Intel made a notable entry into the low-to-midrange discrete GPU market this year with its A750 and A770 cards, but don’t expect the company to start challenging the RTX 4090 or Radeon RX 7900. Wattage, anytime instantly. According to Raja Koduri, head of Intel Graphics, the company is squarely committed to extracting as much performance as possible from its 200-225W power limit (often with a single power connector). , hopefully enough to compete with the best graphics cards.
priority
“My priority at the moment is to get that core audience with a single power connector,” said Raja Koduri, head of Intel Graphics. Gadget 360, an Indian tech site. “And it can go up to 200W to 225W. And if you nail something a little above and below it, it’ll all be in the sweet spot.”
With companies like AMD and Nvidia tending to squeeze all the performance out of their GPUs, modern high-end graphics cards consume an incredible amount of power. This naturally drives the price of these advanced graphics cards to levels inaccessible to many gamers. However, having just released its first mainstream discrete GPUs this year, Intel is clearly focusing more on power efficiency and affordability than speed. Raja believes that many consumers want something that is affordable and doesn’t require a large power supply or a lot of cooling equipment.
The company’s recently released Arc A750 and A770 cards range in price from $289 to $349 and both fall between the more expensive RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti on the GPU benchmark tier. Intel’s cards are already in the 200-225W power range, and while it’s worth it, there are still two power connectors that Nvidia could have on his one on some cards.
possibility
Currently, the plan to build a high-end graphics board that consumes around 200W may sound like an unattainable dream given the standards of today’s gaming-grade graphics cards (maximum performance at any cost). However, you should probably consider starting with the GPU architecture. perspective. After all, Raja Koduri is his GPU architect, not the engineer who implements these graphics processors in silicon or another engineer who works out how to build graphics cards to get the most out of the GPU. .
Building a discrete GPU architecture that delivers decent performance at, say, 4K resolution with a power envelope of around 200W is an achievement in itself. Nvidia and AMD cards that play smoothly at 4K use a lot of power. Building a GPU with a set power envelope is another challenge, and success is an undisputed achievement.
sweet spot
If this sweet spot architecture scales both up and down from a power standpoint, it is possible to build something significantly more powerful or less power hungry. In the former case, Intel will be competing with powerful GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. Whether such an architecture is part of the published Intel Arc roadmap remains to be seen, but at least Raja Koduri has stated such a goal.
Catering to mass-market buyers is probably Intel’s course of action for Arc discrete GPUs at this point, as the company has just entered the standalone GPU market and needs to capture market share. To that end, our main goals at the moment (probably) are GPUs that offer good performance in notebooks (Intel has the undisputed lead on the CPU side) and low-power mainstream It’s about creating desktops for gamers. I don’t tend to spend $1000 per graphics card. However, this is a business goal.
Battlemage
Meanwhile, Koduri has expressed confidence in Intel’s Arc roadmap in general, and in particular the company’s next-generation standalone GPU, codenamed Battlemage, due in 2023. “The level of interest is very high,” said Intel’s graphics and accelerated computing boss. “When [we’re working on] We can get more partners in India and do bulk shipments at good prices. Therefore, we expect to see more Arcs in 2023 and more variations of Arcs. ”
