Almost a year ago, Intel made a big announcement about its push into the dedicated graphics business. Intel Arc would be the brand name for a new batch of gaming GPUs, far surpassing the company’s previous efforts and directly competing with Nvidia GeForce GPUs and AMD Radeons. Arc is the culmination of several years of work, dating back to at least 2017, when Intel tapped AMD GPU architect Raja Koduri to lead its own graphics department. And while Intel would be trying to break into an established and fiercely competitive market, it would benefit from the experience and giant install base the company had cultivated with its integrated GPUs. Intel sought to demonstrate its commitment to Arc by showing off a multi-year roadmap, with four separate branded GPU architectures already in the pipeline. Sure, the GPUs wouldn’t compete with top-of-the-line GeForce and Radeon cards, but they would appeal to the critical mainstream GPU market, and high-end cards would follow once the brand was established. All of this makes the Arc much more serious than the Larrabee, Intel’s latest attempt to enter the dedicated graphics market. Larrabee was canceled late in its development due to delays and disappointing performance, and Arc GPUs are real things you can buy (albeit in a limited way, for now). But the challenges of entering the GPU market haven’t changed since the late 2000s. Entering a mature market is difficult, and experience with integrated GPUs isn’t always applicable to dedicated GPUs with more complex hardware and their own memory pool. Regardless of the company’s plans for future architectures, the Arc’s launch was messy. And while the company is making some efforts to own these problems, a combination of performance issues, timing and financial pressures could threaten Arc’s future. Advertising
Early turbulence
A year after its announcement, it looks like the Arc is already on shaky ground. Intel has proved characteristically unable to meet initial launch estimates, only managing to make a print release of two low-end notebook GPUs in Q1 (the original launch window) and failing to follow through with widely available desktop cards in Q2. The company has highly publicized its driver-to-driver battles, which hurt the performance of cards in older but widely played games. And the graphics department is losing money at a time when revenue is falling across the company. And this is exactly what happens in public. A report from German-language Igor’s Lab claims that Intel’s board partners (those who would put the Arc GPU dies on the boards, package and ship them) and OEMs who will put the Arc GPUs into their pre-built PCs are frustrated with the delays and the lack of communication. A long, conspiratorial video from YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead goes even further, suggesting (using a combination of “inside sources” and speculation) that people in Intel’s graphics division “lied” to consumers and others at the company about the situation of the GPU, that the first-generation Alchemist architecture has fundamental performance-limiting flaws, and that Intel is having internal discussions about discontinuing the Arc GPU after the second-generation “Battlemage” architecture. We reached out to Intel and several GPU manufacturers to see if they had anything to share on the matter. the short version is no—Intel has no news on release dates. Asus says it”[doesn’t] they currently have something in the works for Intel Arc on the North American side” and other companies have yet to respond. For his part, Intel’s vice president of graphics Raja Koduri has publicly stated 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.”
