Intel Arc GPUs keep getting closer to release. At yesterday’s investor meeting, Intel confirmed that it will be shipping Arc mobile GPUs based on its Alchemist architecture in the first quarter of 2022, with desktop GPUs coming at some point in the second quarter. Later, in the third quarter, there will be GPUs for workstations.
Intel has released a few official details about any Arc GPU configurations or performance targets, although the leaked specs and benchmarks have given us a very general idea of what we can expect. Intel VP of Graphics Raja Koduri tweeted an image of an Arc GPU in a “Beast Canyon”NUC chassis running Shadows of the Tomb Raider from 2018, which means at least one of the GPUs will be physically small enough. to fit in this box. But prices, availability, and even what the cards will look like are unknown.
The company plans to ship at least 4 million GPUs across its desktop, laptop and workstation product lines in 2022, but that will only be a small part of the dedicated GPU market. Data from Jon Peddie Research (compiled by Tom’s Hardware) shows that Nvidia and AMD sold about 47 million desktop GPUs in the calendar year between Q4 2020 and Q3 2021, and that doesn’t include laptop GPUs.
It would be nice to have another viable option in the GPU market, but this small number won’t make much of an impact on the current GPU shortage.
As for the future of its graphics division, Intel has shared a rough release date for its next generation Battlemage and Celestial GPU architectures, which will be released in “2023-2024″and “2024+”respectively. Each architecture has a slightly higher performance goal than the previous one, although the competitiveness of these products will also be determined by the GPUs Nvidia and AMD will ship in the next few years. Battlemage GPUs will also be integrated into Intel’s “Meteor Lake”processors, the architecture that will be used in the 14th Gen Intel Core processors (assuming no latency and keeping current Intel naming conventions).
Intel also teased a cryptic GPU-related initiative called “Project Endgame,”a service that will offer Arc GPUs “through a service for always-on, low-latency computing.”It remains to be seen whether Endgame will be a cloud gaming service like Nvidia’s GeForce Now or a more workstation-oriented service offering GPU processing power.