PC hardware manufacturer Acer announced today on Twitter that it will officially enter the independent GPU market with its own brand Intel Arc GPU. The company will enable its gaming-oriented Predator brand to launch its own Intel Arc A770, the Predator BiFrost.
Despite working with the latest independent GPU manufacturers, Acer's attempts in the independent GPU space mark an interesting entry point of view – at least from a design standpoint.
The new Arc A770 BiFrost uses asymmetric dual fans and has added industrial design details such as RGB lighting. The design of the card is a bit reminiscent of the NVIDIA's design for its founder version, with some visible screws breaking the visual coherence. It also uses a dual 8-pin power supply circuit, proving that its performance will certainly be more powerful than the Intel public version of Arc A770.
Acer is known for its prefabricated desktops, laptops and monitors, and now seems to want to get into the standalone GPU market. Unfortunately, the news from Acer's release today lacks details; there is only a rendering of a graphics card, and there is no actual specifications about whether the company will offer the 8GB Arc A770, its 16GB variant, or both. Whether the company intends to extend its tentacles to other Arc models, even other manufacturers such as AMD and NVIDIA is also not known, but it is understandable to try from easy to difficult at a single supplier in the first place. GPU is a slightly more complex board component on a personal computer, and the company will definitely tend to try the waters first rather than investing completely in this area that is still unfamiliar to them.
Of course, we still hope that the company will take the ASUS /Gigabyte approach, providing graphics cards from different manufacturers rather than just one. It seems that some companies are stepping up further filling the market space of GPU board business, and even in other companies such as EVGA, which has been engaged in GPU for a long time, just announced its breakup with NVIDIA.
