The Intel Arc Alchemist GPU range officially launched earlier this month, but gaming laptops featuring the new chips are currently only available in South Korea. However, it looks like the blue team’s first wave of graphics cards are finally set to release in the US, as HP and Asus products wielding the chips have popped up online as “coming soon”.
Over on Best Buy, there are two gaming laptop models listed that use an Intel Arc Alchemist GPU – the ASUS Zenbook Flip and the HP Spectre. Both options are equipped with the A370M, a chip that features 4GB GDDR6 VRAM, 8 Xe cores, and 8 ray tracing cores. The GPU is accompanied by an Intel Alder Lake i7 CPU, but the Asus laptop features 16GB of low profile DDR5 RAM, trumping the HP Spectre’s DDR4 equivalent.
In terms of price, the ASUS Zenbook Flip currently bears a $1,399.99 USD price tag, while the HP Spectre is listed for $1,999.99 USD. The latter option is particularly pricey when you consider the A370M GPU’s specs, and you can grab an HP Omen RTX 3070 laptop on Best Buy for $600 less.
It’s needless to say that the A370M isn’t the best gaming laptop GPU, but the arrival of products featuring the chip should help provide more choice. There’s still no word on the company’s Arc A550M, A730M, and A770M mobile offerings, and desktop Arc Alchemist GPUs might not show up until late summer.
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We’ll need to wait for the Intel Arc Alchemist GPU lineup to fully arrive before knowing if it’ll shake up the gaming PC scene. Yet, benchmarks suggest that the A370M falls flat against the Nvidia GTX 1650, which may be a foreboding sign in terms of performance. It’s also worth noting that both the RTX 4000 series and AMD RDNA 3 GPUs are rumoured to release later this year, meaning the blue team’s lineup could come up against fierce next-gen competitors.