Latest Intel Arc GPU Leaks: 3070 Ti-ish Speed, 5 Different Laptop Options

Intel hasn’t said much about its upcoming dedicated Arc GPUs since it announced their branding and a few architectural details a few months ago. But recent leaks have given us some idea of ​​what we can expect when it comes to the performance and GPUs Intel is planning for laptops later this year.

Of the leaks, information about Arc laptop models is more specific. The slide, originally leaked on Twitter, outlines a total of five different laptop GPU models, ranging from a couple of slower but better-than-built options at the bottom to a potential high-end GeForce or Radeon competitor.

The best GPUs include 512 Intel GPU Execution Units (EUs) connected to 16GB of 16Gbps VRAM using a 256-bit interface; such a wide memory interface and such a large amount of memory suggests a high performance graphics processor that is trying to compete with the GeForce 3070 and 3080 series and Radeon 6800 and 6900 series products.

The two mid-range GPU options – one 384 EU model with 12GB RAM connected to a 192-bit interface, and one 256 EU model with 8GB RAM and a 128-bit interface – resemble the specs for mainstream Nvidia RTX 3060 and 3050 laptops.. The two lower models, which connect to 4GB of RAM with a 64-bit memory interface, seem poised to compete with GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce MX series or beefed up RDNA2 integrated GPUs in upcoming AMD Ryzen 6000 laptop processors.

The use of the word “recommended”on the slides means that laptop manufacturers will have the option to tweak these settings, most likely by using more or less (or faster or slower) RAM. This would be par for the course in the sometimes confusing mobile GPU market, where the “same”GPU model can perform differently on different laptops depending on the specific hardware configurations, cooling systems, and power settings that manufacturers choose laptops. It’s also hard to draw conclusions about the performance of these GPUs based on these paper numbers alone.

This brings us to another recent story with Arc: some SiSoftware benchmarks designed to show Arc desktop GPU performance came out last week, pointing to the 512 EU model, which was roughly competitive with the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti (albeit with more impressive numbers for computational tasks on the GPU than for games).

Assuming Intel is getting close to RTX 3070-level performance with this desktop part, it’s reasonable to assume 3060 and 3050 performance targets for the more modest 384 and 256 EU products. However, these numbers are (at best) unverified performance previews using non-final hardware and drivers on a single test. Thus, we should not draw too many conclusions from these figures in isolation.

Intel Arc GPUs were originally supposed to start showing up in the first quarter of 2022, although references to “Q1″have since been removed from Intel’s website. Some laptop announcements at CES earlier in January mentioned Arc GPUs, but there were no specs or performance numbers, and Intel didn’t provide details.

The shortage of GPUs is still so great that even apparently mediocre products are being bought as fast as GPU manufacturers can make them, so chances are Intel GPUs will sell well even if they aren’t objectively impressive. They just need to be released first.