- This is it, Intel Arc Pro.
These cards are the first of their kind, the A40 and A50.
And when we heard they'd be at SIGGRAPH,
we rushed over here to see them.
And it looks like Intel did too. (laughs)
Oh, Intel.
But why did Intel choose SIGGRAPH of all places
to launch new GPUs?
Why hasn't Nvidia announced theirs?
And is there even anything on the show floor here
that might make use of either of them?
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- Of the new Arc Pro GPUs,
the A40 is what Intel
is calling an entry level professional card,
with a TDP of 50 Watts
and a low-profile compatible, single-slot form factor.
There's a halfway decent performance,
and that's a very good sign,
considering the integrated AV1 encode engine
and fast, mature H.264 and 5 encoders
common to all our GPUs.
That's so tempting,
that I could see people buying an A40 for that alone,
even if they're using it
alongside another GPU in the same system,
which is why it's so strange
that Intel isn't opting
to show off that encode capability at SIGGRAPH.
Instead, they've got a 5B renderer demo,
connected up to SketchUp,
which runs at about 30 or 40 FPS
in a simpler scene like this,
that Intel says is indicative of, for example,
an interior designer or floor planner workload.
Fair enough.
This is SIGGRAPH after all.
And the six gigs of video memory is more than enough
to handle a scene like this.
Only about four gigs are in use here at the moment.
On the other side,
Intel's got another A40 running Topaz AI video enhancement,
which to be fair to Intel,
is something that's more likely
to be used alongside that encoding engine.
Unfortunately,
these are the only demos Intel has on the floor.
No, A50s are running,
although the only major difference between the A40 and A50
is a bump up to a 75-Watt TDP
and commensurate cooler design,
in a dual slot configuration as well.
Everything else, the ray tracing and compute cores,
video memory, PCI express bandwidth,
you name it, is identical between these two cards.
That means that you might be able to make an A40
into an A50 with a simple TDP adjustment
assuming you shore up the cooling.
Like regular Arc, Intel's saying
that they're targeting aggressive price points
for their performance class,
but they won't tell me how much,
maybe they don't even know yet.
Because both of these cards
are rated within 75 Watts of power drop,
they don't require any external power connectors
which is a bonus for small form factor PCs
like the NUCs they have on display here.
Their PCI Express X16 cards,
but they're wired for 8X at Gen 4 speeds,
which at this performance level is probably plenty,
but we'll have to see for ourselves
when we get our hands on them.
As for display outputs,
both boast quad mini display port 2.0 connections
with HDMI 2.1 output capability rated for 4k 60.
So HDMI 2.0.
Surprisingly,
Intel's exhibit isn't the only place to find Arc GPUs.
And for that, we're here at Supermicro's booth
to look at these, Intel's Arctic Sound-M server-grade GPUs.
See what they did there?
Arc, Arctic Sound.
(chuckles) Anyway.
Unlike the previous Arctic Sound GPUs
that have been available,
these are based on Big Alchemists
the same GPU cores as the A500 and A700 series GPUs.
These just began shipping in late July
and Supermicro here
will be one of the first to deploy servers with them.
What we have here are two different, unnamed SKUs.
The low profile card is 75 Watts
and the full size, beefy boy is 150 Watts.
From what Intel said about them so far,
the smaller card is actually a dual SOC design,
where the big one is a single kind of monolithic GPU.
Supermicro is wisely leaning heavily
on the hardware video encoders in their data sheets here.
And they tell me that in their testing,
Intel's performance estimates on the encoder
are incredibly understated.
The low profile card alone
has been tested to handle up to 60 streams
of 1080p 60 streaming video, which is just insane.
If we're really nice to them, they say
that they'll let us take one for a test drive sometime soon.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
As for the competition, Nvidia,
who's sponsoring SIGGRAPH, doesn't have a booth here.
And sadly,
did not announce any new GPUs in the event this year,
which is strange,
given how much time they spent talking about the RTX reveal
during SIGGRAPH 2018 in this year's special address.
Instead,
we got more details on their plans for the Metaverse
and new updates to Nvidia's Omniverse platform.
Now,
I'm just as excited about this stuff as the next person.
Take that how you will but without hardware,
it's tough to see how all of this photogrammetry
and AI motion capture will be applicable to anyone really.
There's a seriously massive amount of compute horsepower
that goes into things like digital twin simulations
and with current gen hardware,
it's tough to see how they expect
to democratize these things.
We'll have to wait a little longer
to see what their plans are,
and hopefully it's not just crank up the TDP
like we've heard so far.
Speaking of photogrammetry,
while the tech will make it easier
to rapidly create 3d models, even for novices,
actually animating those models is another story entirely.
There's plenty of examples
of professional grade motion capture on the floor here
but what about you guys at home?
Enter Plask, a company
that's been using some pretty advanced software techniques
to take captured 2d video from a video camera or a webcam
and translate it into motion data.
If you've ever heard of rotoscoping,
the technique used back in the eighties and nineties,
where animation was done by drawing over frames of video,
this is basically that, but entirely automatic.
The best part of it is that it's free for individual use.
I can foresee a lot of VTubers picking up on this,
if they haven't already.
And they might pick up on finger tracking gloves too.
There's a few of them on the show floor
but Manus here is special
because it was their tech that actually was used
by Keanu Reeves for motion capture
for the Matrix demo for Unreal Engine 5.
Granted this is probably far more expensive
than Elite Motion that VTubers use
for hand tracking today, but it is extremely accurate.
Think about your fingers for a second.
The fine motor control most of us have over our fingers,
the little movements you can make,
those can't be fully captured by film alone.
It's incredibly difficult.
What makes these super cool
is that not only do they track those fine movements,
they automatically map out the layout of your hand.
Each joint and bone segment are accounted for at 120 Hertz.
They're also wireless,
although they're being used wired here.
So when these trickled down to consumers,
it's gotta make VR so much more immersive.
They already have some work
for Unity and Unreal Engine baked in,
and they used SteamVR to boot.
So it's not a huge leap from here.
SIGGRAPH's not our normal hot.
So this might have been a little bit of a weird video.
Still, there were some things
that we just couldn't ignore for many reasons.
And here we are, unfortunately,
it's not as exciting as it could have been.
Arc is still dripping out at a very slow pace,
and Nvidia is still holding out on us.
But at the end of the day,
there's a lot of exciting things here.
And hopefully, you've found it exciting too.
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- Thanks for watching guys.
It's been a while since we've last done a show like this.
Maybe, check out one of our older show videos.
See what things used to be like.