Intel has publicly admitted that current drivers for its discrete Arc ‘Alchemist’ graphics cards are optimized for new and popular games, which certainly will upset some loyal fans of older titles. But apparently, one more category of users will be upset with Intel’s standalone GPUs — miners.
As it turns out, Intel’s Arc A380 discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs currently do not support popular Ethereum mining software.
“Well, we got the Intel GPU driver working great, but unfortunately looks like no mining programs support Intel GPUs yet,” wrote DJ Mines, a well-known YouTuber who also happens to be a cryptocurrency miner and a DJ. “Tried NiceHashMining, trex miner, lolminer, teamreeminer (all on Windows). Guess we have to wait for [Hive OS mining platform].”
Intel’s Arc A380 graphics card is not exactly meant for core gamers or miners since it is based on the company’s entry-level ACM-G11 GPU with 8 Xe cores (equals to 1024 stream processors) capable of around 3 FP32 TFLOPS and featuring a 96-bit GDDR6 memory interface. This board will likely not make it to the list of the best gaming graphics cards around, and it is not particularly surprising that, for now, it does not support mining at all.
Meanwhile, since Intel’s Arc A380 boards cannot be used for mining, they will not be purchased by miners for their Ethereum rigs, which is why their price will not be inflated due to high demand, at least for now. Still keeping in mind that Ethereum mining on GPUs is not particularly profitable, mining support on Intel’s Arc A380 looks to pose theoretical rather than practical interest.
Intel’s discrete Arc ‘Alchemist’ graphics cards are beginning to show up on the market (albeit initially only in China), which is why we see many people sharing their impressions about the boards on Twitter and YouTube. So far, many observers have noted the build quality of Gunnir’s Arc A380 graphics card, which has two fans and an eight-pin PCIe auxiliary power connector.