Intel’s most powerful Arc GPU could be coming to gaming laptops

An unidentified Intel Xe graphics card which has just been spotted in a leaked benchmark looks like it’s a laptop version of Intel’s Arc Alchemist discrete GPU, teasing the possibility that we might see the beefiest flagship solution in gaming notebooks next year perhaps.

PC Gamer spotted the Geekbench 5 result as flagged up on Twitter by a less familiar source for us, though still one which has provided previous spillage, namely Benchleaks, so plenty of salt here as ever – but it’s a very interesting sighting.

As you can see, the GPU is only named as an Intel Xe discrete graphics card running in a Tiger Lake laptop, but it has 512 EUs (Execution Units) meaning it certainly isn’t a current Xe laptop card, and that EU count corresponds with Alchemist, and the top-end configuration of Intel’s incoming Arc gaming GPUs. It’s shown with a clock speed of 1.8GHz, though that could be pushed higher with the release version.

• We'll show you how to build a PC
• These are the best processors for your PC
• Check out all the best PC games

Remember that Alchemist isn’t expected to debut until early in 2022, and we’ve no idea yet when laptop versions of these discrete cards will figure into the mix, so this is obviously still an early sample chip.

Due to that, the result of 34,360 for the OpenCL score isn’t something we can draw any real conclusions from, save that it seems to be in the right ballpark for such an early pre-release product. Besides, Geekbench is far from the best place to be evaluating a GPU’s performance, anyway (there’s much better benchmarking software out there for that job).

Analysis: Great news for gaming on the go?

Obviously we need to be careful here, but this certainly looks like a tantalizing hint that before long we’ll have some seriously powerful new gaming laptops. If a notebook can pack an Intel Alder Lake CPU – with its major design innovations on the mobile front, with the hybrid architecture offering clear advantages for laptops – alongside a flagship Alchemist GPU, the potential performance leap in gaming during 2022 (maybe relatively early in 2022) is something to get excited about that.

Think of it this way: we’ve got what could hopefully be a seriously powerful Arc GPU driving frame rates, coupled with all the battery benefits Alder Lake promises to bring to laptops, and that should make for not just gaming notebooks with more grunt, but models which can last for a bit longer on the move too.

• These are the best graphics cards