Intel showcased Arc, a brand new mobile GPU developed in-house

Intel's latest venture in the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) department hopes to shake off the duopoly of Nvidia GeForce and AMD Radeon.

After years of circulated rumours about an in-house Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Intel has finally dropped the curtain with the official launch of Arc. Being the latest player in the GPU field, it shows that Intel is serious about shaking off the current duopoly held by Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon.

Photo: Intel Newsroom

Currently aimed at laptops, Intel's A-series mobile GPU (codenamed Alchemist) is built on an all-new microarchitecture built from the ground up called Xe High Performance Graphics (HPG). It features Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engine with Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) AI-accelerated upscaling technology, Xe Media Engine that supports AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding, and Deep Link with Hyper Encode and Hyper Compute technologies for seamless integration with Intel CPUs. Intel has been collaborating with various gaming studios and content creator software developers to unlock the full potential of Arc.

Photo: Intel Newsroom

Photo: Intel Newsroom

Photo: Intel Newsroom

Photo: Intel Newsroom

Intel offers three variants of Arc to choose from. The base Arc 3 aims for enhanced gaming with six or eight Xe cores and 4GB GDDR6 memory. The Arc 5 offers advanced gaming with 16 Xe cores and 8GB GDDR6 memory, while the top-end Arc 7 goes all-out on high-performance gaming with the choice of 24 or 32 Xe cores and 12GB or 16GB GDDR6 memory.

You can now buy laptops with the Arc 3 variant in the shape of Samsung's recently announced Galaxy Book2 Pro. Laptops with Arc 5 and Arc 7 variants will be available in early Summer 2022. Expect to see brand new laptops with Alchemist mobile GPU selling for as low as $899.

Are you interested in Intel's in-house mobile GPU? Would you like to see this coming to Intel NUC SFF PC? Let us know in the comment section down below.