Intel has recently unveiled its latest GPU offering, the Intel Arc Pro A60, which is part of the new(-ish) Intel Arc Pro GPU series. This new GPU is specifically designed to cater to the professional market and for OEMs to integrate into workstation desktops.
Intel Arc Pro A60 GPU
The Intel Arc Pro A60 GPU is built on the Xe HPG architecture, which incorporates features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AI-driven super sampling, and variable rate shading. In terms of specs, the GPU has 12GB of onboard GDDR6 memory (ECC is not noted in the specs) in a 192-bit design for 384GB/s memory bandwidth.
The new GPU has 256 execution units, 16 Xe cores with 4 render slices, 16 ray tracing units and supports Intel XMX for AI inference.
Display outputs are four DisplayPort 2.0 ports.
The card also supports h.264, h.265, and AV1 encoding and decoding.
In terms of ISV certification, here is what Intel is listing:
- Autodesk
- Bentley
- Dassault Systèmes
- Nemetschek
- PTC (Certification Ready)
- Siemens
It seems like this is probably not yet to the level of what we typically see on the NVIDIA and AMD Pro lines. Workstation vendors also focus on ISV certifications. Still, at least this is a program that Intel is working on with its Arc Pro cards.
Final Words
It is great to see Intel working in the professional graphics market. It seems to be focusing on the lower-cost solutions rather than focusing on the higher end of the market at this point. That probably makes sense. One of the big questions, especially if one is not looking for ISV certifications, is how much this will cost versus cards like the Intel Arc A750 and A770. The A750 uses more power and space, but has been on the market for $199-249 recently. For the OEM workstation market that is not really a key factor, but for those customizing workstations, they will look at the price of this versus the non-Pro parts just like folks do with NVIDIA cards.
This looks like a nice competitor to the A2000 and A4000. Hopefully they won’t charge an outrageous price for it because I might pick one up if it’s reasonable.
It will be interesting to see how different the drivers are from the non-pro Arcs.
The usual implication with workstation cards is that the vendor will care more, especially about professional software; but of all the current GPU vendors Intel is the one whose viability hinges most urgently on their driver improvements and (presumably) the one that has the least room to leave driver improvements on the table for any of their cards; even if they aren’t “pro”.
If I’m already paying thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for fancy CAD packages I’m not inclined to roll the dice on how interested Intel will be in my bug reports; but given that they have, by all accounts, a competent hardware product muddied by software support issues it’s hard to imagine them trying to differentiate on driver support too hard, the low end still needs all the support they can provide.
Would love to know if these support SR-IOV or other virtualisation tech, it’d be great to have a reasonably small graphics card with hardware AV1 decode/encode and virt support without jumping through hoops.
+1 For Aaron. That might be a good staple for a low-cost virtualization lab (or small production environment) if proper support of SR-IOV would be applied! Especially considering the 4 display outputs!
I had breakfast and a dinner with Wendell and his wife from L1 Techs in Taipei last week. I think he figured out how to get it working on the Intel Arc GPUs. It is not just a “it works” but I will let him do his thing showing folks this.
Also, I gave the feedback directly to Raja at SC21 that we need this. Raja is not at Intel anymore, but I have been very clear on my feedback that Arc has a big value proposition if it has SR-IOV as well as AI inference acceleration.
smart and to-the-point question Patrick, BRAVO!
Good. We need intel in the GPU scene gaming and work. Maybe nvidia and AMD will pull they’re head out there behind.
Do this things support sr-iov or similar?
Like the ability to split them virtually for VDI purpouses.
That would be so cool
It’s April 2024 now and this card seems to not exist anywhere for actual purchase like any other professional video card product. Was this just some BS card for “contact us for quote” type of crap that is so prevalent in the hardware world?