For decades, Intel has been a champion for PC platform innovation. They have delivered generations of CPUs that provide computing horsepower for billions of people. Following this tradition, and after much anticipation following their reveal at CES 2022, Intel has officially launched its Arc graphics family for laptops. These are the first discrete GPUs from their Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, with desktop and workstation products coming later this year.
Intel Arc A-Series Mobile Graphics
As part of the official announcement, Intel has confirmed the following features consumers can expect:
New Laptops with Intel Arc Graphics: We’ve partnered with top OEMs to co-engineer an amazing lineup of laptops that feature new and improved gaming and content creation capabilities with Arc graphics and 12th Gen Intel Core processors. Many new systems with Intel Arc 3 graphics will feature the Intel Evo platform’s trademark responsiveness, battery life and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity in thin-and-light form factors. Laptops with Arc 3 graphics offer enhanced 1080p gaming and advanced content creation, and those with Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics will offer the same cutting-edge, content-creation capabilities coupled with increased graphics and computing performance. The first laptops with Arc 3 GPUs are available to preorder now and will be followed by the more powerful designs with Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics in early summer.
Unleashing the Laptop Platform: The foundation of products with Arc A-Series GPUs and our platform-level approach to graphics innovation starts with our new Xe High Performance Graphics microarchitecture (Xe HPG), which is engineered for gamers and creators. We have packed a ton of great technology into Xe HPG, including powerful Xe-cores with XMX AI engines, a graphics pipeline optimized for DirectX 12 Ultimate with hardware acceleration for ray tracing, the Xe Media Engine tuned to accelerate existing and future creator workloads and the Xe Display Engine ready for DisplayPort 2.0 UHBR 10.
Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engines provide more compute capability for accelerating AI workloads. These AI engines have 16 times the compute to complete AI inferencing operations when compared to traditional GPU vector units, which can increase performance in productivity, gaming and creator applications.
Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) is our solution that leverages the power of Arc graphics’ XMX AI-engines to deliver high-performance, AI-accelerated upscaling. XeSS is a novel upscaling technology that uses deep learning to synthesize images that are very close to the quality of native high-res rendering. XeSS is coming in the summer and will be supported on all products with Arc A-Series graphics.
Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We’ve worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.
We’ve integrated Intel Deep Link technologies to enable Arc GPUs to work seamlessly with our CPUs and integrated graphics for a performance improvement across gaming, creating and streaming workloads. Intel Deep Link enables dynamic power sharing, intelligently distributing power across the platform to increase application performance up to 30% in creation and compute-intensive applications. With Hyper Encode and Hyper Compute, Deep Link allows multi-engine acceleration in transcoding and AI tasks. More details are available in our product fact sheet.
Community Experiences: Our Arc graphics are more than another piece of hardware in your PC. They are your portal to play and create. We have a dedicated team focused on delivering Day 0 game-ready drivers, which you’ll be able to track in our new Intel Arc Control interface, an all-in-one hub that puts you in full control of the gaming experience. Intel Arc Control includes custom performance profiles, built-in streaming, a virtual camera, integrated Game ON driver downloading, automatic game capture, and more. The app supports Iris Xe graphics and Arc GPUs for a unified software experience. By working with our developer partners, we are making a growing portfolio of Intel-optimized games and multimedia applications available to discrete graphics customers through special launch bundles. Bundles will vary based on the system and the region, but the first of these gamer and creator bundles is rolling out in April with the launch of our A-Series mobile products. Our goal is to deliver something new and fun to the community every day of the year. We invite you to connect with us and join the conversation on our Intel Insiders discord.
Where Can I Learn More?
While Intel is still a little vague as to any specific laptop releases just yet, their website rather extensively covers the new Arc A-series of mobile graphics. – If you do, therefore, want to learn more about it, you can check it out via the link here!