Reporting by XinZhiyuan
EDIT: LRS
Intel stopped 24 years of discrete graphics recovery update! The lowest-end series of Ruixuan A series mobile graphics cards released this time has been launched, but the first batch of notebooks is not for the Chinese market, and high-end models may have to wait until the summer.
Intel's high-performance graphics, which was once seen as the "savior" when graphics prices soared, has finally arrived!
On March 30, Intel officially released the Sharp ARC mobile discrete graphics, code-named Alchemy Alchemist.
The Savior has come, but not quite yet.
The majority of players have waited so long to get a mobile graphics card? Say good kick Nvidia, punch AMD?
Although Intel launched a DG1 graphics card last year, the performance is only similar to the graphics card of ten years ago, and it is mainly for the server market, so it has not made much waves.
The last discrete graphics Intel launched for consumers was the i740 in 1998, and it has been focusing on integrated graphics ever since. Twenty-four years later, when Intel once again opened the unique display research and development, everyone is looking forward to its performance.
Let's take a look at the products, this time Intel mainly released the A series graphics cards launched for mobile terminals, including three models, Arc (Arc) 3/5/7, corresponding to low-, medium-to-high-end products.
Like core CPUs, Arc 3 is for "mainstream gaming," Arc 5 for "performance games," and Arc 7 for "hardcore performance games."
The specific models of Arc mobile display announced this time mainly include 5 models: A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, A770M, which have differences in the number of Xe cores, frequency, number of optical chasing units, memory capacity and bit width, and graphics card power consumption.
Ruixuan graphics cards support XeSS hypersampling, full AV1 hardware acceleration, Smooth Sync jitter filtering, deep Link technology, and cover gaming, creative design, power control and other scenarios.
The first Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro with Arc 3 discrete graphics is already available, but it is not for the Chinese market. It is expected that starting from the second quarter of this year, china will see notebook products that use Arc alone.
Other brands including Acer, Asus, Dell, Haier, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, Intel NUC and other brands have also already planned to launch Sharp-ray unique notebooks.
One exception is that the 12th-generation Core's U-series processors do not carry Sharp graphics cards, but only with the higher TDP Alder Lake-H and Alder Lake-P. Intel's explanation is that the thin and light cost of the U-series low-voltage processor has a limited power margin, but it may also be related to the I/O limit of the low-voltage processor.
Only Ac3 series graphics cards are available this time, and the Arc 5/7 may not be available until the summer.
Intel has also confirmed that intel graphics can be paired with AMD CPUs in the future.
As for when to enter the desktop computer market, Intel expert Tom Peterson said that this problem depends more on the planning of OEM and ODM, and it is not difficult to achieve from a technical point of view.
Is it a mule or a horse?
On the basic unit of gpu, Intel abandoned the eu (execution unit) of the past kernel display, and instead introduced a new unit of counting: the Xe core, which mainly includes the arithmetic unit, cache, load/store logic unit. The arithmetic unit section contains a general vector engine, as well as an AI engine that accelerates convolutional and matrix operations.
In the Xe-HPG architecture of Arc graphics cards, Render Slice is the basic module, each Slice contains 4 Xe cores, 4 optical tracing units, 4 samplers, geometry engine, raster engine, HiZ engine, and 2 pixel back-end components, supporting DXR and Vulkan light tracing, as well as some hardware units for directX 12 Ultimate graphics technology such as mesh shading and sampler feedback. Intel claims that the Xe-HPG architecture has 1.5 times better performance per watt than the previous Xe-LP architecture.
In terms of graphics and AI units, Intel has made a big deal out of it. Each Xe core is equipped with 16 Vector Engines (XVE) + 16 Matrix Engines (XMX). Among them, XVE is mainly responsible for traditional graphics operations, providing FP32 with 16 ops/clock, FP16 with 32 ops/clock, and 64 ops/clock INT8 computing power, while XMX is mainly to enhance AI performance, ANDT8 has a computing power of 256 ops/clock, which can be used to accelerate super-resolution algorithms such as XeSS in games.
Between XVE and XMX, they also added 192KB of local memory, which can be dynamically allocated between L1 cache and SLM (shared local memory) according to the needs of the workload, and in order to effectively improve execution performance and computing power, Xe-HPG can simultaneously schedule and execute floating-point FP, integer INT and XMX instructions, and parallel the two engines and shared resources in lockstep form.
As for which of Intel's XeSS and Nvidia's DLSS performance is better, because there is no universal super-resolution benchmark yet, it is difficult to say, but in Intel's demonstration effect, XeSS is still quite good.
The first 14 games will support XeSS, with Intel planning to add more in the coming months.
The Xe-HPG architecture is partially enhanced based on the Xe-LP architecture in the Xe media engine for video hardcoding and decoding. Hardware codecs in VP9, AVC, HEVC and AV1 formats are currently supported, up to 8K60 12-bit HDR hard decoding, and 8K 10-bit HDR hard-coded.
Among them, AV1 hardware encoding is the first provided by Intel, this video format has a better compression ratio and picture quality, the efficiency is 50% higher than the common H.264 format, even compared to HEVC is also 20% higher, more suitable as the future Internet ultra-high-definition video propagation format, and AV1 format is open source without license fees, the current HandBrake, Adobe Premiere Pro and FFMPEG and other well-known software have supported Intel AV1 hardware coding capabilities.
Xe-HPG architecture with 4 display channels, support HDMI 2.0b, DisplaysPort 1.4a and 2.0 10G Ready, support output up to 2 8K60 HDR, or 4 4K120 HDR, while 2K and 1080p can reach 360Hz, and support Adaptive Sync, Speed Sync and Smooth Sync three display synchronization technologies.
In addition to graphics independent combat, Intel also agrees that GPUs should be coordinated with CPUs, "CG collocation, work is not tired", such as AMD launched SAM on this road, can give full play to the advantages of its own platform.
Arc Solo can be paired with 12th Generation Core and its core to optimize efficiency or work together to get something done. These technologies are collectively referred to as Deep Link. Intel mainly lists the three characteristics of Deep Link's dynamic power sharing, super coding, and super computing power.
Dynamic power sharing refers to the mechanism that enables power to be dynamically distributed when either side of the CPU or GPU needs power more. In the system is under high load, such as the game scene, in order to speed up the response to load changes, the system will dynamically adjust the power ratio at a minimum interval of 100 milliseconds; in the light load scenario, when there is no need for rapid response, the time window will become larger to achieve energy saving.
Super encoding is to hand over the media encoding work to the Arc solo display and the Core processor's Xe core display to complete the collaborative work.
Super computing power is in some applications at the same time combined with the nuclear display and unique display of computing power, such as video noise reduction, super resolution and other tasks that can be parallel, according to the video frame after splitting can be reasonably assigned to different hashing modules, this distribution process mainly considers the load latency sensitivity, throughput, performance requirements, power consumption and other factors.
How about real-world gaming performance?
Intel took out the A370M frame rate test on a large number of games, and in the case of medium quality in 1080p, medium and large games such as Killer 3, Doom: Eternal, Destiny 2, and The Witcher 3 ran to 60 frames without any problems.
For esports games such as Fortnite, Rocket League, Intrepid Covenant, etc., the A370M can even run to frame 90-115 with the Core i7-12700H, which is enough!
The results of the game performance test are about the same as NVIDIA's desktop graphics card GTX 1050, but the frame rate of the game does not reflect the performance of the graphics card completely, such as the details of the settings, the choice of game scenes, cpu and memory matching will affect the actual frame rate.
However, the performance is definitely much stronger than intel's own integrated graphics.
The entry of Intel graphics has officially entered the "Three Kingdoms Era" for the graphics card market, and the three factories of red, yellow and blue have been in the war.
But at present, Intel's graphics performance can not yet compete with Nvidia, AMD's high-end graphics cards, so whether it can affect the price of graphics cards and let consumers buy cheaper graphics cards is still unknown.
One more entrant, for consumers, is ultimately one more choice.
Resources:
https://www.techadvisor.com/news/pc-components/intel-arc-gpu-3807569/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-debuts-arc-gpu-lineup-for-laptops/
https://www.expreview.com/82842.html