Intel At the in-house exhibition Intel ON Intel couldn’t avoid a status update on Arc – and ticked off the topic in a blog post the night before. The message: Arc for PCs has been further delayed. Only the smallest class, the A3, will hit the market in Q2 – in China through OEMs and systems integrators. A5 and A7 will follow “later in the summer”. In this case, too, OEMs and system integrators (SI), ie dealers who assemble computers, must be supplied first. Only then will the graphics cards be sold separately through retailers, according to Intel.
The launch of the Arc product has been more than bumpy so far: it was originally said that graphics cards for notebooks and desktops would be released in late 2021. Then the first quarter of 2022 was the target until Intel made it clear at an event on March 30, 2022: Only the variants for notebooks were officially presented in the first quarter, and desktop graphics cards should follow “in the summer”. To date, only the Intel Arc A370M is available in a Samsung notebook in South Korea, for which the first reasonably reliable benchmarks were published this week. Intel ON is now de facto admitting that “in summer 2022” the entry-level A3 series for gaming PCs will make its first appearance – and initially only through OEMs and SI in China. By the fall, however, there probably won’t be Intel Arc A5 and Arc A7 for desktops in traditional retail. This would disrupt the schedule of the performance, which had already been rescheduled several times. But that was to be expected in recent weeks.
We will launch our entry-level Intel Arc A-series desktop (A3) products in China through system builders and OEMs in Q2 first. Retail sales and retail components will soon follow in China as well. The proximity to board components and strong demand for entry-level discrete products make this a natural place to start. Our next step is to scale these products globally. The rollout of Intel Arc A5 and A7 desktop cards will begin globally with OEMs and system integrators later this summer, followed by component sales through global channels. information
In any case, Intel confirms that there were or are software problems (in the case of graphics cards, this mainly means driver problems). This has long been the dominant rumor and is also discussed in the ComputerBase community as the biggest weakness at Intel. The problem: Even if the raw performance is correct, the big question mark remains whether the performance can also be converted to FPS by the drivers in games.
In view of the continued slow start of Arc in notebooks, Intel cites another reason why there are no other variants on the market so far besides the Samsung notebook: the COVID situation in China has not helped to improve availability. From this month, however, more notebooks with a discrete Arc graphics card will be available. But even this is only about the small Arc-A3xx solutions that will be made available by Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, HP, and Asus. For faster variants, Intel also calls the period “summer” in this case.
Another delay ultimately fits into the overall picture Arc’s product launch has so far painted. Starting with the “big” fixes in late summer and fall, when both AMD and Nvidia are likely to showcase the next generation, is probably the worst possible time. Either way, the focus on OEMs and system integrators (SI) could help sell these cards, but the retail market should be just an afterthought.
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