If there was ever a time for a new player to start shipping decent graphics cards, it’s now. The wait for Intel to join the party has been long, but we’re finally nearly there. The company’s Arc Alchemist was due to land this quarter, and now ‘leaked’ benchmarks have appeared with good news. The top card uses the DG2-512 die, with 512 execution units (comparable to 4,096 Stream processors), and 32 ray-tracing units.
Run against a $600 GeForce 3070 Ti, the Alchemist holds its own. We don’t know the clock rates yet, but there’s always room for tweaking. The hardware is good, what about production capacity? We’re going to need a lot of them. –CL