Intel Arc May Miss Q1 2022 Launch Window

Just days after reaffirming its plan to launch Arc Alchemist discrete graphics processors in the first quarter of this year, Intel quietly removed any mention of Q1 from its website, leaving only 2022. Could this mean a delay for Intel's standalone GPU? We asked Intel for clarification, and it told us, "We are targeting the first Alchemist products to be in market in Q1 2022" (emphasis ours). That leads us to some speculation about the pending release.

Intel recently removed all mentions of Q1 2022 for the Arc Alchemist launch from its website, as noticed by VideoCardz. Right now, Intel's Arc graphics solutions — hardware, software, and services — are said to be "coming 2022." Just days ago, they were set to arrive in Q1 2022. It sounds like some of them will indeed be available in the first quarter, but it looks like Intel wants to focus on delivering mobile GPUs, so we expect GPUs with 128 execution units (EUs, now also called Vector Engines) to arrive first, with higher performance parts coming later.

Right now, it seems possible that Intel's highest-end discrete GPUs with 512 EUs and maybe even 256 EUs for desktops will not be released in the first quarter. Meanwhile, launches of notebooks based on the same hardware are not really aligned, so promising to release all Arc Alchemist solutions in Q1 does not make a lot of sense, as Intel cannot talk for its partners.

Let's dive a little bit deeper into the history of Intel's Arc Alchemist (aka Intel DG2) family and see how the company's rhetoric has changed in the last 1.5 years in a bid to explain why we think that the blue company intends to start rolling out its new lineup with mobile GPUs first and why promising Arc in Q1 is not something that Intel wants to do.

From Gamers First...
Intel confirmed development of its Xe-HPG architecture for GPUs aimed at gamers in August 2020, and a month after that rumors surfaced that the company was looking at Q4 2021 as a possible launch timeframe for graphics cards based on the Xe-HPG. Back in 2020, Intel's official rhetoric about Xe-HPG-based products was that they were going to compete against the best graphics cards based on GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

"We know at Intel that gamers are the hardest bunch to impress," said Raja Koduri (via EE Times), Intel's graphics chief. "They want products that have the best performance, best performance per watt, best performance per dollar, and the latest and greatest features. All at the same time. We had to leverage the best aspects of the three designs we had in progress to build a gaming optimized GPU."

The rumor mill changed its tune early in 2021 and started to point at very early 2022 as a potential release timeframe for Intel's DG2 desktop family. Eventually, Intel confirmed that its Arc Alchemist GPUs would be available in Q1 2022, but rumors indicated that the company delayed actual desktop product launch from CES 2022 to March 2022.