It appears that Intel’s ARC Alchemist graphics card will be named in a rather surgical manner, with each card bearing an “Arc aXXX” label. Alleged details of Intel’s naming guidelines for its upcoming GPUs were first leaked by the leakster, 188号 (@momomo_us), who somehow managed to get their hands on the details.
According to the guideline, the “a” in the “aXXX” moniker refers to the Alchemist GPU. This actually clears up two details for us: Firstly, we now know that Intel isn’t going the way of NVIDIA or AMD, with the two GPU makers slapping the RTX and RX moniker to their respective GeForce and Radeon GPUs. Instead, Intel just wants to keep it simple.
The second detail is Intel’s categorisation of its GPUs, now and in the future. We know that the next three generations of ARC GPUs are known as Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid. Therefore, we can at least deduce that, assuming this naming guideline holds, the next round of graphics cards will be launched with the “bXXX”, “cXXX”, and “dXXX” label.
🆗Intel® Arc™ a-series graphics
🆖1st Gen Intel® Arc™ graphics pic.twitter.com/pgSNo5avVD— 188号 (@momomo_us) September 26, 2021
It’s also clear that Intel is being pretty strict with itself and even goes so far as to even list down an incorrect use of its product’s names.
Intel’s ARC Alchemist graphics cards are expected to debut sometime during the first quarter of 2022, but reports have been unable to pinpoint an exact launch date. Another rumour suggests that Intel will be launching not one, but three different SKUs when the time comes, but do take that bit of news with a large grain of salt.
