Intel Sneakily Reveals Specs for a Mysterious Desktop GPU

Intel released a flurry of announcements recently about its new Arc graphics platform. In addition to launching mobile chips and teasing a desktop card, the company also showed off some new software. While demoing said software, the company revealed what may be the specs of an unannounced desktop GPU.

The reveal was included in a tutorial for Intel Arc Control, which is software for its new mobile and desktop GPUs. At one point in the video a performance monitoring screen appears on-screen then disappears. In that half second, it revealed several interesting specs about whatever GPU it was monitoring. The reason we know it wasn’t a mobile GPU or low-end part is the power consumption is listed as 175W. Nothing Intel has released, or talked about so far, has that kind of power draw. In its official mobile launch this week, the flagship Arc 7 A770M mobile GPU is listed as requiring 120-150W. Even more curious is the screen displaying this was only visible for a fraction of a second. Intel clearly put it in there as an easter egg, and 3DCenter was the first to notice it.

In addition to the power consumption, we can also glean several details about this mystery GPU. For context on those power numbers, this card seems to be equivalent to an RTX 3060, which has a 170W TDP. The Radeon RX 6600 XT is in this class too, with a 160W TBP (Total Board Power). It’s important to keep in mind that different companies express this metric differently, so it’s not always an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s also not clear how Intel is measuring this power consumption. Still, it clearly shows the GPU is at 99.16 percent utilization, so this seems like peak power draw. That means this is likely a midrange card.

We can also see its GPU clock speed is 2,250MHz, which is similar to the boost clocks on AMD’s 6000-series GPUs and a bit higher than Nvidia’s Ampere. That might change with AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen however, as rumors point to both companies raising clocks a bit. This is important as Intel will be facing down RDNA3 and Ada Lovelace GPUs after it releases its GPUs, even if it beats them to market. We also see the memory clock listed as 1,093MHz, which means it’s roughly 17.5Gb/s according to Videocardz.

Though all these specs seem to hint at a moderately powerful GPU, we also see the GPU is running at 80C as well. That’s a bit warm, though not incredibly so. Though temperatures can vary wildly according to the cooling solution in question, modern GPUs usually hover in the 70s or so at full load. Although Intel has shown off what appears to be a dual-slot card with twin fans, it doesn’t appear to be able to keep the card chilly. That’s even more surprising given that seems like a midrange GPU.

This is a big deal as so far Intel has been tight-lipped on what’s in store for its high-performance GPUs. Though we’ve been aware of the general specs based on rumors, this is the first time we’ve seen any specs from Intel itself, so it’s noteworthy. For all the folks that might think this is just a mistake on Intel’s part, that seems highly unlikely. It’s been planning this launch for years and we’re sure anything released to the press is highly scrutinized. That said, we’ll know more soon as Intel also teased a desktop GPU in its mobile launch. Sadly the only information it shared was that it was a “limited edition” coming in “Summer 2022.”

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