Intel announced professional graphics cards Arc Pro A40, A50 and mobile chip Arc Pro A30M
Intel announced professional graphics chips: Arc Pro A30M for mobile systems, as well as Arc Pro A40 and Arc Pro A50 for desktop computers.
All announced GPUs feature built-in ray tracing hardware, machine learning capabilities, and industry-first AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding. Google’s free, open-source alternative to HEVC, AV1 hasn’t gained much popularity on the Internet yet, despite the promise of Netflix and YouTube, and is mostly used in Google Duo video calls, despite its superior compression quality to HEVC. However, it has always been very slow to code, so a good hardware accelerator and Intel support could boost its popularity.
According to Intel, the Arc Pro A-series graphics cards are certified for professional architecture, design and construction, and design and manufacturing software. They can also be used to run Blender-like applications and open-source libraries in the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit, which are “widely distributed and integrated into leading rendering tools.”
Intel’s professional graphics cards should go on sale “later this year.” It will be really interesting to see how Intel Arc Pro can compete with AMD Radeon Pro and NVIDIA RTX A.