Intel Arc Pro A50 And A40 Workstation GPUs Break Cover Revealing Key Specs
Intel is taking a slow and staggered roll out for its Arc series of discrete GPUs, having already launched a few SKUs in mobile and the A380 on the desktop (in China). More first-generation Arc releases are coming. Among them will be Intel's first workstation graphics cards based on Arc, two of which have seemingly appeared in SiSoftware's SANDRA database.
Obviously when it comes to leak of this nature we have to maintain a level of skepticism. Even if the designations are real (which we suspect they are in this case), it doesn't necessarily mean the specifications and any performance figures are representative of the final product. That's just the nature of early silicon (engineering samples) and leaks in general.
That little disclaimer out of the way, what we have here are various details surrounding Intel's Arc Pro A50 and Arc Pro A40 graphics cards (hat tip to @momomo_us on Twitter for spotting the listing). At a glance, the benchmark leak suggests the Arc Pro A50 will feature the full Arc ACM-G11 GPU, an Xe-HPG part with 8 Xe cores, 128 execution units, and 1,024 FP32 cores.
Source: SiSoftware SANDRA
The listing also indicates a 2.45GHz GPU clock, 6GB of GDDR6 memory linked to a 96-bit memory bus, and 1MB of L2 cache.
These leaked specifications are nearly the same as the Arc A380 (8 Xe cores, 128 EUs, 2 render slices, 6GB GDDR6, 96-bit bus, 186GB/s memory bandwidth, 2GHz base GPU clock, 2.45GHz boost clock, 75W). So the Arc A50 Pro is looking like a professional version of the A380, or shenanigans are at play. It's also possible that SANDRA is misreading things.
The database entry clumps the Arc Pro A50/A40 together, so if we assume the listing is accurate, the Arc Pro A40 model will be a tamer configuration in some way. Or we could be looking at the tamer Arc Pro A40 config already, and the Arc Pro 50 will feature higher end specs. There's just no way of knowing for sure right now.
Looking at the performance metric in the Arc Pro A50/A40 benchmark leak, the card(s) posted an anemic result that is higher than only 2.69 percent of ranked results. We'd caution against reading too much into that, as we have no idea what the circumstances are behind this leak. Unless something is terribly wrong, we would expect a markedly better result when the workstation cards actually ship.
As for timing, Intel stated earlier this year that its desktop cards would ship in the second quarter (and it technically hit that time frame with the A380 launch overseas), followed by professional models for workstations in the third quarter. Throw in its mobile SKUs, and Intel anticipates shipping 4 million discrete Arc GPUs by the end of this year.
