INTEL

Arc A770 graphics accelerator could be used in servers

At the Innovation 2022 event, Intel demonstrated the Arc A770 graphics accelerator, designed for the desktop platform market - gaming PCs and workstations. In addition, the novelty can be used on servers, but with a series of limitations.

Recall that the A770 is a mid-range graphics card based on the ACM-G10 GPU with 32 Xe cores (4096 FP32 units, 32 ray tracing units and 512 XMX matrix compute units). The GPU is capable of operating at a frequency of 2.1 GHz, it will be supplemented with 8 or 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, in the latter case a 256-bit bus with a memory bandwidth of about 560 GB / s is used. The cost of the reference Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition will be $329.

The reference design is compact by today's standards: the card takes up only two slots in height and is cooled by a pair of relatively small fans. Power is arranged according to the 6+8 pin scheme. A small detail indicates that the Arc A770 will be installed not only on gaming PCs, but also on workstations - these are the holes for attaching the latch on the back of the board.

The retention card is included in a special slotted rack on the front of the case and prevents long cards from falling out and mechanically overloading the PCI Express slot. This solution is not used on gaming PCs, but is often found on servers and workstations.

Intel noted that it does not plan to limit the Arc A770's scope to PCs or gaming workstations. Accelerators can also be used on servers, however, one nuance was revealed here: in the speech it was noted that new accelerators will not receive full support for SR-IOV.

Remember that SR-IOV is an integral part of any adapter that will have to work in environments with virtualization, as it is this technology that gives virtual machines quick access to the device's hardware resources. Thus, the use of Intel Arc accelerators on servers appears to be limited.

Intel