Intel Teases First Look at Arctic Sound Dedicated Graphics Card

Clearly not wanting to be outdone by Nvidia’s imminent Turing graphics card launch, Intel has used SIGGRAPH 2018 to tease its own discrete graphics card.

It’s all revealed via a rather tasty little teaser video that eulogises about Intel Graphics achievements over the years. They claim their integrated graphics brought us the world’s first DirectX 12 compliant GPU; the first PC graphics to run Netflix 4K video, and eSports gaming to laptops as thin as phones. But that’s not where it ends.

“In 2020, we will set our graphics free,” boasts Intel. “And that’s just the beginning.”

Intel’s first GPU will be codenamed Arctic Sound, and it will be ready to ship in two years time, likely ready to go toe-to-toe with AMD Radeon and whatever Nvidia’s got up its sleeves after Turing.

Despite being two years away, this video provides our first ever glimpse at what Intel’s first discrete gaming graphics card looks like. A sleek, minimal, and boxy single-slot design is clearly visible in the teaser video, including a metal blower fan and token blue trimmings.

Specifics on Intel Arctic Sound are few and far between. However, we do know that ex-Radeon architect Raja Koduri is leading up development of both integrated and discrete graphics cards at Intel. Based on Intel’s current output, it seems safe to assume that Arctic Sound will be based on the 10nm process. AMD will already be deep into 7nm, and we’d expect Nvidia to be doing the same, so there is perhaps the worry that Intel could be behind the curve somewhat.

Whatever they’re doing, they’re going to need to hit the ground running as in Nvidia and AMD, they’re competing with GPU manufacturers that have decades of high-end graphics card experience.