According to sources close to Igor Wallossek from Igor's lab, Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist discrete graphics card lineup is in trouble. As the anonymous sources state, certain add-in board (AIB) partners are having difficulty adopting the third GPU manufacturer into their offerings. As we learn, AIBs are sitting on a pile of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. This pile is decreasing in price daily and losing value, so it needs to be moved quickly. Secondly, Intel is reportedly suggesting AIBs ship cards to OEMs and system integrators to start the market spread of the new Arc dGPUs. This business model is inherently lower margin compared to selling GPUs directly to consumers.

Last but not least, it is reported that at least one major AIB is stopping the production of custom Arc GPUs due to quality concerns. What this means is yet to be uncovered, and we have to wait and see which AIB (or AIBs) is stepping out of the game. All of this suggests that the new GPU lineup is on the verge of extinction, even before it has launched. However, we are sure that the market will adapt and make a case for the third GPU maker. Of course, these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt, and we await more information to confirm those issues.

The second company to launch an Intel Arc A380 graphics card is somewhat surprisingly, if already rumoured, ASRock. The card in question goes under the somewhat awkward name of Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC or A380 CLI 6GO for short. Unlike the Gunnir card, this is a rather compact, Mini-ITX friendly card that measures 190 x 124 x 39 mm and sports a single fan. Despite its diminutive size, it's still a dual slot card and ASRock outfitted it with a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, just as Gunnir did with its card.

The base frequency is somewhat higher at 2250 MHz vs. 2000 MHz for the Gunnir card, although ASRock doesn't mention the boost clock on its website. As the name implies, the card comes with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory with a rated data rate of either 15 or 15.5 Gbps, as both numbers are mentioned by ASRock, still on a 96-bit bus. The card has a single HDMI 2.0b port and three DisplayPort 2.0 ports with DSC. The card obviously has a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface as well. ASRock has implemented a 0dB mode where the fan stops spinning during low loads. According to Videocardz, the ASRock Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC is already on sale in the PRC for the equivalent of US$192.

Intel Graphics, with its latest Graphics Drivers 31.0.101.3222, changed the coverage of its latest driver updates. The company would be providing game optimizations and regular driver updates only for its Gen12 (Iris Xe), and Arc "Alchemist" graphics products. Support for Gen9, Gen9.5, and Gen11 iGPUs integrated with 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th generations of Intel processors, namely "Skylake," "Kaby Lake," "Coffee Lake," "Ice Lake," and "Cascade Lake," will be relegated to a separate, quarterly driver update cycle, which only covers critical updates and security vulnerabilities, but not game optimizations.

Intel's regular Graphics Driver cycle that includes Day-0 optimizations timed with new game releases, will only cover the Gen12 Xe iGPUs found in 11th Gen "Tiger Lake," "Rocket Lake," and 12th Gen "Alder Lake" processors; besides the DG1 Iris Xe graphics card; and Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs. Version 31.0.101.3222 appears to be a transitioning point, and so it has drivers from both branches included within a 1.1 GB package (the main branch supporting game optimizations for new GPUs, and the legacy branch for the older iGPUs). You can grab this driver from here.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, is announcing future Total IT Solutions for availability with Android Cloud Gaming and Media Processing & Delivery. These new solutions will incorporate the Intel Data Center GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound-M, and will be supported on several Supermicro servers. Supermicro solutions that will contain the Intel Data Center GPUs codenamed Arctic Sound-M, include the 4U 10x GPU server for transcoding and media delivery, the Supermicro BigTwin system with up to eight Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M in 2U for media processing applications, the Supermicro CloudDC server for edge AI inferencing, and the Supermicro 2U 2-Node server with three Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M per node, optimized for cloud gaming. Additional systems will be made available later this year.

"Supermicro will extend our media processing solutions by incorporating the Intel Data Center GPU," said Charles Liang, President, and CEO, Supermicro. "The new solutions will increase video stream rates and enable lower latency Android cloud gaming. As a result, Android cloud gaming performance and interactivity will increase dramatically with the Supermicro BigTwin systems, while media delivery and transcoding will show dramatic improvements with the new Intel Data Center GPUs. The solutions will expand our market-leading accelerated computing offerings, including everything from Media Processing & Delivery to Collaboration, and HPC."

ASRock has signed up as one of Intel's board partners for its Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, and is ready with its custom-design Arc A380 Challenger card, pictured below. The company joins the likes of China's Gunnir, in bringing to market some of the first graphics cards from the yet-elusive GPUs from Intel. The ASRock-branded custom A380 card surfaced on Chinese social-media site Bilibili, revealing a cost-effective design, with a simple aluminium mono-block fan-heatsink. The board draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, and like Gunnir's A380 card, has a spartan-looking PCB. There's still no word on global availability, and ASRock could stick to the China-first rollout of Arc.

Today, Lenovo unveiled a new ThinkCentre neo 50a 24 all-in-one (AIO) desktop with innovative AI-assisted features to address the needs of next generation Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). Lenovo is expanding its all-new ThinkCentre neo desktop portfolio announced earlier this year, designed to offer developing businesses high-performance future-ready desktop computing solutions for immersive work experiences. Powered by the latest 12th Gen Intel Core H-series processors with discrete Intel Arc A370M graphics and running Windows 11, the new AIO desktop incorporates AI-based technology including human presence detection, adaptive screen dimming, noise cancellation and AI Meeting Manager to name a few.

ThinkCentre neo 50a 24 offers a vivid TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light certified 23.8-inch Full-HD display with wide viewing angle, available with touch option, wrapped in a stylish and minimalist design for a contemporary look with the brands' terrazzo color and material finish. ThinkShield compliance with fTPM-based security, BIOS-level protection and port security enhances protection, and sustainability commitments are reinforced with the use of ocean-bound plastic in packaging and an eco-friendlier design using post-consumer recycled content and paint-free raw materials.

It's been a busy couple of days when it comes to Intel and its Arc graphics cards, as not only has the company showed off the Arc A770—which looks identical to the Arc A750—but the company has also refuted that it was ever planning to release an Arc A780 card, despite the existence of the A380 and supposedly an A580. A leak with price brackets and performance tiering has also leaked, which gives us a much better understanding of how Intel is planning on positioning its Arc graphics cards versus NVIDIA and AMD and it doesn't look like Intel is as confident as it sounded just a few months ago.

LinusTechTips got the honour to reveal the Arc A770 card, although there appear to be minuscule differences to the physical appearance between it and the Arc A750. The only thing noticeable is a 3-pin header, possibly for some kind of RGB syncing, next to the 8- and 6-pin power connectors, something not present on the A750 card that Gamers Nexus showed off earlier this week. The good news is that the Arc A770 seems to be running cool, as the card was reportedly only hitting 69 degrees C during some hands-on time, although this will apparently be covered in a separate video next week.

Intel has decided to share some more details on its upcoming Arc A750 graphics card, the one and same that appeared briefly in a Gamer Nexus video just the other day. The exact product being previewed is the Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics card, but the company didn't reveal any specifications of the card in the video it posted. What is revealed, is that the card will outperform a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 card at 1440p in the five titles that Intel provided performance indications and average frame rates for. The five games are F1 2021, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Borderlands 3 and Fortnite, so in other words, mostly quite demanding games with F1 2021 and Fortnite being the exceptions.

The only game we get any kind of insight into the actual performance of in the video, is Cyberpunk 2077, where Ryan Shrout details the game settings and the actual frame rate. At 2560 x 1440, using high settings, the Arc A750 delivers 60.79 FPS, with a low of 50.54 FPS and a max of 77.92 FPS. Intel claims this is 1.17 times the performance of an EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Gaming 12G graphics card. At least Intel didn't try to pull a fast one, as the company provided average frame rates for all the other games tested as well, not just how many times faster the Intel card was and you can see those results below. The test system consisted of an Intel Core i9-12900K fitted to an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero board, 32 GB of 4800 MHz DDR5 memory and a Corsair MP600 Pro XT 4 TB NVMe SSD, as well as Windows 11 Pro. According to the video, the Arc graphics cards should launch "this summer" and Intel will be releasing more details between now and the launch.

Remember that Limited Edition card that Intel was teasing at the end of March? Well, it turns out that it could very well be the Arc A750 card, at least based on a quick appearance of a card in Gamer Nexus' review of the Gunnir Arc A380 card. For a few seconds in the review video, Gamers Nexus was showing off a card that looked nigh on identical to the renders Intel showed back in March. There was no mention of any specs or anything else related, except that Gamer Nexus has tested the card and that it will presumably be getting its own video in the near future based on what was said in the video.

Based on leaked information, the Arc A750 GPU should feature 24 Xe cores, 3072 FP32 cores and it's expected to be paired with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus. For reference, the Arc A380 features eight Xe cores, 1024 FP32 cores and the cards ship with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 96-bit bus. In related news, Intel is said to be touring some gaming events in the US promoting its yet unavailable Arc graphics cards. LANFest Colorado is said to be the first stop, so if you're planning on attending, this could be your first chance to get some hands-on time with an Arc graphics card.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of TechPowerUp GPU-Z. Version 2.47.0 adds support for new GPUs and improves on several fronts. To begin with, it adds support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1630, RTX 3050 Laptop, MX570, A1000, A2000, A3000, and other pro-vis GPUs; on the AMD front, it can detect RX 6700 or "Radeon 6700" cards. Support is also added for Intel Core "Alder Lake-H," "Alder Lake-U," and "Alder Lake-HX" processors and their iGPUs.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.47.0 comes with many improvements to the detection of Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPUs. The fake GPU detection was expanded to cover knockoffs based on NVIDIA G98, GT200, and GK104. A workaround was added to fix broken clock-speed detection for AMD GPUs with some recent driver versions this year. Non-LHR reporting of the RTX 3080 12 GB has been fixed. You now have the ability to no longer resume logging on GPU-Z restart, by unchecking a checkbox. Grab GPU-Z from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.47.0The change-log follows.

The upcoming Intel Arc A550M & A770M mobile graphics cards have recently appeared on 3DMark in Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme. The Intel Arc Alchemist A550M features an ACM-G10 GPU with 16 Xe cores paired with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus while the A770M features the same GPU but with 32 Xe cores and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus.

The A550M was tested in 3DMark Time Spy where it scored 6017 points running on an older 1726 driver with Intel Advanced Performance Optimizations (APO) enabled. The A770M was benchmarked with 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme where it scored a respectable 13244 points in graphics running on test drivers which places it near the RTX 3070M. This score does not correlate to real-world gaming performance with figures provided directly by Intel showing the Arc A730M only being 12% faster than the RTX 3060M.

Intel is preparing to enter the professional visualization graphics card market with its upcoming Arc Pro series. This would put it in competition with graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD, such as the Radeon Pro W-series, and RTX A-series. At least two SKUs have been confirmed in SiSoft SANDRA screenshots, the Arc Pro A40, and Arc Pro A50. Both appear to be based on the smaller 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon that physically features 1,024 unified shaders across 128 execution units (EU), or 8 Xe Cores, and up to 6 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 96-bit wide bus.

Intel could take a swing at entry-level pro-vis solutions from AMD and NVIDIA, such as the Radeon Pro W6400, Pro W6500M, NVIDIA RTX A2000, etc. There could be a design focus on multiple display connectivity options, as the cards could be targeted at commercial environments where workstations feature multiple high-resolution displays. The company could also develop mobile variants of these SKUs for mobile workstations. Intel could extensively advertise the media-acceleration and AI capabilities of the Xe-HPG architecture, including hardware-accelerated AV1 encode, and AI neural-net building, training, and inference acceleration. Another key differentiator for these cards could be validation by leading content-creation software vendors; and an elevated support level by Intel.

According to fresh benchmark numbers from someone on bilibili, Intel's Arc A380 cards perform even worse when paired with an AMD CPU compared to when paired with an Intel CPU. The card was tested using an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 on an ASUS TUF B550M motherboard paired with 16 GB of DDR4 3600 MHz memory. The Intel system it was tested against consisted of a Core i5-12400 on an ASUS TUF B660M motherboard with the same type of memory. Both test systems had resizable BAR support set to auto and above 4G decoding enabled. Windows 11 21H2 was also installed on both systems.

In every single game out of the 10 games tested, except League of Legends, the AMD system was behind the Intel system by anything from a mere one percent to as much as 15 percent. The worst performance disadvantage was in Forza Horizon 5 and Total War Three Kingdoms, both were 14 to 15 percent behind. The games that were tested, in order of the graph below are: League of Legends, Dota 2, Rainbow 6 Extraction, Watch Dogs Legions, Far Cry 6, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Total War Three Kingdoms, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, CS:GO and Forza Horizon 5. For comparison, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 was also used, but only tested on the Intel based system and the Arc A380 only beat it on Total War Three Kingdoms, albeit by a seven percent margin. It appears Intel has a lot of work to do when it comes to its drivers, but at last right now, mixing Intel Arc graphics cards and AMD processors seems to be a bad idea.

Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics cards launched in laptop/mobile space, and everyone is wondering just how well the first generation of discrete graphics performs in actual, GPU-accelerated workloads. Tellusim Technologies, a software company located in San Diego, has managed to get ahold of a laptop featuring an Intel Arc A370M mobile graphics card and benchmark it against other competing solutions. Instead of using Vulkan API, the team decided to use D3D12 API for tests, as the Vulkan usually produces lower results on the new 12th generation graphics. With the 30.0.101.1736 driver version, this GPU was mainly tested in the standard GPU working environment like triangles and batches. Meshlet size is set to 69/169, and the job is as big as 262K Meshlets. The total amount of geometry is 20 million vertices and 40 million triangles per frame.

Using the tests such as Single DIP (drawing 81 instances with u32 indices without going to Meshlet level), Mesh Indexing (Mesh Shader emulation), MDI/ICB (Multi-Draw Indirect or Indirect Command Buffer), Mesh Shader (Mesh Shaders rendering mode) and Compute Shader (Compute Shader rasterization), the Arc GPU produced some exciting numbers, measured in millions or billions of triangles. Below, you can see the results of these tests.

Intel's Arc A380 desktop graphics card is generally available in China, and real-world gaming benchmarks of the cards by independent media paint a vastly different picture than what we've been led on by synthetic benchmarks. The entry-mainstream graphics card, being sold under the equivalent of $160 in China, is shown beating the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 in 3DMark Port Royal and Time Spy benchmarks by a significant margin. The gaming results see it lose to even the RX 6400 in each of the six games tested by the source.

The tests in the graph below are in the order: League of Legends, PUBG, GTA V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2. We see that in the first three tests that are based on DirectX 11, the A380 is 22 to 26 percent slower than an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, and Radeon RX 6400. The gap narrows in DirectX 12 titles SoTR and Forza 5, where it's within 10% slower than the two cards. The card's best showing, is in the Vulkan-powered RDR 2, where it's 7% slower than the GTX 1650, and 9% behind the RX 6400. The RX 6500 XT would perform in a different league. With these numbers, and given that GPU prices are cooling down in the wake of the cryptocalypse 2022, we're not entirely sure what Intel is trying to sell at $160.

One of the biggest dividends of the Arc discrete graphics lineup for Intel is getting to use its own GPUs in its NUC desktops. The next-generation NUC 12 "Serpent Canyon" desktop sees the 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" quad-core + RTX 2060 "Turing" combination replaced by advanced 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" 6P+8E processor, and the Arc "Alchemist" A770M discrete GPU. Intel's choice of mobile versions of "Alchemist" and "Alder Lake" may have to do with not just lower TDP, but possibly also an implementation of the Intel Deep Link feature.

The A770M maxes out the 6 nm ACM-G11 silicon, packing 32 Xe Cores (512 execution units, or 4,096 unified shaders), and has 16 GB of 256-bit GDDR6 memory. When paired with the 14-core "Alder Lake-H" processor, the duo could make for a formidable performance-gaming and creator machine. "Serpent Canyon" also sees the integration of Thunderbolt 4, SDXC UHS-II, Wi-Fi 6E, and 2.5 GbE interfaces, along with a number of USB 3.2 ports. Although its marketing images are leaked to the web on Chinese social media, there's no release date for the thing yet, but it could be just around the corner.

Intel has recently published a document outlining the requirements for Arc GPU support on desktop including the supported platforms. The guide states that supported processors are limited to 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake", 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake", and 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" with Resizable BAR support enabled on the motherboard. The document also notes that other platforms supporting Resizable BAR / Smart Access Memory may work with Intel Arc graphics cards indicating potential unofficial support for AMD platforms also. Intel has also specified that only Windows 10/11 is supported and installations must be using the GPT partition type. The page contains instructions to enable Resizable BAR support and switch to a GPT partition but no information is provided as to whether the cards will work without this functionality.

The GUNNING A380 Photon OC appears to be the first custom variant of the recently released Intel Arc A380 graphics card. The card features an upgraded dual-fan cooling solution and aluminium block heatsink along with a single 8-pin power connector. The card is equipped with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 15.5 Gbps which is a slight downgrade from the reference that runs at 16 Gbps. The performance should however be higher than the reference model with an increased maximum clock speed of 2450 MHz and a 92 W power draw. The A380 Photon includes four display outputs with 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI 2.0 and will be available as part of pre-built systems initially. The company also teased an upcoming flagship Arc graphics fan with a triple-fan cooling setup that could possibly be based on the A770 or A780.

Intel officially launched the Arc A380 "Alchemist" entry-mainstream desktop graphics card in China, priced at RMB ¥1,030, including VAT, which roughly converts to USD $153. The Arc A380 "Alchemist" is based on the Xe-HPG graphics architecture, and the smaller DG2-128 (ACM-G11) silicon, which is built on the TSMC N6 (6 nm) silicon fabrication process.

The A380 desktop GPU is endowed with 8 Xe Cores, or 128 EU (execution units), which work out to 1,024 unified shaders. The chip features a 96-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, running 6 GB of memory. Despite these hardware specs, you get full DirectX 12 Ultimate capability, including ray tracing, and the XeSS performance enhancement. There are also several content-creation accelerators, including Intel XMX, and AV1 hardware-encode capabilities.

A part of the process of building a graphics card is designing compatibility to execute the latest graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. Today, we have confirmation that Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards will be compatible with Vulkan's latest iteration - version 1.3. In January, Khronos, the team behind Vulkan API, released their regular two-year update to the standard. Graphics card vendors like NVIDIA and AMD announced support immediately with their drivers. Today, the Khronos website officially lists Intel Arc Alchemist mobile graphics cards as compatible with Vulkan 1.3 with Intel Arc A770M, A730M, A550M, A370M, and A350M GPUs.

At the time of writing, there is no official announcement for the desktop cards yet. However, given that the mobile SKUs are supporting the latest standard, it is extremely likely that the desktop variants will also carry the same level of support.

With its Arc "Alchemist" graphics solutions, Intel is introducing a new in-house display refresh-rate technology alongside support for VESA Adaptive Sync, which it calls Smooth Sync. This feature is targeted at notebooks and desktops with fixed-refresh rate displays, which lack support for Adaptive Sync. The technology works to counteract the screen-tearing effect caused by the GPU putting out frames at a higher rate than the display's refresh rate, letting gamers set V-sync to "off" in their games, and enjoy the lowest possible input latencies.

The way Intel Smooth Sync seems to work, is that V-sync is disabled in game, the GPU puts out the maximum frame-rate that it can, and then a lightweight dithering filter blurs off the screen-tear zone on the display. The idea is that this filter imposes a far less latency cost than V-sync, so even budget-segment notebooks with fixed refresh-rate displays can enjoy the benefits of low-latency gaming, without the screen-tear. Smooth Sync is a software-level feature that's part of the latest Arc graphics drivers, and will work with Arc "Alchemist" graphics processors.

The first benchmark result of an Intel Arc A730M laptop made an appearance online and the mysterious laptop used to run 3DMark turned out to be from a Chinese company called Machenike. The laptop itself appears to go under the name of Dawn16 Discovery Edition and features a 16-inch display with a native resolution of 2560 x 1600, with a 165 Hz refresh rate. CPU wise, Machenike went with a Core i7-12700H, which is a 6+8 core CPU with 20 threads, where the performance cores top out at 4.7 GHz. The CPU has been paired with 16 GB of 4800 MHz DDR5 memory and the system also has a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD of some kind, with a max read speed of 3500 MB/s, which isn't particularly impressive. Other features include Thunderbolt 4 support, WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, as well as an 80 Whr battery pack.

However, none of the above is particularly unique and what matters here is of course the Intel Arc A730M GPU. It has been paired with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 192-bit interface, at 14 Gbps according to the specs. The memory bandwidth is said to be 336 GB/s. The company also provided a couple of performance metrics, with a 3DMark TimeSpy figure of 10002 points and a 3DMark Fire Strike figure of 23090 points. The TimeSpy score is a few points slower than the numbers posted earlier, but helps verify the earlier test result. Other interesting nuggets of information include support for 8k60 12-bit HDR video decoding for AV1, HEVC, AVC and VP9, as well as 8k 10-bit HDR encoding for said formats. Here a figure for the Puget Benchmark in what appears to be Photoshop (PS) is provided, where it scores 1188 points. The laptop is up for what appears to be pre-order, with a price tag of 7,499 RMB, or about US$1,130.

Currently the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) event is taking place in Dallas and at the event, Intel had one of its Arc Limited Edition graphics cards on display. It's unclear if it was a working sample or just a mockup, as it wasn't running in a system or even mounted inside a system. Instead, it seems like Intel thought it was a great idea to mount the card standing up on the port side inside an acrylic box, on top of a rotating base. The three pictures snapped by @theBryceIsRt and posted on Twitter doesn't reveal anything we haven't seen so far, except the placement of the power connectors.

It's now clear that Intel has gone for a typical placement of the power connectors and the card in question has one 8-pin and one 6-pin power connector. Intel will in other words not be using the new 12-pin power connector that is expected to be used by most next generation graphics cards. We should mention that @theBryceIsRt is an Intel employee and is the Intel Arc community advocate according to his twitter profile, so the card wasn't just spotted by some passerby. Intel has as yet not revealed any details as to when it's planning on launching its Arc based graphics cards.

During the International Supercomputing Conference on May 31, 2022, in Hamburg, Germany, Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group at Intel Corporation, announced Rialto Bridge, Intel's data center graphics processing unit (GPU). Using the same architecture as the Intel data center GPU Ponte Vecchio and combining enhanced tiles with Intel's next process node, Rialto Bridge will offer up to 160 Xe cores, more FLOPs, more I/O bandwidth and higher TDP limits for significantly increased density, performance and efficiency.

"As we embark on the exascale era and sprint towards zettascale, the technology industry's contribution to global carbon emissions is also growing. It has been estimated that by 2030, between 3% and 7% of global energy production will be consumed by data centers, with computing infrastructure being a top driver of new electricity use," said Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group at Intel Corporation.

Intel's revamped IDM 2.0 strategy has seen the company revise its stance in both in-house and outsourced silicon fabrication. While we're already seeing the fruits of Intel's collaboration with TSMC (albeit at the relatively slow pace of introduction for Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics), it seems that Intel is willing to go much farther than just TSMC as a source of chips for its product portfolio.

That's the backdrop to which Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently took a trip to South Korea's capital of Seoul. According to the Korea Herald, Gelsinger met several key Samsung executives, including Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, co-CEO and chip business boss Kyung Kye-hyun, and head of Samsung Mobile Roh Tae-moon. More than enough executive grunt to ignite talks of a deepening collaboration between both companies. While the reporting source doesn't provide any quotes or actionable intel from the meeting, Samsung remains one of the key semiconductor manufacturers alongside Intel itself and TSMC, with a particularly strong portfolio in memory-related technologies.