Intel ARC Alchemist Discrete Laptop GPU Spotted With 512 Xe Cores, Evaluated on Tiger Lake Reference Platform

Hassan Mujtaba
Intel Xe HPG Scavenger Hunt to conclude soon with 300 free Intel ARC Alchemist GPUs still available

Multiple entries of Intel's flagship ARC Alchemist GPU featuring the Xe-HPG graphics architecture have been discovered in Geekbench by Benchleaks.

Intel's ARC Alchemist Flagship GPU Featuring 512 Xe Cores Spotted, Discrete Mobile Chip For High-End Gaming Laptops

The Intel ARC Alchemist GPUs will be heading out to the consumer segment on both desktops and laptops in Q1 2022 however, we have seen various entries of these chips ahead of launch. Intel has been evaluating its next-gen graphics on Rocket Lake, Tiger Lake, and Alder Lake platforms and the latest entry was tested on the Tiger Lake 11th gen reference platform.

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The chip shows up with 512 Xe Cores (Compute Units) which equals 4096 ALUs. The chip is clocked at 1800 MHz which is reportedly the maximum frequency it could reach but considering that this is still an early sample, final variants could clock much higher considering Intel is using TSMC's latest 6nm process node.

As for the performance of this specific variant, well it's a 4.5x increase over the last entry for the same chip which shows that the earlier benchmarks were still from early silicon with drivers that weren't really optimized at all. Even still, the drivers are not up to par with what we will see in the final samples but you can see that the performance is definitely improving in this particular bench. At the same time, the ARC Alchemist 512 core chip is 88% faster than the 256 core SKU that leaked out earlier. This is almost linear scaling for double the cores.

Intel ARC Alchemist GPU Performance Comparison (Geekbench)
OpenCL Score
0
7000
14000
21000
28000
35000
42000
0
7000
14000
21000
28000
35000
42000
ARC Alchemist 512
34.8k
ARC Alchemist 256
18.5k
ARC Alchemist 128
16.2k
Xe-LP 96
12.1k
Xe-LP 32
8.6k
ARC Alchemist 512 (Early Silicon)
7.9k

The fact that Intel tested this on a Tiger Lake laptop may or may not be that significant. It might hint that Intel plans to introduce its ARC Alchemist GPUs on Tiger Lake-H laptops first but it may just be them evaluating the performance on a Tiger Lake reference motherboard whereas the final variant will be integrated on Alder Lake-H laptops. That remains to be seen but if Alder Lake laptops ship in Q2 or Q3 2022, then an intermediary Tiger Lake-H refresh with ARC Alchemist GPUs makes sense.

The performance when compared to GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD is still underwhelming at the moment. The flagship delivers performance on par with the AMD RX 500 and NVIDIA GTX 1650 series which are really old cards by now. Again, Intel's ARC Alchemist GPU lineup is launching in about 6-8 months from now so they still got a lot of time to properly be optimized.

Intel Xe-HPG Based Discrete Alchemist GPU Configurations:

GPU VariantGraphics Card VariantGPU DieExecution UnitsShading Units (Cores)Memory CapacityMemory SpeedMemory BusTGP
Xe-HPG 512EUARC A780?Arc ACM-G10512 EUs4096Up To 32/16 GB GDDR618 / 16 / 14 Gbps256-bit~225W (Desktops)
120-150W (Laptops)
Xe-HPG 384EUARC A580?Arc ACM-G10384 EUs3072Up To 12 GB GDDR616 / 14 Gbps192-bit150-200W (Desktops)
80-120W (Laptops)
Xe-HPG 256EUARC A550?Arc ACM-G10256 EUs2048Up To 8 GB GDDR616 / 14 Gbps128-bit60-80W (Laptops)
Xe-HPG 128EUARC A380?Arc ACM-G11128 EUs1024Up To 6 GB GDDR616 / 14 Gbps96-bit~75W (Desktops)
Xe-HPG 128EUARC A350?Arc ACM-G11128 EUs1024Up To 4 GB GDDR616 / 14 Gbps64-bit35-50W (Laptops)
Xe-HPG 96EUARC A330?Arc ACM-G1186 EUs768Up To 4 GB GDDR616 / 14 Gbps64-bit~35W (Laptops)
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