It is a matter of time to see Intel GPUs, graphics cards that arrive in the midst of a component crisis and with mining through the clouds. This makes its launch one of the most anticipated of the quarter within the technology sector.
For many, this first quarter is marked by two events: the launch of the Galaxy S22 and the premiere of Intel’s dedicated graphics cards.
And although we have already talked about the Galaxy S22 today, now it is the turn of the Intel GPU, because after 20 years of fighting between AMD and NVIDIA, in 2022 a new player arrives in the business.
The Intel Arc, which is how Intel has baptized its graphics card division, were confirmed at the end of 2021, with a launch date during the first quarter of 2022. Hence, any day is a good day for us to see them debut.
But that is in theory, since in practice we can ensure that they still have it, since we have not seen photos, benchmarks or other official information about it.
Or so we could assure until yesterday. Now, and as we have seen from a famous leaker on Twitter, a presentation slide intended for internal sales channels has been leaked to Intel. In this slide you can see the different models of Intel Arc that would reach the market.
Like NVIDIA or AMD, Intel would launch models from higher to lower power to capture the market with its graphics solutions. And, as we see in the slide, Intel would have up to 5 models already prepared.
These models are: SKU1, SKU2, SKU3, SK4 and SK5. The first three would be desktop GPUs and the last two would be for laptops. Hence, the truly interesting ones are SKU1, SKU2, SKU3.
The most basic models of these cards are based on the Intel DG2-96EU and Intel DG2-128EU graphics chips, with 768 and 1,024 cores respectively. Its low power is reflected in the 4 GB of GDDR6 memory at 14 Gb / s that will offer a low bandwidth of 112 GB / s.
Then we would have the SKU3, which would be the first desktop that would have 2,048 cores accompanied by 8 GB of GDDR6 memory at 16 Gb/s together with a 128-bit memory interface to achieve a bandwidth of 256 GB/s.
Then we would have the SKU2 with 3,072 cores and we already reached 12 GB of GDDR6 memory at 16 Gb / s with a 192-bit memory interface that reaches 384 GB / s.
Finally, we would have the top-of-the-range model, SKU1 with 4,096 cores, which would come with 16 GB of 16 Gb/s GDDR6 memory along with a 256-bit memory interface that manages to reach 512 GB/s of bandwidth.
These are just numbers, but they allow us to see Intel’s strategy regarding its graphics cards. If they manage to stand up to the entry range and mid/high range of this generation, we could speak of success without palliatives to be their first generation.
