The Arc desktop graphics cards from Intel might be delayed further and this delay might be carried forward to as late as September. We are fearing now that by the time these are officially released, they might be outdated already. In this fast paced market, no one should be able to afford such delays. Intel has officially announced that they don’t see these cards being available soon.
So far, these Arc A-Series products will only be made available to the Chinese system integrators and OEMs. They were expected to be available this quarter but we will be waiting till September for a global release. In a piece of short blog news, this news was confirmed by Intel’s Visual Compute Group Vice President Lisa Pearce. She said, “Intel Arc A5 and A7 desktop cards will start worldwide with OEMs and system integrators later this summer, followed by component sales in worldwide channels.”
She further said “During our evaluation of this feature, we decided to go a step further and implement a system to allow users to control collections of our driver-based optimizations, including memory management options, constant folding, and others. We will collect related toggles into groups to allow end-user customization.”
There are growing concerns that the Arc’s competitiveness might be lost by the time of the release. Seems like this won’t be an easy time for Intel as it decides to venture into an extremely competitive field that is already dominated by two other giants.