We’ve been waiting for Intel to release its Arc Alchemist graphics card lineup for some time now. After reports suggested that we could see these cards sometime in spring, we now have confirmation on that. Intel has launched a page on its website that teases an event for March 30 where we’ll see the laptop variant of one of the GPUs. Alongside the announcement, a short description says “see Intel Arc graphics take center stage and get a first look at our new discrete graphics for laptops.”
Of course, there’s a fairly big ‘desktop GPU’-shaped elephant in the room here as well. There’s still no exact date for when we can expect Intel’s Arc desktop graphics cards. We do have a broad window though since Intel previously mentioned that these cards will release sometime in Q2 2022. So we may get an announcement sometime in April, May, or June. Intel is committed to shipping at least four million units by the end of the year, so if all goes to plan, there should be plenty of graphics cards to go around.
Laptops get to go first
We know there’s an announcement coming for Intel Arc graphics in laptops by the end of the month, but Intel hasn’t said too much more beyond that. Lisa Pearce, vice president and general manager for the Visual Compute Group, did however answer a few questions. In fact, she revealed that the Intel A370M will be the first of the company’s lineup to come to market.
This card will apparently have double the performance against integrated graphics. The claim was specifically in reference to Metro Exodus running at 1080p on DX12 with an unspecified frame rate and at a medium graphics preset.
Obviously, we’ll need to wait for the release of the A370M before some more rigorous testing can be done. It will be interesting to see how Intel’s long-awaited Arc Alchemist graphics perform compared to the competition, and what type of pricing Intel can offer.
It’s been a busy year for Nvidia too, as more information on the RTX 40 Series has been making the rounds, as well as early leaks for AMD’s RDNA 3 Radeon graphics cards. But for now, keep an eye out for more information on Intel’s ARC laptop graphics announcement on March 30.
