Intel appears to be in the final throes of launching its first generation Arc graphics and the nomenclature has leaked out in due order. Intel created a usage guide for add in board members and it inclued details that we had not seen before (@momomo_us via videocardz), including the fact that the generations will be referred to as Intel Arc aXXX, bXXX, cXXX and dXXX respectively. Interestingly, Arc is also not capitalized.
Intel Arc a170, a150 and a130 are all potential naming schemes (along with other variations)
Not going to lie, I am a bit dissappointed to see Arc will not be capitalized. Imagine NVIDIA being spelled as Nvidia, just not the same effect. Hopefully the box art will more than make up for it as we have already seen glimpses of marketing lore with alchmeist that looks absolutely awesome.
The leaked design document mentions that the first generation of GPUs will be reffered to as Intel Arc a-series as well as Intel Arc a-series graphics and they are not to be referred to as 1st generation Intel Arc graphics. Although this does not apply to the press of course, and we would always fondly refer to these as the first generation of Intel's most publicly applauded attempt to date to diversify (remember 5g?) to date.
Now the nomenclature was hashed out, but considering Intel is planning exactly three SKUs we can take some educated guesses at what the naming scheme could be.
Here are some of our more likely guesses:
- Intel Arc a300, a500 and a700 (performance wise)
- Intel Arc a130, a150 and a170 (performance wise)
- Intel Arc a800, a600 and a200 (referring to the number of Xe slices)
The first iteration of the Intel Xe HPG GPU will have 8 slices, each consisting of 4 Xe Cores. This makes up a total Vector/Matrix count of 512 (8x4x16). And yes, that is exactly what the older “EU” count of this GPU was. Assuming the base architecture is the same (which it should be) we are still looking at 4096 ALLUs (512*8).
In the world of graphics, there is an insatiable demand for better performance and more realism. TSMC is excited that Intel has chosen our N6 technology for their Alchemist family of discrete graphics solutions.
There are many ingredients to a successful graphics product including thee semiconductor technology. With N6, TSMC provides an optimal balance of performance, density and power efficiency that are ideal for modern GPUs. We are pleased with the collaboration with Intel on the Alchemist family of discrete GPUs.
Dr. Kevin Zhang,
Senior Vice President of Business Development at TSMC
Intel Xe HPG will be manufactured on TSMC’s 6nm process, which should give them quite the kick in terms of power efficiency and transistor density. This also means that we might actually get some good volume out of these when they launch. Intel’s Xe HPG architecture will be able to achieve 1.5x higher clock rates than Xe LP and also deliver 1.5x higher performance per watt. This means we are looking at clocks in the 2.1 GHz range considering the Xe LP discrete GPUs were clocked at 1.4 GHz. We can't wait for performance leaks and roadmap leaks to start popping up and actually get one in the lab for reviews.
