Last year, Intel launched its Arc line of discrete GPUs. Intel said at CES 2022 that Arc GPUs for laptops would be ready in Q1 2022. The availability of the company’s initial generation of graphics cards for desktops and workstations was not updated at the time. Arc GPUs for PCs will be available in Q2 2022, according to Intel. In addition, workstation graphics cards will only be available until Q3 2022, according to the business.
“Project Endgame,” a new, planned service for Intel’s Arc GPUs, will allow clients to stream access to Intel’s graphics cards for a “always-accessible, low-latency computing experience.” Although the particular processes remain unclear, it appears like Intel will allow customers to rent GPUs in the cloud, or possibly a full-fledged front-end gaming service similar to Nvidia’s GeForce Now subscription.
Aside from the mobile vs. desktop divide, there’s the matter of what kind of graphics hardware Intel plans to sell. We know that numerous Arc Alchemist GPUs are in the works, ranging from entry-level models with only 128 Vector Engines (previously known as EUs) to high-end variants with up to 512 VEs. Each VE has eight shader ALUs, allowing Intel to cover the range from 1,024 to 4096 “GPU cores.” That’s a much lesser number than AMD or Nvidia give at the top of the spectrum, with AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT topping out at 5,120 cores and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 giving 10,496.
Of course, differences in architectures play a role, but multiple leaks and reports imply that the entry-level Arc solutions will be comparable to the GTX 1650 Super and RX 6500 XT, while the fastest options would be comparable to the RTX 3070 and RX 6800 — give or take. We won’t know for sure until we get our hands on real hardware, which might suggest Intel will release desktop Alchemist around Computex 2022.
We expect Intel to ship considerably more laptop Arc GPUs than desktop Arc GPUs, and those will almost certainly be lower-spec 128 VE variants.
After Alchemist, Battlemage will be released between 2023 and 2024, followed by Celestial somewhere in 2024 or beyond range. Battlemage will be associated with future Meteor Lake and “Next Gen” CPUs, which will require a new CPU socket and motherboards, whereas Alchemist will be associated with existing Alder Lake and future Raptor Lake systems. One fascinating tidbit about Battlemage is that Intel is considering including a GPU tile in its standard processors.
