Here’s When And How Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs Will Allegedly Arrive To Battle AMD And NVIDIA
There's a very high chance Intel provides more details about its Arc Alchemist lineup during its virtual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) event next week, which could potentially include an update on exactly when the first cards will release. We'll have to wait and see. That said, Intel has promised Alchemist will arrive in the first quarter of 2022. That's a three-month window, though if the latest unofficial chatter is accurate, Alchemist will make its debut in March of next year.
Obviously we always have to take leaks and rumors with a healthy dose of skepticism, and the same applies to this one. As the story goes, however, a post at the Board Channels forums claims Intel has sent its Alchemist lineup to various hardware partners for debugging. If true, we also imagine this is so add-in board (AIB) partners can start constructing custom designs.
The post also claims the March 2022 release is actually a bit of a delay, noting that Intel had originally intended to release its Alchemist lineup in January 2022. It doesn't state the reason for the supposed delay, though.
Additionally, the post claims Intel will kick things off with two desktop products, including its flagship DG2-512 model with 16GB of onboard memory, and a DG2-384 model with 12GB of onboard memory.
Intel essentially confirmed that its flagship Alchemist card will wield 512 execution units, just not quite in so many words. The company talked a little about the specs during its Architecture Day 2021 event, and again more recently during its InnovatiON event.
More specifically, Intel said Alchemist is "designed for gamers first," is being built on TSMC's 6-nanometer manufacturing process, and will feature 32 Xe cores, each with 16 vector engines. Some rudimentary math works that out to 512 vector engines.
Getting back to the rumor, it's said the 512 EU version of Alchemist will be competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card, while the 384 EU version will be more in line with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.
That will be exciting if Intel can pull it off. Potentially even more exciting? If Battlemage in 2023 competes for the performance crown with Ada Lovelace and RDNA 3, as separately rumored.
