Release dates are hard to trust these days, but Intel says its Arc series of discrete desktop graphics cards will arrive in the next few months, as promised.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who recently gave a troubling prediction about chip supply shortages, said late last week that the company’s desktop graphics cards would release in Q2, meaning sometime before July. He said more SKUs would arrive later in the year, suggesting the first batch of desktop cards would be released in waves, echoing the mobile launch.
“AXG [Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group] is on track. And we launched the mobile SKUs. We’ll have the desktop SKUs coming in Q2. And we’ll have more SKUs as we go through the year as well. We’ll be filling out the product line,” Gelsinger said in a financial call, as PC Gamer reports.
On the desktop side of things, Intel said the first GPUs would arrive this summer as a “limited edition” release. The card was revealed in a hype video, but we weren’t privy to any specs or performance benchmarks. All we know is that the component contains a dual-fan cooling system and has a sleek design with chrome trim (sadly, it’s not blue).
Interestingly, Gelsinger said in his financial call that there will be three versions: 5, 7, and 9—rather than 3, 5, and 7 as we expected. If we had to guess, these cards could be positioned as direct competitors to the RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 in terms of pricing.
