Intel Arc A750 prototype spotted with 16GB VRAM — Engineering sample made by Gunnir sports sticker claiming a 512-bit memory bus

Arc A750
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel released the Arc A750 roughly three years ago as part of its first generation "Alchemist" lineup of discrete GPUs. It launched with 8GB of GDDR6 memory saturated across a 256-bit bus. While the card's specs are nothing extraordinary, a new version of the A750 has just surfaced — seemingly with double the VRAM and twice as wide of a memory bus — which never came out. It looks like a prototype and @komenezumi1006 on X claims they have one.

The user has provided images that confirm there's only one core on the card, turning down speculation of a dual-GPU prototype with double the memory. That still doesn't explain the wider 512-bit bus. Perhaps it's been mislabeled by someone who thought that twice the VRAM capacity means twice the bus width. Regardless, it's an interesting sample, but it unfortunately wasn't benchmarked, so we don't know how it performs (or if it's better than the standard A750).

From the pictures, we can see that two 8-pin PCIe power connectors are present on this A750, which is different from the 1x 8-pin and 1x 6-pin config that the retail A750 had. Moreover, there are stickers on the GPU that specifically say "Intel Arc Sample," suggesting that Intel might have floated around the idea of a 16GB A750 at some point, and developed this prototype to test out the feasibility.

Ultimately, we never got such a card. The only 16 GB GPU from Alchemist was the Arc A770 (which also had an 8 GB variant). The current-gen Arc B750 that succeeded the A750 has 10 GB of VRAM, while the B770 is rumored to feature 16 GB, effectively making this 16 GB A750 the only "midrange" Intel GPU we know of with that memory pool.

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Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Makes me think of the Radeon...was it the 2900XT that shipped with a 512 bit bus but changed to 256 bit?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    The article said:
    The user has provided images that confirm there's only one core on the card, turning down speculation of a dual-GPU prototype with double the memory. That still doesn't explain the wider 512-bit bus. Perhaps it's been mislabeled by someone who thought that twice the VRAM capacity means twice the bus width.
    Thanks for confirming that. Yeah, I think it's not credible that the GPU actually had such a wide memory interface. It'd put the bandwidth/compute ratio wildly out-of-whack. And let's not forget that burning die area on GDDR6 controllers + the additional I/Os for the extra 256-bits cost money and therefore isn't the sort of thing they'd do on a whim.
    Reply
  • artk2219
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    Makes me think of the Radeon...was it the 2900XT that shipped with a 512 bit bus but changed to 256 bit?
    The 2900XT did ship with a 512 bit bus, they cut the bus width for the 3000 series though, they shipped with a 256 bit bus.
    Reply
  • jlake3
    This almost certainly has to be a mislabel. The fully-enabled ACM-G10 die has been widely reported to only have a 256-bit memory bus, and doubling the memory bus is not an easy change to make. By the time you add the extra memory controllers and extra pins its no longer an ACM-G10 and is now an all new and never-before-seen die, which is extremely unlikely to be supported by public drivers while an A750 on an A770 16gb board plausibly could.
    Reply