You’ll have to wait a little longer for Intel’s Arc desktop graphics cards. On Thursday, following rumors the GPUs had been delayed, Intel confirmed that the products won’t arrive until the second quarter of 2022.
Intel previously said the Arc PC graphics technology would arrive in Q1. But ahead of an annual investors meeting, the chipmaker is now clarifying that only the laptop-based Arc graphics will launch in the first quarter.
“OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) are introducing notebooks with Intel Arc graphics, code-named Alchemist, for sale in the first quarter of 2022,” the company said. “Intel will ship add-in cards for desktops in the second quarter and workstations by the third quarter.”
The news will disappoint PC builders still struggling to buy a GPU during the ongoing chip shortage. The Arc products were actually supposed to launch last year before Intel postponed the launch to Q1. To build the graphics cards, the company is tapping TSMC, the same manufacturer behind AMD's current lineup of Radeon RX 6000 GPUs.
Intel’s announcement does note it expects to ship 4 million Arc discrete GPUs, but it’s unclear how many will be for desktop PCs. For now, the company has only named companies including Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Alienware, and Samsung as vendors for upcoming Arc products.
The company also teased its long-term plans for the Arc graphics cards. Intel has already begun work on Celestial, a next-generation GPU that promises to “address the ultra-enthusiast segment,” the chipmaker said.
In addition, Intel signaled it’s working on a cloud gaming service to rival Nvidia's GeForce Now, which streams the game experience from company servers outfitted with graphics cards.
Project Endgame, currently scheduled to launch later this year, "will enable users to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience," according to Intel.