Intel launches Arc A-series discrete graphics for laptops

Dimapur, March 30 (EMN): Two years after Intel announced its intention to make discrete GPUs, the company has launched its first Arc A-series GPUs for laptops today.

Intel is launching two Arc 3 series GPUs: the A350M and the A370M. The A350M has six Xe-cores and six ray-tracing units while the A370M has eight Xe-cores and eight ray-tracing units. These two discrete GPUs are aimed at ultraportable devices with low-end dedicated laptop GPUs similar to Nvidia’s GeForce MX 550 and MX 570 enabled laptops.

The company claims that the A370M can reach 60fps at 1080p resolution in popular games like Doom Eternal, Hitman 3, Destiny 2, Fortnite, Valorant and Death Stranding. It looks like Intel is marketing these Arc 3 series GPUs as entry-level 1080p gaming GPUs.

The company said that the one Arc 5 GPU and two Arc 7 models will be coming to the discrete GPU market in the “early summer.”

Arc 3 GPUs are based on the ACM-G11 die while the Arc 5 and Arc 7 GPUs are based on the larger ACM-G10. The Intel Arc 5 A550M will have 16 Xe Cores while the pair of higher end Arc 7 GPUs—A730M and A750M—will have 24 Xe Cores and 32 Xe Cores respectively.

Intel has also confirmed that its Arc GPUs will have full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, including ray-tracing support. These Arc GPUs will also have support for Intel’s own upscaling solution, Xe Super Sampling (XeSS), similar to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR.

All Arc GPUs, from the Arc 3 series up to Arc 7, will have hardware that supports encoding and decoding the AV1 video codec for faster video encoding in a variety of apps.

Another key feature of Arc GPUs is Intel’s Deep Link technology which will enable Arc GPUs to work seamlessly with Intel CPUs to boost performance in a variety of different scenarios using features like dynamic power sharing, hyper encode and hyper compute.