Intel's New Arc Pro A60 Graphics Card Is for CAD Not Call of Duty

Intel is set to offer workstation users a powerful new graphics card in the form of the Arc Pro A60, as well as a new Arc Pro A60M mobile GPU.

These new GPUs won't trouble the graphics cards aimed at gamers, not even Intel's own Arc A7XX range. However, the Pro A60 will be desirable to workstation users for a number of reasons.

First of all, it's a single-slot graphics card drawing just 130 watts peak power, so it will easily fit into just about any PC case and work with most power supplies. Intel is promising a significant performance upgrade over previous Arc Pro cards by doubling the PCIe lanes to 16, doubling the memory bandwidth to 384 gigabytes per second, and doubling the number of dedicated AI XMX Extensions engines to 256. There's also twice (16) the number of ray tracing units, and the card ships with 12GB of VRAM, supports up to four displays, HDR, and Dolby Vision.

So what is this graphics card going to be used for? Intel views it as the perfect card for anyone working in the "architecture, engineering and construction, and design and manufacturing industries." The quarterly driver updates will be certified for use with popular workstation apps such as those offered by Autodesk for desktop CAD and 3D modeling/art. There's also full AV1 hardware acceleration, making it a great solution for media creation/encoding.

Unlike the consumer-friendly Arc graphics card range, these new Arc Pro cards will filter into the market already installed in workstations from the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo in the coming weeks. Mobile workstations containing the Arc Pro A60M GPU will appear "in the coming months." The mobile chip is equipped with 8GB of memory, 16 PCIe lanes, and has a peak power draw of between 65-95 watts.

Another potential way to get your hands on one of these new cards is by purchasing an NUC. Intel says it's possible to slot one into a NUC 13 Extreme, which would pair it with a 13th Gen Intel Core processor and give you quite a bit of performance in a small form factor.