Item: Intel Unveils Arc A580 GPU, Occupying Budget GPU Segment
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Author: Low Boon Shen

Intel Unveils Arc A580 GPU, Occupying Budget GPU Segment

Intel has just released the Arc A580 GPU – making it the latest (and rather late at that) addition in Arc’s product lineup. The A580 is aiming for 1080p high settings and Esports titles for its positioning, complemented by media capabilities such as dual hardware AV1 decode and encode support.

Considering Team Blue’s GPU releases so far, starting from the Arc 3 (A310, A380) to the Arc 7 (A770 LE, A750) – there wasn’t anything in the Arc 5 series until now. Arc 3 barely counts as a gaming GPU given its weak specs, and Arc 7 is facing stiff competition from both Radeon and GeForce. So the Arc 5’s presence could very well open up a new battlefield in the GPU market – something that NVIDIA and AMD has largely skimmed over in recent years.

The release of Intel Arc A580 is significant as it brings modern GPU features to mainstream gamers, which is mainly dominated by the likes of GTX 1650 and such. Specs-wise, it features 512GB/s memory bandwidth to feed the 8GB RAM – huge compared to its class. Onboard the chip is 24 Xe Cores, which runs at 185W TDP. Intel hasn’t forgot the AI stuff too: there’s the usual XMX instruction set that XeSS upscaler uses, and for things like Stable Diffusion.

Intel Arc A580-based add-in cards are available from ASRock, GUNNIR, and Sparkle, starting at $179. No prices are available for Malaysian market at this writing.

Pokdepinion: This could be a very legitimate option now that Arc drivers have progressed a good bit – and comes with pretty solid amounts of VRAM too.