Intel was originally expected to release its Arc desktop graphics cards at some point last January/February. Given that it’s now August with nothing still yet to be seen (outside of China), however, it seems abundantly clear that something hasn’t gone entirely according to plan here. With recent sources claiming that the release cycle would begin before the end of this month, however, it did seem that after long last Intel Arc desktop graphics cards were finally set to arrive.
Or are they? – Following an official Blog post, Intel has potentially suggested that although they are still due to be released before the end of this year, we may be looking more towards November/December than, say, this month!
Intel Again Gets Coy With Arc Desktop GPU Release Dates
Now I might be putting two and two together and coming up with five here. Given the prominence of the event, however, if Intel Arc desktop graphics cards were arriving within the next month, I suspect that they would’ve been a little more on the nose in suggesting so. – Based on the comments, however, Intel is stubbornly sticking with ‘before the end of the year’ which potentially indicates one of two possibilities:
- Intel is still having problems with the hardware, drivers, or both (There are additional rumours recently of poor quality chipsets which has led a ‘major’ AIB to withdraw)
- Intel is still attempting to discern exactly where these GPUs are going to sit in the pecking order, and, by proxy, what kind of price they should carry
What Do We Think?
With the Arc A380 available to purchase right now in China, it does continue to seem that a Western release is still imminent. Based on these new comments, however, it’s hard to deny that even senior members at Intel are entirely sure when it’s going to happen. – Overall, putting the question marks of hardware and driver issues to one side, it almost feels like they’re waiting for something significant to happen or change. What that is though, I have no idea!
As noted at the start though, these GPUs are pretty much 6 months overdue as things stand right now. At this point though, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that these don’t arrive before early 2023!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
Poor drivers were expected – you can’t expect a decade and more of poor integrated graphics drivers to suddenly be polished up and be good discrete graphics drivers within a couple of years. But this is fixable.
The hardware bugs are a bigger problem. Seems they only exhibit at higher clock speeds perhaps, so mobile and ‘workstation’ GPUs may be unaffected. But desktop, which needs higher clock speeds to compete against next generation Nvidia and AMD GPUs, is sorely affected.
But Intel needs to plug on. It was never going to be a simple job, and a huge part of the future of silicon is in massively parallel computation on GPUs, and they need a competitive product here, as AMD and Nvidia are building more complete solutions for the entire marketplace. Similarly, AMD needs to up its discrete AI products.