When Intel announced a few months ago that it was joining the GPU race, PC enthusiasts likely began keeping their collective ears to the ground to learn more about it. With the Alchemist in its Arc range due out sometime next year, it seems the tech giant is keen to become the third combatant in the graphics card ring, with current specs showing that its first release could rival some big products from Nvidia and AMD. Now, it looks as though the company is saying there will be yet another SKU, which could potentially sit in between its mid-range and high-end cards.
According to a recent report, Intel has already confirmed that a DG2 Arc product with 448 Executable Units is already in existence, with mentions of it in a screenshot taken from Mesa, an open-source software application for OpenGL and Vulkan graphics. Another report suggests that this will be the fourth SKU that will be in this range of GPUs and that, given the EU, would likely sit pretty much halfway between the DG2-384 and DG2-512 variants, which would place the 448 configuration somewhere in the middle of the mid-range and high-end versions, going off the number of cores calculated.
It's also likely to put the VRAM somewhere in the range of 8 GB to 12 GB. Going off these figures alone, it's likely that the DG2-448 may be comparable to the RTX 3060, which has 12 GB of RAM and 3584 cores, the same as the Intel version. However, it has been noted recently that the Arc cards may be closer in terms of overall power to the Nvidia RTX 3070, with some believing it may even tip into the 3070 Ti range.
Whether it will take on the might of some Nvidia or AMD's most powerful hardware products remains to be seen at this stage, but the revealed specs of the upcoming Alchemist show that it has the potential to sit right up there with the best in the current market. Of course, that may all depend on whether Intel will be able to meet supply with demand.
Currently, there is still a shortage of tech and gaming hardware, and even the company's own CEO believes the crisis could go on until 2023. There are certainly a lot of GPUs about to hit the market, but with the deficit raging on, something which has been a blight on the industry for the better part of a year now, Intel will likely need a plan if customers find themselves struggling to get hold of any products, no matter how many SKUs are put out.
Source: Videocardz, Tom's Hardware