Intel Might Be Prepping Sub-$100 Miniature Alchemist Arc GPU

Intel's Arc A380 graphics card is about to launch in the U.S. at $129 - $139, but this will not be the company's cheapest discrete offering as it has a miniature single-slot low-profile A300-series board that will likely cost about $100 and will be aimed at small form-factor low-cost desktops.

Alexey 'Unwinder' Nikolaychuk, the developer behind MSI's Afterburner (and RivaTuner before that), has published a picture of a yet unannounced single-slot low-profile Intel Arc A300-series graphics card with a dual-fan cooler, which Ilya Korneychuk has reposted from PRO Hi-Tech. The cooling system was 3D printed, Nikolaychuk told VideoCardz, so we are not dealing with a commercial product here. Meanwhile, this could be a design for a highly cheap Intel Arc A300-series graphics board aimed at channel partners and PC makers.

Intel's Arc A380 is a relatively compact entry-level gaming graphics card powered by the company's ACM-G11 graphics processor with eight Xe cores (1,024 stream processors) and 6GB of GDDR6 memory connected to the GPU using a 96-bit interface. However, since they cater to gamers, they sometimes come with increased clocks and power consumption, which is why they need an 8-pin auxiliary PCIe power connector. Meanwhile, in many cases, cheap PCs from big OEMs do not have any PCIe power connectors. Furthermore, some cannot even house a full-profile graphics card since they come in a compact chassis. Thus, Intel needs something smaller and more energy efficient to address such systems than its Arc A380.

Intel is prepping (or at least testing) a miniature single-slot low-profile Arc A310 or Arc 320 board that can fit into any PC with a spare PCIe x16 slot and does not need any external power. To a large degree, this is a rival for AMD's Radeon RX 6400 o Radeon Pro 6400 card that is both small and low power. Meanwhile, unlike AMD's Navi 24, Intel's ACM-G11 has world-class media processing capabilities (hardware decoding/encoding of 4K H.264/H.265/AV1 streams) and four display pipelines.

We can only wonder about the exact ACM-G11 configuration that Intel wants to use with its miniature Arc A300-series graphics board, but we suspect we are talking about a cut-down version of the GPU here. Since even the full-blown Arc A380 graphics card will cost about $130, expect the miniature form-factor cut-down version to cost about $100 or even less.

We do not know whether such tiny boards will end up in retail, but if they do, they will be good options for home theater PCs (HTPCs) and quite capable boards to upgrade cheap OEM systems.