Intel announces Arc A-series discrete GPUs for laptops, desktops' to follow

Intel Arc A-series discrete GPUs come in Arc 3, Arc 5, and Arc 7 range. The Arc 3 is now available in laptops starting $899

American chipmaker Intel has announced its maiden discrete graphic processing units (GPUs) for laptops. Called Intel Arc A-series, the GPUs are based on Intel’s new Xe Hyper Performance Graphics microarchitecture (Xe HPG). The first batch of laptop GPUs include Arc 3, Arc 5, and Arc 7. The Arc 3 is now available in laptops starting $899. The Arc 5 and Arc 7 will be available for advanced laptops later this year.

Speaking of the Arc 3 series, it comes in two variants -- A350M and A370M. The A350M has six Xe-cores, six ray tracing cores, and a power envelop of 25-35W. The A370M has eight Xe-cores, eight ray tracing cores, and a slightly higher power envelop of 35-50W. Both the variants have 4GB GDDR6 memory, and 64-bit wide memory bus.

According to Intel, the Arc 3 is an entry-level discrete GPU with up to twice the performance of Intel’s integrated Iris Xe graphics. The GPUs support features such as DirectX 12 Ultimate, Ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shading, etc. Like Nvidia, the Intel’s GPUs include AI engine for machine learning and AI-acceleration that enables super sampling in select gaming titles. However, both the XMX AI engine and XeSS (Xe super sampling) are not available right away but coming soon.

What is available to experience, however, is the industry first advance media engine with full AV1 hardware acceleration support. This codec is being adopted rapidly by the industry for its efficiency and performance, and Arc 3 are the first GPUs to support it natively.

The Intel Arc Graphics are available with laptops based on Intel Evo designs. Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro is the first laptop to offer 12th Gen Intel Core Processor with Intel Evo designs and Intel Arc GPUs. Other laptops maker such as ASUS, Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI are set to introduce the new line-up based on Intel Arc GPUs soon.