Image: Intel
Intel has quietly launched the Arc A530M and A570M for laptops, offering another option for low- to mid-range GPUs that won’t eat much of your budget.
While Intel has confirmed the Arc A530M and A570M in its Ark (no relation) parts database, the company made no public announcement. As Anandtech surmised, the new parts are a step up from the basic Arc A370M that we tested in May 2022, which put Arc at or above the RTX 3050 but below more “serious” GPUs in game play.
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Basically, here’s how the lineup breaks down, with the addition of Intel’s new Arc parts: as Intel detailed in 2022, the Arc A350M contains eight Xe cores and eight ray tracing units, with a graphics clock of 1550MHz and 4GB of memory. The A530M increases that to 12 Xe cores and 12 ray tracing units, dips the clock speed to 1300MHz, and offers either 4GB or 8GB of memory. The A570M uses 16 Xe cores and 16 ray tracing units, also with a 1300MHz clock speed and 8GB of memory support.
As Anandtech pointed out, the power of the two parts is between 65W and 95W (the A530M) and 75W to 95W (the A570M). This fills a rather odd hole in the power/performance offerings of the Arc chips Intel detailed previously.
We don’t know how these new chips will fare performance-wise, but tests of the A550M, the Arc 5 chip that should be the next performance tier up, showed that that chip should drive 1080p gaming at medium to high levels of detail. In some ways, the new Arc chips remind us of the Nvidia GeForce MX series from a few years back, a bit of graphics oomph, but not much more. Still, our own tests have showed that even the Arc 370M dramatically outperforms the standard integrated graphics inside most Intel laptop CPUs, so these GPUs should allow you to play some older games at more basic settings.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor
As PCWorld’s senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.