- Intel is growing its GPU segment with the introduction of a new card designed for professionals.
- The Intel Arc Pro A60 is a discrete GPU aimed at CAD, media encoding and AI applications.
- No word on whether the card, which will launch in the coming weeks, is coming to South Africa.
Last year Intel stepped into the discrete GPU market with its Arc cards. While they weren’t going toe-to-toe with the likes of AMD or NVIDIA, it was a strong first step into the market.
On Tuesday, Intel took another step into the space with the introduction of its Arc Pro A-series of GPUs aimed at – as the name suggests – professionals.
“With built-in ray tracing hardware, graphics acceleration and machine learning capabilities, the Intel Arc Pro A60 GPU unites fluid viewports, the latest in visual technologies and rich content creation in a traditional single slot factor,” Intel said in a press release.
How do these cards differ from the Arc range aimed at gamers? For one, Intel says the Arc Pro A60 and A60M offer double the number of PCIe lanes (16), twice the memory bandwidth at 384GBps, double the number of AI X Matrix Extensions engines and twice the number of ray tracing units.
The firm says that the GPUs support AV1 media encoding and decoding and all of these features make the card perfect for computer-aided design, AI inferencing tasks and media processing.
Team Blue says that its pro GPUs have been certified and are in the process of being certified by the following applications:
- Autodesk 3ds Max
- Autodesk AutoCAD
- Autodeck Fusion 360
- Autodeck Inventro
- Autodeck Maya
- Bentley MicroStation
- Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS
- Nemetscheck VectorWorks
- PTC Creo
- Siemens NX
- Siemens Solid Edge
Looking closer at the Intel Arc Pro A60 spec sheet and the card sports 12GB of GDDR6 memory and can draw a maximum of 130W.
The Pro A60M is a mobile iteration of this GPU and it will arrive in notebooks in the coming months. The discrete Pro A60 will be available from authorised distributors in “the coming weeks,” Intel says. There is no word from Acer locally on whether the Pro A60 will also be coming to our shores. The tech maker announced in December that it would be bringing Arc GPUs to South Africa in mid-2023.
