The problem is that Intel has a very full schedule, they first have to release Arc A330M worldwide as it’s only available in South Korea right now, then they have at least three more laptop GPUs that have been revealed and need their own launches. Not only that, Arc A-Series desktop is also on the planner as it is supposed to launch in the second quarter of this year. With all that on Intel’s calendar, it’s looking harder and harder for Arc Graphics everyday out here. If all that wasn’t enough, today a new report emerged from popular leaker Enthusiast Citizen, claiming that Intel is working on yet another GPU, this time a desktop graphics card that is supposed to launch soon. Oh, and, did I mention Intel also has to release their 13th Gen Core series processors along with the Z790 platform motherboards? Yeah, it’s going to be quite the year for the Blue Team, but I digress.
Arc A310 desktop GPU
As always, Enthusiast Citizen took to Chinese social media platform Bilibili to post an image containing all the juicy info. According to this new report, Intel is apparently working on a new entry-level Arc A-Series GPU, the Arc A310. This is supposed to be a follow-up to yesteryear’s DG1, technically Intel’s first-ever discrete GPU attempt that launched only at the OEM-level, meaning you couldn’t just buy this graphics card separately. Now, Arc A310 will serve as the official successor to that GPU mostly because of their matching performance targets; both are entry-level GPUs with barebones performance. Some of you already know that Intel Arc Alchemist is also known as DG2 because it is the follow-up generation to DG1, whereas Arc A310 graphics card will be more specifically a follow-up to the DG1 OEM graphics card. DG1 can be taken as both the name of the GPU itself and the generation as a whole. Anyways, if this rumor is true, Arc A310 will be (unofficially) the sixth graphics card to join the soon-to-release Arc Alchemist desktop lineup. As the name suggests, Arc A310 will be the lowest-end card from the Intel’s new graphics portfolio, having very moderate power requirements and it could, like its predecessor, be exclusive to system integrators in the OEM segment.
Further specs and details
Performance wise, the leaker pits the card to either be slower than or match the Radeon RX 6400, AMD’s newly-released entry-level RDNA 2 GPU. Arc A310 will reportedly pack 4GB of GDDR6 memory across a 64-bit interface, despite the GPU being capable of a 92-bit width. Speaking of which, Arc A310 will be using a cut-down version of the ACM-G11 (previously known as “SOC 2”), the same GPU that is inside the Arc A330M. Interestingly enough, Arc A310 has never once appeared before in leaks. We’ve heard a lot about the next-step-up, Arc A350, as being the entry-level GPU in Intel’s Arc A-Series lineup. Arc A350 also notoriously uses a cut-down version of the ACM-G11 GPU. So, there is a chance this could just be a new name for that graphics card, or perhaps it’s a new GPU entirely as suggested by the leaker. Moreover, given the aforementioned specs and details about this GPU, it could feature either 64 or 96 Execution Units, the latter being the same as rumored EU count of the Arc A350. As for the cores, I speculate it would carry 6 or at least 4 Xe-Cores from a full configuration of 8. All in all, the spec list for the Arc A310 is quite similar to the Arc A330M laptop GPU Intel launched earlier this month.
Update on Arc A-Series performance
Arc A310 isn’t the only GPU Enthusiast Citizen had new info on. The leaker further listed the performance levels of four other Arc A-Series desktop GPUs. Firstly, Arc A380 will supposedly have performance in between the GeForce RTX 3050 and Radeon RX 6400 graphics cards. Then, the Arc A580, so far the only Arc 500-series desktop GPU to have been leaked, will offer performance that falls in between the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 GPUs. Moving on, we have the two Arc 700-series GPUs. As per the report, Arc A750 will be noticeably more performant than the RTX 3060 whereas Arc A770‘s performance will be faster than the RTX 3060 Ti, so pretty much on-par with the RTX 3070. Intel will have the lead in some conditions such as raytracing with titles that have XeSS support, but in all other scenarios, the AMD and NVIDIA GPUs will pull ahead. Intel clearly has very high ambitions for its Arc Graphics and for good reason. The company has tried to make a major move in the world of discrete graphics for years now but has never really materialized that idea. Arc is Intel’s first and hopefully the only attempt they need to capture the GPU market. While the hardware certainly looks promising, we can all tell that the software side is still suffering from infancy. It will take a lot of effort and resources for Intel to giddy-up its drivers to make them competitive with AMD and NVIDIA. Even those companies have had driver issues for years and they are the only two players in the field, so you can imagine the work Intel needs to do here. Whether Intel is actually capable of making world-class drivers or not remains to be seen, because right now, whatever they have is falling way behind.
