Intel may have provided a sneak peek at its "Alchemist" PC gaming graphics card through a drone light show.
On Monday, the company introduced the new Intel Arc brand for the graphics cards. To commemorate the occasion, the chip maker staged a light show using 1,000 aerial drones to sketch out various images in the sky.
Intel uploaded a video of the light show, and at one point the drones assemble to form a two-fanned graphics card built with a PCIe slot. The GPU depicted adopts a very generic design, no different from the graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia.
We'll have to wait and see what Alchemist's final design looks like. However, Videocardz notes the depicted Intel GPU appears similar to a leaked pre-production model for the card that contained two fans. The leaked model, which YouTuber “Moore’s Law is Dead” first reported on, had 16GB of GDDR6 memory over a 256-bit memory interface, which is twice that found in Nvidia’s RTX 3070 card.
The drone light show didn’t reveal much else. But Intel’s head of graphics, Raja Koduri, said last year the company plans on releasing PC graphics cards “up and down the stack,” so consumers should expect various models at different price points. Intel has also said it's tapping an outside foundry to build the GPUs, with rumors suggesting it's TSMC, the same chip manufacturer behind AMD’s own graphics cards.
During Monday's announcement, Intel also showed off digital images for the silicon chip that'll power the Alchemist graphics cards. But the company has yet to disclose exact specs.
The company’s Alchemist GPU is slated to launch in Q1 2022. In addition to desktop PCs, Alchemist is also targeting notebooks. The company plans on revealing more details in the weeks and months to come.