If Intel’s long-in-the-pipe lineup of discrete GPUs were like childhood fantasies of Santa, then the most wise amongst us would ascribe to the axiom that “seeing is believing.” As far as the rumored Arc A780 graphics card is concerned, it’s pretty much confirmed nobody’s going to be getting one in their stocking this Christmas.
Ever since Intel announced the company’s first series of discrete modern graphics cards meant for gaming and other similar workloads, including the top-of-the-line Arc A770, people have speculated on another card, an A780, that would be competition for the Nvidia RTX 3070 in the high-ish-end gaming market. The A770 is supposed to be somewhere in between the RTX 3060 and 3070 in overall power, which meant there was room for something with a little more juice.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware and Videocardz, tech leakers like the prolific Moore’s Law is Dead have talked up the idea of a more powerful Arc card. Those rumors have now come to such a head that Intel’s own director of graphics marketing, Ryan Shrout, posted Sunday that, no, there is no A780, now shuddup about it!
He was backed up by another Intel marketer for the Arc project, Tuan Huynh, saying “there never was an A780 and no mentions of it in the year and a half I’ve been on the Arc team.”
That there seems to be a hole in the Arc lineup has only helped drive the theories, however.
Moore’s Law is Dead showed up in the replies to Shrout’s tweet to defend himself and his information, essentially accusing Intel of trying to issue “damage control” over it not being able to push an RTX 3070-scaled card to market.
“It’s either that, or pretend the same source as the Raptor Lake, Redwood Cove, and Alchemist cooler leaks guessed all of that stuff… SPOILER ALERT: I didn’t.”
Moore’s Law’s YouTube channel had previously released a video on July 14 describing information he pieced together from several internal sources about the Arc lineup positioned for this summer. He mentioned that the supposed 3070 and 3070 Ti competitor was supposed to clock in at 2.3GHz or higher and have 16GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM. He even showed supposed documents that included SKUs of the supposed card. The leaker even stated in the video that the A780 card might never actually see the light of day, but the Intel marketers’ contention that it was never even considered has only helped fuel more disagreement.
Well, at least there seems to be some consensus that the A780 is dead as a doornail, whether anyone actually breathed life into it or not.
Of course, all of this might be moot when the Nvidia inevitably releases its RTX 40-series of cards, which—if you believe the leakers—would become the company’s fastest and likely hottest GPUs in its arsenal.