Intel Will Allegedly Assault The Desktop GPU Market With 8 Arc Alchemist Graphics Cards

As far as we know Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs are coming in the form of either two or three chips: one with 512 Execution Units (EUs), a much smaller one with 128 EUs, and possibly a mid-size model with 256 EUs. Armed with that knowledge, an experienced enthusiast might reasonably expect Intel to launch five or six models of first-generation Arc graphics cards. After all, AMD and NVIDIA usually only reuse the same die in two or rarely three models of graphics card—if they get reused at all.

Well, if the latest information from supposedly-retired leaker Komachi (@KOMACHI_ENSAKA on Twitter) is accurate, Intel could be planning to release as many as eight desktop graphics cards models based on Alchemist. In a tweet that was deleted almost immediately after they posted it, Komachi stated (in their typically-vague way) that there are Arc models numbered A310, A350, A380, A580, A750 on the way, as well as two models of A770. Komachi also seemed to speculate on the existence of A780.

Most of this is not a surprise. We've already observed Intel segmenting Arc into 300, 500, and 700 tiers, and we've seen leaks of many of these model numbers, but the A770 part with 8GB of RAM is new to us. Given the level of performance we're expecting out of the Alchemist 700-series cards, 8GB of local memory seems a bit slim, but then, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti only comes with 8GB, too.

This is also the first time we've seen the desktop A350 mentioned. The mobile version of that part is already available in South Korea, and gives surprisingly solid 1080p performance—as long as you disable Dynamic Tuning. Presumably, a desktop A350 would have higher performance than its mobile sibling; it might make a reasonable competitor against the Radeon RX 6400.

Of course, all of this is speculation until we have desktop Arc graphics cards in our greedy mitts. When that will happen is anyone's guess. Desktop discrete graphics cards bearing Alchemist GPUs are supposed to show this summer, yet even though Intel released Arc mobile graphics on March 30th, laptop models with the discrete GPUs have not yet materialized in the US.