Almost a year ago, Intel made a big announcement about its breakthrough into the dedicated graphics business. Intel Arc will be the brand name for a new batch of gaming GPUs, going far beyond the company’s previous efforts and directly competing with Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD Radeon GPUs.
Arc is the culmination of years of work dating back to at least 2017, when Intel poached AMD GPU architect Raju Koduri to lead its own graphics division. And while Intel struggles to break into an established market with fierce competition, it will benefit from the experience and gigantic install base that the company has built with its integrated GPUs.
Intel has been keen to prove its commitment to Arc by showing off a multi-year roadmap with four separate named GPU architectures already in development. Of course, the GPUs won’t compete with high-end GeForce and Radeon cards, but they will address the all-important mainstream GPU market, with high-end cards to follow as the brand becomes more well-known.
All of this makes Arc much more serious than Larrabee, Intel’s latest foray into the dedicated graphics market. Larrabee was discontinued late in development due to delays and poor performance, and Arc GPUs are the real thing you can buy (albeit in limited quantities, for now). But the challenges of entering the GPU market haven’t changed since the late 2000s. Breaking into a mature market is difficult, and experience with integrated GPUs doesn’t always apply to dedicated GPUs with more sophisticated hardware and their own memory pool.
Regardless of the company’s plans for future architectures, Arc’s launch has been a mess. And while the company is making some efforts to address these issues, a combination of performance, timelines and financial pressures could threaten Arc’s future.
early turbulence
A year after the announcement, it seems that Arc is already on shaky ground. Intel showed a characteristic failure to meet its initial launch estimates, narrowly managing a paper launch of two low-cost laptop GPUs in the first quarter (initial launch window) and failing to catch up with widely available desktop cards in the second quarter. The company has been public about driver issues that slow down the card’s performance in older but still popular games. And the graphics division is losing money at a time when company revenues are falling.
And that’s just what happens in public. A German-language report by Igor’s Lab claims that Intel’s board partners (those who will place Arc GPU dies on boards, package them, and ship them) and OEMs who will install Arc GPUs in their finished computers are frustrated by delays and lack of communication.
YouTube blogger Moore’s Law is Dead long conspiratorial video goes one step further, suggesting (using a combination of “inside sources”and speculation) that people in Intel’s graphics division are “lying”to consumers and other company employees about the state of the GPUs, that the first generation Alchemist architecture has fundamental performance-limiting deficiencies, and that Intel is in internal discussions to discontinue Arc GPUs after the second generation “Battlemage”architecture.
We contacted Intel and several GPU manufacturers to see if they have anything on this; short version – no – Intel has no news on release dates. Asus states that it “does not currently have anything in development for the Intel Arc on the North American side”and other companies have yet to respond. For his part, Raja Koduri, Intel VP of Graphics, publicly stated that “we are very committed to our roadmap”and that “we will get more updates this quarter”and “four new product lines by the end of the year.”