Chinese graphics card manufacturer Gunnir has announced the Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC, one of the first custom graphics cards based on Intel's Arc Alchemist family. However, the Arc A380 has a tough road ahead as Intel's offering has to compete with the best graphics cards on the market.
The Arc A380 is Intel's entry-level graphics card that utilizes the chipmaker's Xe-HPG architecture and wields the ACM-G11 silicon. TSMC produces the ACM-G11 for Intel on the foundry's 6nm process node. The Arc A380 has eight Xe cores, eight ray tracing units, and 4MB of L2 cache. Each Xe core houses up to 128 ALUs; therefore, the Arc A380 has 1,024 ALUs.
The Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC features a 2,450 MHz boost clock. However, the model name insinuates that it comes with a factory overlock, so the reference boost clock speed for the Arc A380 could be lower. At any rate, the Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC delivers an FP32 performance up to 5 TFLOPs. That would put the graphics card in the same alley as Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1660, which also offers 5 TFLOPs of FP32 performance. Nonetheless, early benchmarks showed that the Arc A380 is on equal grounds with the GeForce GTX 1650 Super, capable of 4.4 TFLOPs.
The graphics card has 6GB of GDDR6 memory at its disposal. The memory chips check in at 15.5 Gbps across a 96-bit memory interface. As a result, the Arc A380 pumps out a maximum memory bandwidth of up to 186 GBps. Therefore, models such as the GeForce GTX 1650 Super or the GeForce GTX 1660 only provide 3.3% higher memory bandwidth than the Arc A380.
The Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC occupies two PCI slots and features a rectangular design. The graphics card, which measures 222mm long, comes with a dual-tone theme that consists of black and grey colors with blue accents. It also has a matching backplate that helps provide rigidity. Underneath the cooler, you'll find a large aluminum heatsink with a single 6nm nickel-plated copper heat pipe that transports heat throughout the heatsink. A pair of 90mm cooling fans are in charge of the active cooling.
Gunnir has equipped the Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC with a 2+1-phase power delivery subsystem. The graphics card carries a 92W TBP (total board power) rating. Hence, it only needs a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, which Gunnir has placed on the side of the shroud, similar to Nvidia's placement of the power connector on its Founders Edition models. As for display outputs, the Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC supplies users with three DisplayPort outputs and one HDMI 2.0 port.
It would seem that Intel has already launched the A3 series graphics cards for desktops in China, leading manufacturers, such as Gunnir, to reveal its custom models. Unfortunately, Gunnir didn't share the pricing for the Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC. On the other hand, Chinese merchants have already started to bundle the Arc A380 inside their prebuilt gaming machines. So it shouldn't be long until the other Arc SKUs start popping up in China, at least. Gunnir has already teased the "future flagship," which features a triple-fan cooler, on its website. Sadly, we won't see Intel's desktop Arc graphics card in the U.S. market until summer, assuming no delays.
