Intel Announces New Line of Ray-Tracing GPUs

Intel has recently announced on SIGGRAPH 2022, their new Arc Pro A-series professional GPUs for mobile form factors and small desktops.

The first product in the series—Intel Arc Pro A30M GPU is for laptops and supports built-in ray tracing hardware competing with Nvidia and AMD. It claims to be the industry's first AV1 hardware encoding acceleration including learning.

“Intel Arc Pro A-series graphics are targeting certifications with leading professional software applications within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), and design and manufacturing (D&M) industries,” says Intel.

The Intel Arc Pro GPUs are optimised to run open source libraries like oneAPI Rendering Toolkit that is used and adopted by industry-leading rendering tools. 

With plans to launch later in 2022, the GPUs Arc Pro A40 and A50 will be available with 4.8 teraflops of graphical power, eight ray-tracing cores, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory. Both the graphics card have dual-slot designs which are suitable for multi display setup supporting two monitors upto 8K 60Hz, one at 5K 240Hz, two at 5K 120Hz, or four at 4K 60Hz.

With support for gaming, Intel is targeting these GPUs for creator applications like Blender, Handbrake, DaVinci Resolve Studio along with engineering, construction and architectural manufacturing. 

The multicore chips will support learning capabilities and faster rendering speed, allowing GPUs to show great potential for developing on frameworks like Gigapixel AI and competing in the workstation market.