get your hopes up just yet.

With that out of the way, let’s talk specifics!

ARC Alchemist GPUs | Details Galore

• There will be five different SKUs; their power will vary wildly and so will their number of execution units — from 96 EUs to a whopping 512.
• Intel will primarily compete in the entry level and higher-end segments of the market. We won’t be getting GPUs as powerful as the RTX 3080 or 6800 XT (to say nothing of the 3090), but Intel will nonetheless come close performance-wise all the while drawing less power.
• Desktop-class ARC Alchemist GPUs could become available by the end of Q1 or, at the latest, early Q2. Laptop variants will be released immediately afterwards, with workstation options becoming available in late 2022. These dates are still not final and could, potentially, get pushed back by a few weeks.
• There’s also a very real chance that laptops and low-end desktops could get the first batch of entry-level ARC GPUs (referred to as “DG2 SOC”) by the end of Q1. By the looks of it, these could very well be the first Alchemist graphics cards to hit the market. Either way, by the end of H1 2022, almost everything will have come out.
• Intel’s “Battlemage” line-up (2023) will be the company’s first foray into the super high-end segment of the market. Whether or not they’ll be able to compete still remains to be seen, but Intel seems dead set on trading blows with NVIDIA and AMD and, by the looks of it, they have a comprehensive plan to attack on all fronts — come hell or high water.

For a more detailed head-to-head with NVIDIA and its varied offerings, take a look at the following slide:

Closing Remarks

All in all, this is quite an exciting time for both gamers and hardware enthusiasts. Even if these ARC Alchemist GPUs fail to move the needle, they’ll at least push NVIDIA and AMD to lower their prices. That, in itself, would already be a momentous triumph. And, over time, there’s no doubt in our mind that Intel will, indeed, be able to compete on even footing.

We’ll get our first in-depth look at what Intel’s been working on in just a few weeks, so stay tuned for more coverage!