Intel Launches Arc A-Series Differentiated Graphics Family for Mobile Devices

March 30.- Intel released its family of Intel® Arc™ graphics products for PCs and mobile devices. These are the first differentiated GPUs to arrive this year from the Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, desktops, and workstations. Intel highlighted the Arc A-Series mobile graphics family, the first Arc GPU-powered laptops and the Arc graphics platform of hardware, software and services that will enable high-performance graphics experiences for gamers and creators around the world.

More: I visited the intel press room for more information on Intel Arc A Series news, including the launch presentation.

Intel Arc A-Series Mobile Graphics Family

Intel Arc A-series graphics will power a wide range of mobile designs, with many of the first Arc 3 graphics products set to be installed on Intel® Evo™ devices. These will include two initial product offerings: the A350M for ultra-slim designs and the A370M for increased performance in thin and light designs.

• Intel Arc 3 graphics offer upscaled 1080p gaming in addition to advanced content creation. Arc A370M-based laptops will deliver over 60 frames per second at 1080p on a variety of popular titles.¹
• Intel Arc 5 and Arc 7 graphics products will deliver the same cutting-edge content creation capabilities along with increased graphics and computing performance. These GPUs will have more cores X^e, more ray tracing units and more GDDR6 memory compared to Arc 3 products.
• The first Arc 3 graphics laptops are available for pre-order, with the Arc 5 and Arc 7 laptops arriving in June. Intel Arc graphics for desktops and add-on cards will be released in the second quarter of the year.

The first laptops with Intel Arc graphics

Most of the first laptops with Intel Arc graphics will be Intel Evo designs with the latest 12th Gen Intel Core processors, allowing users to take full advantage of thin and light PCs with Wi-Fi 6, remarkable response and long battery life. The additional power of Intel Arc graphics will provide new and better gaming and creation capabilities in mobile form factors. Check out our launch video to learn more about our OEM partner systems.

X^e High performance graphics microarchitecture

All products with Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are based on the new X microarchitecture^e Intel High Performance Graphics, or X^e HPG for its acronym in English, which was designed from the ground up for gamers and creators. X-technologies^e HPG enable Intel Arc graphics to deliver breakthroughs in performance, power, and scalability. Features include:

• Powerful X Cores^e with Intel X^e integrated, AI engines within the Xe cores, known as Matrix eXtensions (XMX) to deliver 16x more compute capacity to complete AI inference operations compared to traditional GPU vector units. Increased computing power can help improve performance in productivity, gaming, and content creator workloads.
• The X Media Engine^e supports acceleration for the broadest set of video codecs and standards and includes the industry's first AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding. AV1 is up to 50% more efficient than today's most common codec, H.264, and 30% more efficient than H.265.³
• The X display engine^e it's ready for high-resolution, high-refresh-rate HDR displays and supports the latest standards, including Display Port 2.0 10G for uncompressed 4K 120Hz.

Technologies for gaming and alliances

Every Intel Arc GPU, from Intel Arc 3 to Intel Arc Graphics 7, will fully support DirectX 12 Ultimate and advanced gaming technologies like hardware accelerated ray tracing and X^e Super Sampling (X)^eH.H).

• DirectX 12 Ultimate technologies include ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shading, and sample feedback.
• X image enhancement technology^e Intel's AI-based SS will be used to significantly improve gaming performance and, for example, allow a game to run at 4K resolution with performance comparable to native 1080p.
• Intel has made it a point to deliver drivers ready for Day 0 and is working with game studios around the world to ensure that next-gen titles are optimized for Intel Arc GPUs and technologies like X^e
• X^eSS will launch in the summer with support enabled on over 20 games and Intel plans to open up the X SDK^eSS and the tools for everyone to implement it, ensuring industry-wide adoption across a wide range of software and hardware.

Intel® Deep Link

Intel Arc Mobile Graphics support Intel Deep Link Technology, enabling Arc GPUs to work seamlessly with Intel CPUs with integrated graphics to boost gaming, creating, and streaming performance with the following features:

• hyperencode – Hyper Encode combines cross-platform media engines to accelerate video encoding workloads by up to 60% compared to Iris X graphics^e separately.¹
• Hypercompute – Hyper Compute similarly uses the combined power of AI and compute engines found throughout the Intel platform, including Intel Core processors, Iris X graphics^e and Intel Arc GPUs, to accelerate a variety of new workloads.
• Dynamic PowerShare – Dynamic Power Share intelligently and automatically prioritizes engine performance based on workload, sending more power to the Intel Core processor or Intel Arc graphics product as needed, increasing performance by up to 30% on authoring and compute-intensive applications.

Community Experience with Intel Arc Graphics

Intel is working with the community and partners to create a growing portfolio of optimized multimedia applications and games that will be available to Intel Arc graphics customers through special launch packages.

• Bundles will vary by system and region, but the first batches for players and creators will be released in April with the launch of the A-series mobile products.
• Intel will offer the Arc community a series of contests and promotions, such as monthly reward giveaways and “play to win” events.
• Additionally, Intel offers the Intel Arc Control app, a seamless interface and one-stop hub that allows users to fully control the gaming experience. It features custom performance profiles, built-in streaming, a virtual camera, built-in Game ON driver download, automatic game capture, and much more. Intel Arc Control is supported on Intel Iris X GPUs^e, Intel IrisX^e MAX and Arc for a unified software experience.

developer resources

Intel provides advanced oneAPI cross-architecture tools to help game developers and content creators take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Intel CPU and Arc GPU, and optimize applications for maximum visual performance.

• Analysis and optimization of graph congestion points. Use Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers for profiling graphics and gaming applications and augment profiling capabilities with ray tracing, system-level profiling, and X capabilities^e
• Accelerate media processing and game streaming in the cloud. The Intel® oneAPI Video Processing Library (oneVPL) enables hardware AV1 encoding and decoding, and Deep Link Hyper Encode, which provides fast transcoding when leveraging multiple Intel accelerators on one platform.
• Streamline compute-intensive tasks. with the profiler Intel® VTune™ Profiler, developers can identify the most time-consuming elements of CPU and GPU code, visualize thread behaviors to quickly find concurrency issues, and more.
• Integrate AI and machine learning into games. Intel® Game Dev AI Toolkit offers a spectrum of AI-powered capabilities, from immersive world creation to game-style streaming real-time visualizations.
• You will find more resources at Intel® Game Dev Program and in Intel® Create.

For more information, check all our news in the following link.