Intel Arc 8-Core iGPU vs AMD Radeon RX 6550S vs AMD Radeon RX 6800S

Intel Arc 8-Core iGPU

The Intel Arc iGPU with 8 cores (ID 7D55) is an integrated graphics adapter in Meteor Lake SoCs based on the Xe LPG architecture (similar to the dedicated Arc GPUs, but with a focus on efficiency). It offers all 8 Xe cores (128 Xe vector engines), 8 ray tracing units, 8 samplers and 4 pixel backends.

The Arc name may only be used if at least 16 GB RAM is used in dual channel mode. Otherwise, the only iGPU is called "Intel Graphics" and is also significantly slower.

According to Intel, performance has been doubled compared to the previous generation (probably still in Alder Lake).

The iGPU supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (probably DX 12_2 like the desktop Arc GPUs). The graphics unit also supports XeSS AI Super Sampling.

The media engine of Meteor Lake is in the SOC tile and supports up to 8k60 10-bit HDR encode and decode of MPEG2, AVC, VP9, HEVC and AV1. The display engine is also in the SoC tile and supports HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 20G with up to 8K60 HDR.

The GPU Tile of the Meteor Lake chip is manufactured at TSMC on 5nm (5N process).

AMD Radeon RX 6550S

The AMD Radeon RX 6550S is a mobile entry-level graphics card based on the Navi 24 chip (RDNA 2  architecture) manufactured in the modern 6nm process. It features 1024 cores (16 CUs - compute units) and 4 GB of fast GDDR6 graphics memory connected with a 64 Bit memory bus. The chip also includes 16 MB Infinity Cache. The game clock speed is specified at 2170 MHz. Low power version of the Radeon RX 6550M with lower clock speeds (-15%) and a lower maximum TGP (-37%).

The performance should be similar to an average RX 6500M, as long as the memory bandwidth reduction wont has a too big impact.

The Navi 24 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 6nm process and should offer a good energy efficiency. The RX6550S is specified at a TDP of 35 - 50 Watt and therefore well suited for thin and light laptops.

AMD Radeon RX 6800S

The AMD Radeon RX 6800S is a mobile high-end graphics card for gaming laptops. It uses the Navi 23 chip based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. It uses all 2,048 shaders (= 32 CUs), 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs and therefore is similar to the desktop Radeon RX 6700 XT. The 128 Bit memory system connects 8 GB GDDR6 with 2 GHz memory clock. Furthermore, the RX6800S includes 32 MB Infinity Cache. The RX 6800S is the power saving variant of the RX 6800M and features slower clock speeds and a lower TDP.

Due to the lower clock speed, the performance should be lower than the RX 6800M. AMD specified the performance between the low power variants of the RTX 3070 (80-100W) and RTX 3080 (80-100W, former Max-Q).

The Navi 22 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 7nm process. Thanks to the reduced TDP, the 6800S is suited for thin gaming laptops.