Intel Confirms ARC A770, A750 As Scavenger Hunt Prizes

Remember when Intel quietly kicked off a “special” Scavenger Hunt event last year, where 300 lucky winners would be rewarded with one of the chipmaker’s latest ARC Alchemist graphics card, as and when they become available? Well, it’s been close to a year now, and the brand recently confirmed what those 300 cards were: the ARC A770 and A750 Limited Editions.

As a quick recap, the Scavenger Hunt that occurred in October last year happened for just a few weeks and was part of Intel’s effort in hyping up interest for its ARC GPUs, which was just known as Xe HPG back then. The rules were more or less straightforward: participants would have to answer a series of questions, with each correct answer earning them points. Simply put, the more points players had, the greater the likelihood of them becoming the winner.

As mentioned earlier, Intel limited the number of winners of the Scavenger Hunt to just 300 people. Of the 300, 100 would receive the “Premium” ARC Alchemist GPU, which we now know to be the A770 Limited Edition, while the remaining 200 would receive the “Performance” model, which is the A750 Limited Edition.

Intel’s confirmation comes less than a week after the A770 Limited Edition itself was shown off in its full glory at the headquarters of popular TechTuber, Linus Sebastian, via the official Linus Tech Tips channel. Specs-wise, there still isn’t much to say about the GPU officially, but it is likely to be using a full-fat ACM-G10 GPU, along with 32 Xe-Cores and as much as 16GB GDDR6 graphics memory.

As for its performance, the top-tier Intel card was able to run “Tier 1” titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 2021 at 1440p (2560 x 1440) resolution at relatively high framerates, although that was explained to be due to the fact that Intel’s ARC team had targetted the new API standards hard, in order to make it run as smooth as it did.

Unfortunately, there still isn’t much to say about the performance of the Intel A750 Limited Edition, beyond the official video of the card’s performance, which again, has since been made private.

For that matter, there’s still no official pricing for both the ARC A770 Limited Edition or A750 Limited Edition, although Intel’s Tom Petersen did say that it plans on offering “killing” prices that will make its competitors rethink their own pricing strategy.

Intel To Kick Off Scavenger Hunt for Xe HPG Graphics Later This Week

On the surface, the teaser 33-second clip looks unassuming and simply looks like very much like a visual effects artist’s impression of the Xe-LP GPU, that then gets hit by a beam of light and transforms it into the Xe-HPG GPU. Of course, thanks to some eagle-eyed sleuths on the internet, it’s become clear that there is more to the clip’s theatrical display.

If you paused the clip around the 17 and 18-second mark, you’ll see the code “79.0731W” appear at the bottom-right corner of the base of the chip’s platform. Then, at the 22-second mark, the video shows four lines of binary code.

As it stands, the first line of code has yet to be deciphered, but speculation suggests that the last two digits are the number of weeks left until the Xe-HPG’s launch, meaning that we could be looking at a November launch.

As for the four lines of code, those have already been cracked, thanks to one internet user who goes by the name “duckofdeath”. Each line of code was apparently a binary number and when strung together, they produce an IP address: 35.160.237.208. Copy that address into your search bar, and you’re immediately transported to the Intel Xe-HPG Scavenger Hunt page.

Sadly, the buck temporarily stops there for the moment, with the message that the event kicks off on 26 March and we need to come back with the “secret code”. At the time of writing, there doesn’t seem to be any more clues from the current teaser but having said that, if this truly is a scavenger hunt, then it’s possible Intel will release another teaser clip between now and the kick-off date.