Intel Arc Alchemist may let you overclock virtually for free

Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards continue to surprise us in many ways prior to their actual release. This time, a new teaser from an interview with Intel fellow Tom Petersen reveals some more information about the GPUs, including their overclocking capabilities.

According to Petersen, Intel Arc might be unexpectedly good at overclocking and striking the right balance between performance and power consumption — so much so that a massive overclock was achieved at almost no extra energy cost.

Intel Arc Graphics: Ask Us Anything With Tom TAP Petersen!

Despite the various shortcomings of Intel Arc, be it the delays or the fact that the GPUs are chiefly optimized for DirectX 12 and Vulkan only, the promotion and communication have definitely been on point lately, and Intel has been transparent about the performance of these graphics cards. To that end, Tom Petersen joined a Q&A session with HotHardware and answered many questions about Intel Arc.

The card’s overclocking powers were briefly discussed and the Arc A770 certainly managed to impress. The GPU went through some overclocking and undervolting in order to measure its performance in Hitman 3. The GPU’s regular clock speed maxes out at 2.1GHz, but this time, it was overclocked to 2.7GHz. That’s a noteworthy overclock that would certainly impact the performance.

Perhaps the more interesting fact is that during the 2.7GHz overclock, the card’s power consumption reached 228 watts, which is just 3 watts more than its regular maximum TBP. This proves that through a good combination of overclocking and undervolting, Intel Arc can deliver good results.

Intel Arc A770 and A750 specification sheet. — Intel/HotHardware

Intel has also shared new slides about the Arc Alchemist graphics cards, namely the Limited Edition versions, which are Intel’s own design. The Arc A770 and Arc A750 both house the same ACM-G10 GPU, but the A770 has the full 32 Xe-Cores and 16GB of memory, although it can also come in an 8GB flavor. Despite that, both graphics cards have the same 225-watt TBP.

The middle-of-the-pack Arc A580 comes with 24 Xe-Cores and 8GB of memory; Petersen has now also confirmed that it will have a TBP of 175 watts. We don’t know much about the Arc A310 and the Arc A350, both rumored to be part of the lineup. The Arc A380 has already seen a limited release, so perhaps a global launch will soon follow alongside the better models.

Petersen addressed many questions, but he was still not ready to talk about a possible release date of Intel Arc. It’s possible that Intel might mention them during its Intel Innovation event on September 27, although that would give the GPUs very little chance to shine — the company is also set to reveal Raptor Lake CPUs on that date, and AMD will be launching its Ryzen 7000 processors.