Arc Alchemist leak provides details for Intel’s five laptop GPUs

A gamer playing on a laptop
(Image credit: Canva)

Details of Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics cards for laptops have been leaked, with five different models of these GPUs incoming, assuming this info is correct, naturally.

The spillage is provided by one of the regular hardware leakers on Twitter, HXL, who posted what looks like official spec details of the five cards which are ‘NB’ or notebook SKUs.

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There will supposedly be a flagship GPU with 512 EUs (Execution Units) plus 16GB of RAM, then next in line is a card with 384 EUs and 12GB VRAM, followed by a model with 256 EUs and 8GB, and then bringing up the rear, lower-end offerings with 128 EUs and 96 EUs which have 4GB.

All these laptop GPUs have GDDR6 memory running at 16Gbps speeds for all but the last two budget cards which are 14Gbps, with a 256-bit bus in the case of the flagship, for a bandwidth of 512GB/s.

The bandwidth of the other cards is 384GB/s (192-bit) for the 384 EU card, 256GB/s (128-bit) for the 256 EU model, and 112GB/s (64-bit) for the budget GPUs.

Intel’s Alchemist GPUs could start arriving from March, although given recent speculation, things could slip a little from the original intended Q1 launch (hopefully only to April, though). We don’t know whether we’ll see laptop or desktop graphics cards first.


Analysis: Arc Alchemist looks to be shaping up nicely

Remember, these are laptop graphics cards, and this doesn’t give us any details on Alchemist desktop GPUs – but we know they will broadly fit the same kind of configuration. Also, the details provided here do line up with what we’ve previously heard from the rumor mill, where for a long time, for example, the flagship has been thought to be a 512 EU model with 16GB of VRAM.

Speaking of the flagship, we’ve recently witnessed another leak – this time of a benchmark – which indicates that this top dog graphics card could be a match for Nvidia’s RTX 3070 Ti.

In short, Intel might come in with a pretty sweet offering towards the higher-end of the GPU spectrum, particularly if Team Blue can use its mighty resources (and filled coffers) to facilitate some competitive pricing, in order to make inroads to the desktop market which is currently dominated by Nvidia (with AMD as the relatively minor player).

With laptops, though, there could be just as much excitement around what the budget GPU minnows will be able to pull off, particularly when you consider that Intel’s Deep Link tech is thrown into the mix. This can boost performance in an all-Intel system, by intelligently sharing and adjusting resources between the Intel CPU’s integrated Xe graphics and the discrete Alchemist GPU – and it could help to realize some seriously peppy affordable laptops, with any luck.

Via VideoCardz

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).