If we were to wonder what hardware we are looking forward to the most in 2022, the answer would certainly be Intel’s ARC Alchemist GPUs. The simple fact that it is the entry of a new entrant in the gaming graphics card market is always good for users and also for knowing how Intel performs.
Intel ARC launch delay
Yes, Intel has just made a small change to the website of its ARC GPUs, specifically they have eliminated the reference where they confirmed the launch of these during the first quarter of 2022 to talk about what will happen sometime this year. This is at odds with the message that Intel itself communicated in its presentation at CES.
Intel’s message is confusing and contradictory regarding the release dates of its ARC GPUs. This is due to the fact that the first thing we will see will be the A350M and A370M GPUs in notebooksas you are belong to the input range. It is quite possible that we will see ultra-thin gaming laptops with these ARC family GPUs, however the devil is in the details.
During the presentation of the Core 12 for laptops, we could see performance comparisons between these processors versus the Tiger Lake-H using an RTX 3080 Mobile. By now we would expect Intel to show performance too with its new enthusiast gaming GPUs, the so-called DG2-512. The fact that they have not appeared in the benchmarks published by Intel itself makes us think that its implementation is greener than we thought and that, therefore, the launch of the Intel ARC has been delayed compared to the expected date .
OEM market takes precedence
The key to understanding Intel’s ARC lag as graphics cards is in its third-generation Evo platform. So far we have seen how Intel CPUs have been paired with NVIDIA or AMD GPUs, but especially the former. It is clear that with the company led by Pat Gelsinger playing all the rods they are going to want assemblers and laptop manufacturers to assemble computers with their own hardware, displacing their rivals in graphics cards.
As for the desktop OEM market, we do not know if Intel is going to deliver graphics cards to mount on their PCs or if not, it will happen as with the NUC 12 Enthusiast where there is an LGA1700 socket to mount an Intel Core 12 desktop, but the ARC GPU and its VRAM are soldered onto the board just like a laptop. If this were to occur then the waiting time in being able to get an Intel ARC Alchemist graphics card to mount in our PC cases would be extended even more.
With NVIDIA’s RTX 40 just months away from launch, we wonder if Intel’s ARC Alchemist will have arrived too late once they get our hands on it. In any case, Intel seeks to occupy the mid-range desktop and is very focused on gaming laptops for this year. Maybe we should wait for ARC Battlemage or DG3 for that heavy gauge graphics card.
