As promised at CES, Intel will launch its mobile family of Intel Arc A-series GPUs in Q1 2022, and the date has been set for Wednesday, March 30. Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group, posted the news on Intel's community site, and added some further interesting nuggets, such as what level of performance users should expect from the first Arc A-Series mobile GPU, and some outline information about Project Endgame.
There will be a special launch event for Intel Arc A-Series graphics for laptops starting at 8am PST on March 30, and it is titled A New Stage of the Game. Expect to see plenty of further technical details at that time, as well as a wide range of laptop partner products unveiled. In her blog post, Pearce confirms that other new Intel Graphics technologies that will be showcased at the live streamed event include "Intel Deep Link, XeSS and more."
The first Intel Arc discrete GPU which will feature in partner laptop designs will be the Intel Arc A370M. Interestingly, Pearce said that the GPU will be the first to find its way into verified Intel Evo designs. This means it will stay strictly within the Evo power limits, so designs can still offer "nine or more hours of real-world battery life on laptops with full HD display." However, at the same time, the new Arc GPUs "will enable up to a 2X improvement in graphics performance."
The reference against which this 2X improvement claim is made is against the Intel Iris Xe with 96EUs running at up to 1.45 GHz. Reading through the small print, Intel pitted these mobile integrated and discrete GPUs against each other in Metro Exodus using DirectX 12 mode.
Checking over various benchmarks of the Intel Iris Xe with 96EUs, another mobile GPU which is approximately 2X as fast as that iGPU in gaming is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile (50W). This should give you a familiar reference point.
Intel hints that its Arc A370M performance is aided by Intel Deep Link technology, like Power Share, which has featured previously in Iris Xe Max graphics systems – balancing power across CPU and GPU to suit the task(s) at hand.
Lastly, with regards to the Intel Arc A370M and other mobile GPUs on the way, Pearce said that "exact specs" for it, and other GPUs, will be shared shortly. She could be talking about the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which begins next Monday. Intel has already confirmed it will discuss Arc ray-tracing and XeSS technology at this event.
If you wish to digest some previous leaks and rumours regarding Intel's Arc A370M mobile GPU, in late January we spotted a CrossMark benchmark run, and we saw an MSI system packing this GPU being tested in PugetBench in early February. More recently we saw the Intel Arc A370M listed in a larger spill of GPU names and details, which included a mix of mobile and desktop cards.
Why Mobile First?
In her blog post Pearce says a very popular question people have about Intel Arc is about why Intel is going mobile first. The answer isn't very clear, but seems to indicate that Intel has worked carefully with laptop partners to ensure a good overall experience. "By beginning to launch our mobile products first, we aim to bring all our technologies (CPU, graphics, media, display, I/O, etc.) to bear to deliver great experiences," wrote Pierce.
Project Endgame
Intel's Graphics VP & GM, polished off her community post by talking about Project Endgame. "Project Endgame is a unified services layer that harnesses computing resources everywhere – cloud, edge, and your home, to improve your gaming, and non-gaming, PC experiences," explained Pierce. In other words, it is a kind of hybrid cloud gaming service which will allow weaker PC systems to run the latest games, with low latency.
Intel will make its first public steps with Project Endgame in Q2 this year, so watch out for further details and perhaps the chance to test beta / trial versions of the service.
