Leaked Intel Arc Alchemist Card With Dual Fan Shroud Smiles For The Camera
Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist GPUs is easily one of the most-covered series of pre-release products in the history of HotHardware. We've talked about the scavenger hunt, speculated on release dates, admired illicit photos, remarked on the marketing, and perused many leaked benchmarks. Heck, we posted one of the latter just a bit earlier today. We even interviewed Intel execs regarding the company's discrete GPU plans in late 2018.
Alchemist is coming for both laptops and desktops, but as usual, it's the desktop parts that arouse the most excitement from enthusiast and gamers. That's why we were pretty interested to peek at these new photos of a pre-release Arc Alchemist graphics card, which you can peruse below.
The new images, of which there are a couple more over at the leakers' site, pretty much match up with the render based on the earlier photos leaked by YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead. The dual-fan cooler's shroud is black instead of silver, but that might just be because of this card's intended duty as an engineering sample.
On the back of the card we can also observe that there are eight landings for DRAM packages, although we have no idea how many there are fitted to the card. Presuming that this is the flagship Alchemist GPU, we're looking at 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Unlike the first Alchemist card leaks, the board on this model is relatively short, while the cooler extends well beyond the end of the PCB. Perhaps we'll see some enterprising card creator sell an Alchemist Nano model if this shorter PCB is an indicator.
Aside from a few features—like the jumpers on the back of the card—this board design looks more or less ready for market, which may indicate that we'll see Alchemist this quarter after all. Let's not get our hopes up, though; there's still no word from Intel beyond that the first Alchemist GPUs will ship in Q1 of this year. Considering the content of the blue team's CES 2022 presentation, that probably means laptops first, so if you're holding out hope for an Alchemist desktop GPU, you might be in for a bit of a wait.
