Another one of Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist gaming graphics cards has surfaced in the wild. Unlike the Arc A380 that recently broke cover, the Arc A370M is a graphics card that targets mobile devices.
Intel aims to be the third player in the graphics game, taking on seasoned veterans like AMD and Nvidia. It's uncertain if Intel has an SKU to compete against the best graphics cards, such as the Radeon RX 6900 XT or GeForce RTX 3090. However, Arc Alchemist will offer gamers a third option when shopping for a graphics card, which comes as music to consumers' ears in times of an existing graphics card shortage.
The Arc A370M reportedly has 128 execution units (EUs). SiSoftware reported 160 EUs, but the software erroneously combined the UHD 770 iGPU's 32 EUs with the Arc A370M's 128 EUs. In addition, the benchmark submission revealed a 1.55 GHz clock speed, but it's unclear if it was the clock speed for the Arc A370M or the iGPU from the unknown Alder Lake chip from the test platform. The Arc A370M's other specifications included 4GB of GDDR6 memory across a humble 128-bit memory interface.
As with any unreleased hardware, we recommend approaching the performance numbers with caution. Engineering samples rarely maintain their specifications, and there is always room for driver and software optimizations.
The Arc A370M (via Tum_Apisak) scored 2,399.97 Mpix/s in SiSoftware's GP (GPU) Processing test. For comparison, Arc A380 scored 2,956.10 Mpix/s in the same benchmark. Therefore, the Arc A380 was 23% faster than the Arc A370M, which shouldn't come as a surprise since the former is a desktop graphics card, and the latter is a mobile graphics card.
The GeForce GTX 1650 Super had an aggregated score of 2,568.82 Mpix/s, meaning the desktop Turing-powered graphics card only delivered 7% higher performance than the Arc A370M. The AMD equivalent would be the Radeon RX 570, which is 6% (2,546.56 Mpix/s) faster.
Intel had stated initially on its website that Arc Alchemist would arrive in the first quarter of this year. However, the chipmaker later amended the information to "coming 2022." In addition, Raja M. Koduri, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, recently tweeted that Intel was working on getting "millions of Arc GPUs into the hands of PC gamers every year." Of course, we don't expect Intel to end the graphics card shortage, but it never hurts to have more competition in the market.
