Intel confirms the release schedule of ARC Alchemist graphics card
During the 2022 investor meeting, Intel announced the release schedule of several products, the specific arrangement of the Intel Arc brand Alchemist graphics card has been confirmed, and Intel also introduced some related or follow-up products.
The first batch of ARC brand discrete graphics cards will be oriented to notebook platforms and will be launched in the first quarter of 2022. In the second quarter of 2022, a version for the desktop platform will be launched, which should be the most anticipated by players, while the workstation version will be released in the third quarter of 2022. Intel is expected to ship more than 4 million GPUs for discrete graphics cards in 2022, including versions for notebook platforms, desktop platforms, and workstations.
The GPU on the Intel Alchemist graphics card uses the new Xe Core, which is manufactured by TSMC N6 process, supports hardware-based ray tracing and AI-driven Super Sampling (XeSS), with full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate. The highest-end desktop platform, DG2-512EU, has 4096 stream processors, 8 video memory chips, a total of 16GB of GDDR6 video memory, a bit width of 256 bits, a rate of 16 Gbps, and a bandwidth of 512 GB/s. The estimated TDP is 225W.
According to Intel’s previously announced development plan, Alchemist is followed by Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid, a total of four generations of products. If the Xe-HPG architecture used by the Alchemist graphics card is regarded as Intel’s RDNA architecture, then the Xe2/Xe3-HPG architecture adopted by Battlemage/Celestial is equivalent to the RDNA 2/3 architecture, the fourth generation of Druid will use the new Xe architecture to replace the original Xe-HPG architecture.
This time Intel confirmed that Celestial’s architecture development is already underway. The target group will be ultra-enthusiasts, which means it’s likely to be a top-of-the-line competitor to Nvidia and AMD, which won’t be seen until 2024 at the earliest.
In addition, Intel also announced a service called Project Endgame. Project Endgame will enable users to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience. Project Endgame will be available later this year.
