Intel Arc Alchemist calculates its clock speed differently than AMD and NVIDIA do

In a recent live stream on the HotHardware YouTube channel, Intel Fellow Tom Petersen; talked about the new graphics clock specification of the new Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs. On this topic, he detailed how Intel's Arc Alchemist clock specs differ from Nvidia's for their GPUs.

Petersen explained that Intel does not include a base clock on its GPUsInstead, Intel has designated its specification as “graphic clock» as a general estimate of clock speeds of Arc in the most thermally and energy constrained environments.

Intel Arc Alchemist clock calculations cannot be compared to AMD or NVIDIA GPUs

This is due to the way Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs use boosting. This allows GPUs to maximize clock speeds. That is as long as there is room for power, voltage and temperature, the GPU will increase its clock speed above its nominal value, just like modern GPU architectures from AMD and Nvidia. Petersen claims we can expect clock speeds of over 2GHz on Intel Arc GPUs. under light gaming workloads as it would be with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which has a very low graphic load.

This means that most users will never see an Arc GPU running at its exact graphics clock specification. Instead they will see clocks well above what is indicated. However, this doesn't mean that Intel's Arc GPUs won't go below their designated clock speed in some exceptionally demanding workloads.

Intel's new graphics clock specification is similar to Nvidia's Boost Clock and AMD Game Clock specifications. These are rough estimates of how the GPU clock speed will behave when pushed to its limits.

This also means that Intel Arc GPUs have no specified minimum frequency at all. So Arc GPUs cannot, technically speaking, be subjected to thermal throttling, as GPUs can run at any frequency and still be within their stated specs. All this could lead to certain reading failures in game performance or overclocking, so before knowing if an Intel Arc can support a game in certain graphic conditions, we will have to wait to see if someone has tried it before.

Source: Tom's Hardware