Intel Alchemist, formerly known as DG2, may have a chance to compete with the greatest graphics cards on the market.
With the current chip shortage, it is hard to get your hands onto a GPU, especially if it's a new release. However, there's new footage of Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics card to keep us up to date for the new GPU.
Intel Alchemist Design
Moore's Law is Dead, a YouTuber with a history of distributing supposedly reliable information regarding Intel's upcoming technology, provided the photographs.
They appear to reveal both sides of Arc Alchemist's flagship graphics card, giving us a good look at the fans and, more significantly, the PCB layout.
The Intel Arc Alchemist graphics card, formerly known as the Intel DG2 discrete graphics card, has a gorgeous black and silver color scheme, and the top 512EU variant is rumored to come with up to 16GB GDDR6 memory and 4096 FP32 shading units.
These specifications support the idea that this card will compete with Nvidia's RTX 3070 and AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT, at the very least.
Intel Alchemist GPU
According to PC Gamer, Intel Alchemist is a collection of graphics cards rather than a single card.
The industry had anticipated a segmentation based on Execution Units (EUs) and memory, albeit this is no longer the case, as Intel has abandoned the EU in favor of the new, all-encompassing Xe-core.
Furthermore, the Xe-core is Intel's latest basic building block for gaming GPUs.
This doesn't completely change things, as both Xe-core and EU should be able to combine ALUs together in the same way. The Xe-cores in Xe-HPG, on the other hand, are not similar to what came before, thus our best-laid ideas for probable specifications are slightly off.
The new Xe-core in Alchemist GPUs has 16 Vector Engines and 16 Matrix Engines, which is more than twice as many as in Xe-HPC.
Intel claims that it made the decision to prioritize gaming for its Alchemist GPUs and that it was required to build out large gaming graphics cards.
If everything between Xe-HPG and Xe-LP, the versions present in Intel's current generation 11th Gen Tiger Lake mobile processors, had remained the same, the 512 EU chip would have had the equivalent of 4,096 FP32 cores.
Each EU has an eight-wide ALU that can perform eight floating-point operations per clock.
Due to the new Xe-core, it appears you may have to replace an eight-wide ALU per EU with an eight-wide ALU per Vector Engine, resulting in a comparable configuration.
Read Also: Intel Meteor Lake Specs Leaked-Release Date and Pricing Also Revealed!
Intel Alchemist Performance
The Matrix Engines for the Intel Alchemist GPUs are also really intriguing.
According to Jacob Ridley of PC Gamer, they're marked as XMX in the diagram above, which stands for Xe Matrix Extensions as long as you give Intel the 'X' in 'Extensions.'
In addition, these cores provide AI workload acceleration, such as deep learning inference jobs.
Consider them Intel's answer to Nvidia's Tensor Core.
Intel intends to employ these units for a variety of AI activities, but from a gaming standpoint, it's the acceleration of its Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) upscaler that has us thrilled.
When you zoom out a little, things start to get extremely interesting for this gaming architecture. A Render Slice is created by combining four Xe-cores, and each Render Slice can contain up to four Ray Tracing Units.
Real-time ray tracing workloads are accelerated by these devices, which Intel has announced will be supported by its Alchemist graphics cards.
Nonetheless, Intel's Alchemist release date might be in the first quarter of 2022.
