[Hardware] Intel Arc GPU Rumors: Desktop Graphics Card Roadmap, AIB Designs, Alchemist Refresh & An Official Q3 Shipping Date

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Intel's Arc GPU lineup and the subsequent graphics products have faced major controversy ever since the lineup missed its initial launch schedule in 2021. Now some internal documents & a list of leaked roadmaps regarding the Arc graphics card lineup have been shared by Moore's Law is Dead which might give a sense of what's really going on at Intel's Graphics Division.

Intel Arc GPUs & Desktop Graphics Cards Allegedly "Original" Roadmap Detailed, Lineup Faces Major Delay, Talks of Refreshes & Cancellations

Intel Graphics' original marketing team was led by Chris Hook who stated that the first discrete graphics products will be available by 2020. Two years have passed since and the GPU lineup is far from public availability. The Graphics division is still spearheaded by Raja Koduri, a brilliant & highly ambitious, and visionary engineer who's applauded for his work by his former employer, AMD. Joining the ranks of Intel's Graphics marketing team were Tom Petersen (former technical marketing manager at NVIDIA) and Ryan Shrout (Chief Editor at PCPerspective).

 

Both Intel reps have been doing rounds over at YouTube and social channels to provide us an update on their current and upcoming Arc GPUs but while we have been told that Arc discrete graphics cards are getting ready for a major launch later this summer, things may not be going as planned for Intel's Graphics division.

 

 

Intel Arc Roadmap: July Launched Pushed Back To September?

As Moore's Law is Dead points out with several alleged documents & roadmaps that come directly from Intel, it looks like the Arc discrete graphics card lineup may have slipped past its original time-frame massively. In an Arc Graphics Desktop SKU schedule, we can see that a global launch of the lineup was scheduled by the end of July and would've included a total of four products for desktop consumers. This was supposed to be a hard launch with global availability of Arc GPUs from OEMs & SIs while a DIY launch was expected around the end of August.

The same roadmap also states that Intel's Arctic Sound-M, a lineup that was originally going to be on a far grander scheme with multiple high-end workstation SKUs planned under the Xe-HP brand but was later canned, would be launching on 26th July but only yesterday, Intel provided another teaser of its Arctic Sound-M discrete GPUs which will be incorporated within server racks from OEMs such as Supermicro. So this kind of makes the roadmap believable considering there was something on Intel's graphics roadmap agenda that happened close to the expected date.

 

Our data center GPU code-named Arctic Sound-M has started production and is now shipping to customers supporting a diverse range of workloads, starting with media streaming and cloud gaming, followed by support for AI visual inference and virtual desktops.

Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, Q2 2022 Earnings Call

An interesting event is known as the "Desktop Launch Event: The Arc Experience" was also planned close to SIGGRAPH 2022 in the coming month which would've included press deep dives and a customer showcase panel. That may have been slipped to late September as the only customer showcase that Intel themselves has talked about is the "Intel Truck" with several Arc-powered PCs which will be heading out to LANFest though that event is scheduled for late September.