Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs delayed, potentially cancelled

It’s been a rough road for Intel, and now its delayed Arc Alchemist graphics cards might be cancelled altogether, according to leaks from Moore’s Law is Dead.

Intel’s Arc Alchemist launch has been a total mess. After first claiming at the start of the year that this new tech will be released during spring, only one SKU materialized. After a recent press tour, the cards left something to be desired. With some significant driver issues reported by early reviewers, it looks like plans may have veered completely off-course.

Leaked documents in the above video are from Intel’s internal documents, and AIB board partners alike. According to certain slides, certain partners like MSI, Asus, and others were all originally planning models for Intel’s ill-fated Arc Alchemist launch.

However, after being subject to numerous delays, there are apparently now “high-level discussions going on regarding the cancellation of dedicated desktop Arc cards”.

Ouch. This doesn’t look good for Intel, who originally envisioned a multi-year plan for desktop GPUs, including ARC Battlemage and more.

Due to various things such as driver issues, and struggling to break the 100fps mark, as demonstrated by Igor’s Lab. They believe that this is possibly due to a hardware issue, meaning that this could potentially extend to other cards in the lineup, too.

Due to the frosty reception, AIB manufacturers have been left hanging on. One stated “To this day we don’t know what’s going on.”, another said “We are going to sit this gen out as much as we can without entirely burning bridges. It’s just taking too long, and we resent being strung along like this.”

The entry-level A380 is out in territories outside of the west. However, manufacturers still do not know when these cards will eventually launch. Intel hoped to have the SKUs out, with a global OEM launch in July.

Since we’re at the end of July, that’s clearly not happened, meaning that the fate of the cards lies entirely up in the air to this day.

Another source from within Intel as reported by Moore’s Law is Dead states; “I cannot confirm the cancellation of Discrete gaming ARC, but I also can’t say it isn’t being considered. It could be.”

The source continues; “What I can confirm is that no good news is coming out of the Graphics Division at the mid-level, and if they do cancel Battlemage [Intel’s next-gen GPU] – marketing will still hype up ARC until that decision is actually made.”

This ill omen is compounded by Intel’s Q2 2022 report, which states that the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics division has posted an operational loss of $507 million USD, according to its Q2 2022 Quarterly results.

Intel still reiterates that we will see Intel Arc GPUs released in Q3 2022, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Arc Alchemist was never intended to be a high-end slate, and now its release being potentially pushed into Q3 (if it even manages to get there) will make it go toe-to-toe with AMD’s RDNA 3 and Nvidia’s Lovelace graphics cards like the RTX 4090.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated on all the latest as we hear it, as Intel seemingly wades into incredibly troubled waters with their dedicated desktop GPU offering.