Intel Arc makes It to the Automotive market

Intel Arc makes It to the Automotive market


A760A dGPU for AI-Driven Cockpit Experience

The automotive market has always been attractive to GPU industry players, and companies like Nvidia started addressing this market a long while ago. Intel is now ready to launch its discrete GPU tailored for the automotive industry. It will be known as Intel Arc Graphics for Automotive and plays a crucial part in Software-defined vehicle strategy.

Cars today have multiple screens and are becoming streaming and gaming powerhouses. The demand for more video and GPU-driven content on multiple screens has significantly grown over the last few years.

The new Intel Arc for Automotive is created to empower automakers to meet and exceed dynamic consumer expectations that demand more screens, higher-fidelity graphics, and unique AI-enabled cockpit experiences within vehicles.

AI is playing a central role inside the car too. The next-generation user experiences that will unlock richer and more seamless consumer experiences are part of the Intel Arc Graphics offering.

Intel is betting on an AI-enabled software-defined vehicle (SDV) system-on-chip (featuring a built-in GPU). Intel is trying to solve the whole vehicle approach where dGPU plays an important part alongside a central compute unit, PMIC, battery, and powertrain synergy.

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OEMs are gaining greater scalability when creating their vehicles, delivering higher performance per dollar. OEMs have been upping their game in recent years as the development cycle of platforms has significantly accelerated.

Arc Graphics for Automotive is enabling high-fidelity visuals and sophisticated 3D human-machine interfaces (HMI). Applications like smooth and immersive AAA gaming, responsive and context-aware AI assistants, and high-quality 3D human-machine interfaces are running well on the dGPU. Being able to run four displays in the car is a feature in high demand. As an example, running two of them will be able to address eight screens, which will be sufficient even for the highest end of the market.

Key Features of Automotive Arc dGPU:

  • Automotive Software and Optimized Drivers: Open-source Linux-based automotive operating system, graphics driver for both dGPU and iGPU.
  • Intel GPU Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV) Advantage: Provides up to 40% performance boost with virtual machines, enhanced security, isolation, and robustness.
  • Large Language Model (LLM) Frameworks Designed for Automotive: Intel optimizations integrated into industry-standard LLM frameworks, offering significant improvement in efficiency, customization, and customer experiences.
  • Xe Display Engine: Supports an additional 4 display outputs and up to 4K resolution for additional in-vehicle infotainment use cases.
  • OpenGL and Vulkan: Open standard graphics and next-gen graphics API featuring ray tracing for graphics realism.

Key specifications of Intel Arc Graphics for Automotive – A760A include 28 GPU cores and 28 Ray Tracing Units, 448 Matrix Engines (XMX) for AI, as well as 448 Vector Engines. It comes with 16GB of 256-bit GDDR6 memory using PCIe Gen4 x16 and SR-IOV (Single-root input/output virtualization). When it comes to AI and power, the Arc for Automotive supports peak 14 TFLOPS FP32, Peak 229 TOPs, and total board power (TBP) of 225W.

It supports four displays, encode and decode AVC, HEVC, VP9, AV1 codecs, and supports Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenVINO, OneAPI, Proton, virgl, Venus, SR-IOV, and virtio display technologies. OS, hypervisor, and orchestration parts of the specs bring ACRN Hypervisor, Linux (Yocto), Android, and Linux-in-Container within the Android virtual machine.

Since this is an automotive part, it is designed to work under extreme temperature conditions between -40°C to 105°C.

The auto availability is expected in Q1 2025.