Although Intel did not ship its Arc Alchemist A700-series gaming-oriented discrete graphics cards for desktop computers this summer, it is about to send them - at least, to winners of its Scavenger Hunt promotion that ran early in 2021. It might signify that the company is ready to ship these boards to general audiences.
Our colleague Evan Stenger tweeted late Friday that Intel is about to ship its Arc graphics cards to winners of its Scavenger Hunt who participated in the competition in early 2021. The screenshot he posted asks about the addresses of the winners, which means that Intel is ready to send out the prizes. We could speculate that this might be the Arc A770 Limited Edition built-by-Intel boards, but we will have to learn from the lucky winners what exactly they got.
Intel planned to start shipping its Arc Alchemist graphics cards for demanding gamers in the summer. Unfortunately, the company has failed to deliver on this promise. Yet, assuming that Intel is shipping its cards to gamers who were enthusiastic enough to do the Scavenger Hunt competition, this might be a sign that the company is indeed getting ready to ship its Arc boards commercially. While we do not know exactly what Intel intends to send to the winners, let us remind you what Intel has at its hands.
The Arc A770 is the company’s top-of-the-range model based on the ACM-G10 graphics processor with 32 Xe cores (equivalent to 4,096 stream processors) operating at 2,100 MHz and equipped with 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 memory featuring a peak bandwidth of 560 GBps. Meanwhile, the Arc A750 sits below the flagship and features a cut-down ACM-G10 GPU with 28 Xe cores (equivalent to 3,584 shading units) working at 2,050 MHz and connected to 8GB of GDDR6 memory with a peak bandwidth of 512 GBps. We will see whether either ends up in our list of the best graphics cards available today.
Now, while we know that Intel ships some of its graphics boards to the lucky winners of its Scavenger Hunt, we still have no idea when these (and other) boards will be available and how much they will cost, therefore, stay tuned.
