Almost a year ago, Intel made a big announcement about its push into the dedicated graphics sector. Intel Arc would be the brand name for a new batch of gaming GPUs, going way beyond the company’s previous efforts and competing directly with Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon GPUs.
Arc is the culmination of years of work, dating back at least to 2017, when Intel raided AMD GPU architect Raja Koduri to run its own graphics division. And while Intel would try to break into an established and fiercely competitive market, it would benefit from the experience and massive install base the company had built up with its integrated GPUs.
Intel tried to prove its commitment to Arc by showing off a years-long roadmap, with four separate named GPU architectures already in the pipeline. Of course, the GPUs wouldn’t compete with top-end GeForce and Radeon cards, but they would appeal to the crucial mainstream GPU market, and high-end cards would follow once the brand became more established.
All of that makes Arc a lot more serious than Larrabee, Intel’s latest attempt to break into the specialty graphics market. Larrabee was canceled late in its development due to delays and disappointing performance, and Arc GPUs are real things you can buy (if only on a limited basis, for now). But the challenges of entering the GPU market have not changed since the late 2000s. Breaking into a mature market is difficult, and experience with integrated GPUs does not always apply to dedicated GPUs with more complex hardware and their own memory pool.
Regardless of the company’s plans for future architectures, Arc’s launch was messy. And while the company is making efforts to get those issues under control, a combination of performance issues, timing and financial pressures could jeopardize Arc’s future.
early turbulence
A year after the announcement, it seems that Arc is already on shaky ground. Intel has characteristically failed to meet its initial launch estimates, just managed to achieve a paper launch of two low-end laptop GPUs in Q1 (the original launch window), and failed to make it into the to follow up on generally available desktop maps in the second quarter. The company has been very candid about its struggles with drivers, which hurt the performance of the cards in older but still widely played games. And the graphics division is losing money at a time when revenues are tumbling over Intel.
And that’s exactly what happens in public. A report from the German-language Igor’s Lab claims that Intel’s board partners (those who would put the Arc GPU die on boards, package them and ship them) and the OEMs that would put Arc GPUs in their pre-built computers have become frustrated with the delays and lack of communication.
A lengthy, conspiratorial video from YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead goes even further, suggesting (using a combination of “internal sources” and speculation) that people in Intel’s graphics department are “lying” to consumers and others in the company about the state of the GPUs, that the first-generation Alchemist architecture has fundamental performance-limiting flaws, and that Intel has internal discussions about discontinuing Arc GPUs after the second-generation “Battlemage” architecture.
We reached out to Intel and several GPU manufacturers to see if they had anything to say about the matter; the short version is no – Intel has no news about release dates. Asus says it “[doesn’t] currently have something in the pipeline for Intel Arc on the North American side”, and other companies have not yet responded. For his part, Intel Graphics VP Raja Koduri has said publicly that “we are very committed to our roadmap” and that there will be “more updates from us this quarter” and “four new product lines by the end of the year”.
