Intel has officially debunked the rumors of an Arc A780 graphics card with RGB lighting. The rumors were false. The hype was unfounded.
It all began back in February of this year when rumors surfaced about a secret Intel Arc A780 GPU in the works. It was purportedly lightning fast — even faster than an Nvidia RTX 3060. It was desktop-class. It was even supposed to have RGB lighting, for goodness’ sake!
Of course, there had never been any official announcement from Intel either supporting the rumors or denying them. Instead, the dream of a fast Intel graphics card took on a life of its own and spread across Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok like wildfire.
The rumors began on the Chinese social media app WeChat and a user named Enthusiastic Citizen became the go-to “expert” on the matter. They were quickly picked up by tech news blogs 3DCenter and VideoCardz, and took on a life of their own from there.
The rumors claimed the Arc chips had a whopping 2250MHz clock speed, 16GB of DDR6 RAM, and a 560 GB/second bandwidth. All of that while drawing only 175W of power.
Several experts weighed in to remind people that these speeds and power supplies don’t match up, especially when compared to previous generation Arc chips like the weak A380M. But their protests were buried under waves of speculation and ignored. Intel didn’t help matters by remaining quiet on the matter.
Then Intel’s chief performance strategist, Ryan Shrout, squashed all the rumors.
Despite some rumors to the contrary, there is no Intel Arc A780 and there was never planned to be an A780. Let’s just settle that debate. 🤣
— Ryan Shrout (@ryanshrout) July 16, 2022
There was never an Arc A780 chip in the works and all the rumors were social media hype gone wild. Intel never planned to take on Nvidia in the GPU market.
This leads to questions about other rumored Intel Arc chips. There was a rumored A750 and A770 in the works, albeit with lower performance benchmarks than the non-existent A780. Shrout didn’t mention either of those in his tweet.
If there are any Arc A700-series chips, Intel should announce them in the coming months if the company wants to join the competition. Both Nvidia and AMD have their newest graphics cards launching in the fall.