Intel sent us a note last night that the Intel Arc dGPUs are now shipping for desktops. The catch is that these are being shipped in China and we found the Gunnir version of this called the Gunnir Intel Arc A380 Photon 6G OC online.
Intel Arc A380 GPU is Out in China
The first Intel Arc A380 GPU we could find is the Gunnir Intel Arc A380 Photon 6G OC and this is prominently displayed on the company’s website.
In terms of our best guess at what this Arc 3 series part might be, here is the image from Gunnir and the company says that this is an 8 Xe core GPU.
Looking quickly at the launch slides from the mobile GPU launch, the ACM-G11 also has eight Xe cores and the chip image looks very similar if you compare the two.
Official specs for the Gunnir Intel Arc A380 Photon 6G OC list the power at 92W, and the maximum core frequency as 2450MHz. Intel is changing the way it defines clock speeds and power that we covered in Welcome Intel Arc GPUs to the Market and Coming to Intel NUCs. Standard for the part is supposed to be 75W.
The A380 has 6GB of GDDR6 and claims 186GB/s of memory bandwidth. Display outputs are 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI 2.0.
Final Words
China is usually a friendly place to launch hardware as most reviews there are pay-for-result affairs. It also helps launch first in the market where many leaks come from to shorten the time between leak and release. It will be interesting to see how these fare when users start getting them. Our expectation is that these are far from top-end GPUs with 92W ratings and pricing at the lower end of the market.
Still, our view of Arc in this generation is that Intel is not trying to compete with NVIDIA and AMD on a price/ performance basis across the stack. Rather, the first-generation Arc Alchemist cards are really there to get the ecosystem ready for its next-generation products. Intel is not starting from zero since it has a huge embedded iGPU market share, but PCIe GPUs are expected to perform better and across a wider range of tasks than the iGPUs so there is still software work to be done and brands to launch for Intel GPUs.
Skylake flashbacks
The power consumption is disappointing. I was hoping this to be the perfect linux desktop card:
– low power consumption
– good drivers
– working hardware acceleration for the latest video formats
The requirement for additional power spoils the picture a bit.
Out is a stretch. Announced is a better word. Still no units for sale or in reviewers hands from what I see.
@Ivan: yes, when I first heard about intel cards I was hoping there would be a version that just had a pcie version of intel integrated graphics… Just a 1x or 4x pcie, low power…or maybe put a bunch of them on a card and allow us to allocate them to VMs.