Right now it looks like the low end of gaming graphics cards are in the $ 300 suggested retail price space, although the reality is that manufacturers are moving it to 400. And yes, we don’t. We haven’t forgotten the ravages of mining in the gaming graphics hardware market.
The reality is that there is an even lower range, where a large chunk of gamers are buying graphics cards at a much lower price, and AMD and NVIDIA have left out. It is in this sector that Intel saw a gap to place one of the versions of its Intel ARC Alchemist, formerly known as Intel Xe-HPG. The results ? AMD and NVIDIA have started working on releasing discontinued low-end versions of their RTX 30 and RX 6000. Well, we finally have the specs for the Intel DG2-128.
Intel DG2-128 specifications
It’s not news that Intel had two chips in development under its Xe-HPG or DG2 architecture, recently renamed ARC Alchemist, and the larger and more powerful of the two whose specs we already knew, but of the model with lower specs, the Intel DG-128, we had little information.
The specifications disclosed speak of 128 EU, we have to remember that Intel recently renamed these units to vector motors, and 16 of them are bundled into something called an Xe Core, so we have 8 units in total, that would equate to one compute unit or one SM each in the GPUs of AMD and NVIDIA respectively.
Graphics power? Well given that this is an entry-level GPU that’s rumored to sell for less than $ 175, we can’t expect anything high-end. What we know is that it will be more efficient than the GTX 1650 SUPER, all in a TDP less than 75 W, a clock speed between 2.2 and 2.5 GHz and parameters 4 GB for laptops, making use of a 64-bit bus and memory 14 Gbps GDDR6.
On desktops, it will have higher bandwidth because it is 96 bits, which will allow you to place 6 GB GDDR6 at 16 Gbps. These characteristics give it the shape of a mini-ITX card, and its design is in part reminiscent of the DG1s that Intel did not officially launch on the market, but which were distributed as a development platform.
Is this the Meteor Lake iGPU?
A few days ago, Intel announced that it was already manufacturing Meteor Lake, its future CPU made up of 3 different chips, which are, on the one hand, the Compute Tile which includes the CPU and the Northbridge, the SoC LP where the I / The interfaces O are. and finally the GPU Die. We have learned that this processor will include parts from Intel and TSMC.
Well, the two GPUs with ARC Alchemist architecture and therefore the DG-128 as well as the DG-512 will be manufactured by TSMC. This means that Meteor Lake’s integrated GPU could be the DG-128, which would make perfect sense in the world given that the DG2-128 by its specs appears to be designed to replace the current DG1 used under the Iris Xe Max brand in laptops. .