Recently, Raja Koduri, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group at Intel Corporation, was interviewed by the Chinese media regarding the upcoming ARC Alchemist lineupGPUs.
The information which came from the Chinese media suggests that the GPUs will include custom variants from AIBs such as ASUS, GIGABYTE, & MSI. But this news was not mentioned by most outlets outside of the Chinese media sources and even Raja as well as Intel had not given names of any specific AIBs.
While Raja Koduri commented on participation from AIBs, the exact partners (ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte) named by Chinese sources are speculation from their sources and not information that comes directly from Intel or Raja.
Coming to the interview report, Raja revealed that the three companies are to be in the development of custom Intel Arc Alchemist-powered GPUs. However, we have no idea as to whether this is about design launches or if these are to be custom options manufactured by the three companies.
Currently, there are OEM factories including ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and others that will launch Intel Arc discrete graphics cards, hoping to develop more business opportunities together in the discrete graphics technology and graphics card market.
According to Chinese media outlets who first reported this news, ASUS and MSI are in talks with Intel about the Arc Alchemist project. GIGABYTE, on the other hand, has not completely divulged the possibility of working with Intel.
As we know, recently, ASUS has released a variant of the Iris Xe (DG1) architecture which utilizes a “single-slot passive design,” placing them in collaboration with Intel Xe GPU structures. MSI has also recently been in a meeting with Intel regarding their DG2 GPU architectures.
In the interview with ASCII, one of the Japanese media channels, Raja Koduri stated that “there should be differentiation among ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) when it comes to Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs.”
This could very well mean that we can see either complete customs utilizing the new Intel Arc Alchemist GPU designs or possibly pseudo-customized devices utilizing Intel’s referenced designs.