Notebooks and Ultrabooks with Intel’s newest Arc Alchemist A-series GPUs have finally hit the market, but costs are shockingly exorbitant. The first two notebooks to arrive at Best Buy are from Asus and HP and are equipped with Intel’s entry-level A370M GPU. The Asus model, on the other hand, starts at $1400, while the HP model costs an astronomical $2000.
The $1400 Ultrabook is Asus’ Zenbook Flip 2-in-1 gadget, which comes with an Intel Core i7-12700H 12-core processor, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, and a 1TB SSD, and, of course, Intel’s A370M mobile GPU. The laptop has a 15.6-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 2880×1620 pixels and a 360-degree hinge that allows it to be used as a tablet.
HP is also selling a 2-in-1 tablet with the same A370M GPU for $2000. It’s called the Spectre, and it boasts a 12-core Core i7-1260P processor, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of solid-state storage. The Spectre is available in a 16-inch display with a higher resolution 8:5 aspect ratio of 3840×2400. This notebook, like the Zenbook, may be utilised as a tablet when necessary.
Both notebooks are based on Intel’s Evo platform, which means they have the most up-to-date networking features like WiFi 6 and Thunderbolt 4. Other features required by Evo include a 9-hour minimum battery life and fast wake-up from sleep.
Prices of laptops with ARC A370M GPUs are going astronomically high
For thin and light Evo devices, these astronomical prices are not uncommon. Prices sometimes soar when you enter that zone to compensate. This is especially true for 2-in-1 devices that require sophisticated engineering to be used as a laptop or a tablet by the user.
The fact that Intel’s Arc A370M is scarcely a fast GPU by today’s standards makes the $1400 and $2000 proposals much worse. According to AMD, the RX 6500M, the company’s entry-level graphics card, can be 27–114 per cent faster than the A370M.
The A370M is well behind any AMD or Nvidia midrange GPU, such as the RX 6600M or RTX 3060. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll see more affordable gaming laptops powered by Intel’s Arc GPUs, and the Arc 500- and 700-series chips will give decent performance.
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