Leaked Internal Document Hints at Intel GPU Naming Structure
Mike Sanders / 3 years ago
With the release of Intel’s dedicated gaming graphics cards, slowly but surely, inching ever closer, there is undoubtedly a lot of excitement from the PC hardware community. Not only from the point of view of (finally!) having a long-overdue third player in the market but also from the perspective that Intel is one of the few companies who have the money and resources to legitimately give both AMD and particularly Nvidia a run for their money (well, in performance terms at least).
Following a report via Videocardz, however, unlike AMD and Nvidia who chose to have rather elaborate names for their GPUs (RX, GTX, RTX, etc.), it would appear following an internal slide leaking online, Intel plans to keep things a lot simpler!
Intel Arc Alchemist
Following the leak, which we’ll freely concede has the possibility of not being legitimate and/or accurate of what we might actually see, it would seem that Intel has decided to launch their graphics cards under the ‘Arc Alchemist’ name. However, based on the information, it does seem that Intel plans to stick with this for a pretty long time. And in addition, to maintain a rather simplified naming structure.
For example, it would appear that the first GPUs will simply come under the name/s Intel Arc A### (the hashtags representing the yet unknown number). – Let’s presume though that there is an Intel Arc A100, following the release of the next generation (currently thought to be BattleMage) this would transition to the Arc B100, C100, D100, and so on (to denote the seemingly alphabetically chosen architecture times of Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid).
What Do We Think?
It’s hard to deny that the naming systems deployed by both AMD and Nvidia have regularly led to more than a few similarities. For example, just in terms of graphics cards, there is an AMD RX 480, and an Nvidia GTX 480. And given the way AMD is progressing, we can perhaps shortly expect to see the Nvidia 8800 GTS and the AMD Radeon RX 8800 at some point too.
While it’s not an overly imaginative or sexy branding, if Intel does go with this, it does at least ensure a good uniform naming system for (presuming they stick with the alphabet methodology) at least 26 generations.
So, given that we already have a good idea of what the first 4 will be (Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid), feel free to tell us in the comments what you think other entries after this could be! – I personally like the idea of the Arc P100 being the ‘potato’. – Let us know yours in the comments though!