Intel's own Ryan Shrout has come out of the gates swinging, aiming at a specific rumor that has been spreading its wings since the announcement of the company's Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs. Specifically, Shrout denied rumors of an upcoming Arc A780 graphics card. Initially reported by known leaker Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), the Arc A780 allegedly was an unannounced card that would offer better performance over Intel's confirmed top-tier discrete card, the Arc A770.
Despite some rumors to the contrary, there is no Intel Arc A780 and there was never planned to be an A780. Let’s just settle that debate. 🤣July 16, 2022
Being an element of Intel's Graphics Marketing, Ryan Shrout is likely privy to details that a leaker isn't. Another Intel specialist, Intel Arc Tech Evangelist Tuan Huynh, reinforced Shrout's disclosure, even going so far as saying that he never heard any rumor of the so-called graphics card in the year and a half he's been on the team.
MLID, which has had a relatively straight record on leaked details for Intel's Arc lineup before, was quick to defend its reporting and information gathering from within Intel's Arc teams. MLID's Twitter account even went as far as saying that Intel's denial is nothing more than an attempt at damage control for the company's failure to produce a product that would be competitive against Nvidia's current RTX 3070 card.
Just admit you guys failed to make your GA104-sized die compete with the 3070 Ti or 3070 outside of 3DMark.It's either that, or pretend the same source as the Raptor Lake, Redwood Cove, and Alchemist cooler leaks guessed all of that stuff...SPOILER ALERT: I didn't. 🤣July 17, 2022
Of course, we might never know the truth behind the Arc A780. However, Intel would indeed have little to gain in admitting failure to produce an adequate alternative against a competitor's card that's expected to be replaced shortly by Nvidia's upcoming RTX 4000 series.
One thing is certain: Intel's top-tier Arc card in the Alchemist series will indeed be the A770. As a reminder, the Arc A770 has been confirmed by Intel to ship with 32 Xe cores and 4,096 ALUs, packed in a 406 mm^2 die with 21.7 billion transistors built on TSMC's N6 process.
Intel's performance projections place the A750 roughly 12% faster than Nvidia's RTX 3060 graphics card at 2560 x 1440 resolution.
Considering that Nvidia's RTX 3070 offers around 42% higher performance than the RTX 3060, Intel's A780 would have to provide about 30% faster performance than the Arc A770. According to MLID, the Arc A780 was projected to have as big a die as the RTX 3070 (392^mm on Samsung's 8 nm). The issue is that Intel's A770 has been confirmed to carry a die that's already bigger than that (and on a denser process), so it seems... improbable that Intel would have unlocked that much performance without having to increase die area considerably.
