A report dropped over the weekend saying that Intel’s Arc discrete graphics card have effectively been cancelled. Intel jumping in as a 3rd player in the discrete GPU market has been rocky to say the least. First you have stiff competition from AMD and NVIDIA, then there were the delays, reports of pretty poor performance and driver issues, and finally a pretty rough economy around the world.
It is no wonder that this isn’t the first time we’ve heard something to the effect of “Intel Arc is cancelled”. Moore’s Law is Dead dropped this news in their latest video saying that “once Alchemist is out, you should be surprised if they do anything besides…. maybe…. some limited re-productions of low volume early next year, and then that’s basically it. There are high-level discussions going on regarding the cancellation of dedicated desktop Arc cards, datacenter stays for now, but the dedicated gaming card line may be canceled before Celestial even gets a chance”
Igor Wallossek of Igor’s Lab has also said he’s talked to potential distributors, and manufacturers in the European area about Intel’s Arc cards, and there was not much interest. On top of that it is claimed that unlike AMD and NVIDIA, Intel could not give price guarantees and their RMA and return policies were far worse than their competitors.
Recently Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed that the company would not meet its internal target of selling four million Arc GPUs this year, which definitely is a big let-down. We also reported last week that Intel could exit other businesses that are not profitable, and Arc could definitely be one of them.
It will be really interesting to see what happens from here. As a gamer and consumer you want to have a 3rd choice and that only makes the competition stronger, which inevitably is a good thing.
