It seems that we’ll be waiting a little while longer to get our hands on any Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs, as leaked documents reveal that the company has missed some key dates in its graphics card roadmap. Worse still, reports are emerging that team blue is evaluating whether it should continue with plans to manufacture future generations of Arc pixel pushers.
According to internal presentation slides obtained by YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead, Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards from AIBs like Asus, MSI, etc. were scheduled to launch at the beginning of August. However, this doesn’t seem very likely at all, given the damning quotes from board partners that MLID has also sourced.
“To this day, we don’t know what’s going on,” says one AIB source, with another almost laughing off the idea that Intel Arc would launch this month, “we have no evidence it’s this quarter!” Meanwhile, an additional partner claims that it will “sit this gen out as much as it can without entirely burning bridges,” with its reasons being that the release is “taking too long, and we resent being strung along like this.”
Despite voicing plans to launch an Intel Arc graphics card every year until 2025, it seems that there are now “high-level discussions going on regarding the cancellation of dedicated desktop Arc cards.” Suffice to say, the future for team blue’s best graphics cards looks bleak.
We still don’t yet know when Intel Arc GPUs will launch, but CEO Pat Gelsinger has stated that we should still expect them in the third quarter of this year in a recent earnings report. Unfortunately, this may result in Alchemist pixel pushers going up against AMD RDNA 3 and RTX 4000 graphics cards, possibly leaving them somewhat dead on arrival in terms of performance.