Intel Launches Sleek Single-Slot Arc Pro A60 Workstation Graphics Card

We’re a little late on covering this one, but wanted to make sure we did, because for multiple reasons, it’s an interesting launch. Up to this point, we haven’t heard too much about Intel’s Arc Pro series, aimed at workstation, despite two models having been available since last year. Today, a third entrant joins the fray, coming to us in the form of the Arc Pro A60, a single-slot card with a 130W power envelope:

Looks only matter so much, but in our opinion, Intel has knocked the design of the Arc Pro A60 out of the park. The sleek black aesthetic with blue blower fan looks great. Looking at the back, we can see that the fan is the only reason the card is as long as it is; the PCB itself is quite short. We’ve seen similar designs in the past, such as with AMD’s Radeon PRO W6600.

It’s not made obvious with these particular shots, but the Arc Pro A60 requires just one 6-pin PCIe power connector, which is another trait shared with the aforementioned W6600. At the back are four DisplayPort connectors, which is par for the course.

As with AMD’s Radeon PRO and NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs, Intel’s Arc Pro targets the workstation market head-on, with a core focus on industry standard design applications from all of the expected vendors, like Autodesk, Dassault, PTC, Siemens, and so on. Quarterly Arc Pro drivers are released which include special optimizations for many of these software solutions. Another perk includes premium support, which is important when a work roadblock can cause huge headaches.

When we evaluated AMD’s Radeon Pro W7000 series a few weeks ago, we noted that while there was a 7800-series GPU in the professional lineup, there was no equivalent on the gaming side. We’re seeing the same thing here with Intel’s Arc Pro A60; its core configuration matches no model on the gaming side:

With half of the number of Xe cores as the gaming- and creator-focused A750, it’s clear that the Arc Pro A60 isn’t going to displace the higher-spec’d Arcs in things like rendering, but pro optimizations are likely to make improvements to performance in key areas that workstation cards typically target; eg: the viewport in solutions like CATIA, SolidWorks, NX, and Creo, with Intel also name-dropping 3ds Max, Maya, AutoCAD, Inventor, Fusion 360, Vectorworks, and Solid Edge.

At the moment, we’re not sure of Arc Pro pricing, as so far, the A40 and A50 appear to be OEM-only, and we’d expect the same to be the case for the Arc Pro A60 (although we hope we’re wrong, as it’d be nice to be able to slip one into your DIY build).

It’s also worth noting that Intel has also just launched the mobile variant of this GPU, called Arc Pro A60M. That GPU shares the same basic specs as the desktop-bound Arc Pro A60, but drops from 12GB to 8GB, and from a 192-bit memory bus down to 128-bit.

Intel expects that the Arc Pro A60 will become available in the coming weeks, while Arc Pro A60M will be a few months off.