Intel could flood retailers with up to eight different Arc graphics cards

The rumour mills are spinning up about Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs, with regular hardware leaker Komachi suggesting that there are eight different graphics cards destined to hit our machines. Well, seven different GPUs, with the A770 supposedly available in both 8GB and 16GB trim. That's more cards than we were expecting, especially as just a single card could make a difference in these still silicon starved times. 

The tweet from Komachi (via Videocardz) doesn't go into much detail, other than outing the different memory versions of the A770. There are ticks next to all the cards apart from the 78, which lines up with the A780, and is assumed to be the flagship model that Intel will launch the line with.

There's no official launch date for Arc Alchemist, although it has said that it will launch the Limited Edition card this summer. The mobile versions of the GPUs should be with laptop manufacturers already, and we should see how they fair soon. 

Very little is confirmed when it comes to the specs of the desktop GPUs, beyond knowing that the high-end cards should be able to lay claim to the full 32 Xe Cores, although how this trickles down to the rest of the family takes some guesswork. The A350 for instance hasn't been mentioned in a long time, although this far down the stack, that's expected to be a budget offering anyway.

I'll admit that at this point in the year I was expecting (ok, hoping) to be looking at early review samples of Intel's much-anticipated graphics cards, but here we are, still eyeing up rumours. It's always been the case that Intel needs to get its drivers right before releasing the cards, otherwise they'll be torn apart by reviewers and gamers alike.

In other Alchemist news, an A770 has appeared on a benchmark site (via Videocardz). Sporting a newer driver than what's available right now. The benchmark on Puget Systems shouldn't be seen as confirmation of much really. The actual performance score isn't particularly useful, as PugetBench isn't a GPU benchmark, and given it's paired up with a Core i5 9600K, it's more than likely just a validation sample of some form. 

Still, here's hoping Intel is getting all its metaphorical ducks in line to make this a big release. The clock is ticking though, and with AMD and Nvidia gearing up for their own next-gen GPUs, and supply of current-gen GPUs going up, and prices coming down, the last thing Intel needs is to be a whole generation behind the competition when it launches Arc Alchemist.