Intel Teases Dual-Fan Arc GPU Using 1,000 Drones

We recently covered the announcement of Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete gaming GPUs, but the company's Graphics Twitter account recently posted a one-minute video showing a dual-fan GPU. Perhaps this will be the cooling design that will be used on the upcoming release of Intel's Alchemist GPU.

Intel hasn't confirmed the specs on Arc as a whole, but all indications are that it will top out at 512 execution units and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. According to a tweet by @GPUsAreMagic, the 512 execution units are sliced up into four groups of 128 EUs each. That's based on a rendered die shot included in Intel's video announcement, however, which could have little to do with the actual silicon.

Regardless, it seems Intel is not looking to go overboard with the cooling on Alchemist. Depending on the GPU configuration, two fans should be adequate, and that's a popular choice for mainstream products on our best graphics cards list. Or the drones may have just been drawing a generic GPU in the sky and the actual design will be completely different.

Alchemist will be hitting first for the Arc team, and according to a tweet from Anton Kaplanyan, the Arc GPUs will support the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set, including mesh shading, variable rate shading, and ray tracing. Intel will also support neural supersampling, which sounds a lot like Nvidia's DLSS. It will be interesting to see how Intel goes about that, as getting game developers to integrate yet another upscaling and supersampling algorithm could prove problematic — they already have DLSS and FSR as options, so it's doubtful games will want to include all three.

Alchemist is set for release in Q1 of 2022. We hope to learn more about the underlying architectural changes before then, and if all goes well Intel could actually offer some needed competition in the GPU market.