Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger confirmed this week that Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards will launch in Q2 2022.
"AXG [Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group] is on track," Gelsinger said. "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."
Back in February, Intel announced that "AXG expects to ship more than 4 million discrete GPUs in 2022” in an investor press kit before confirming that their launch would be delayed until May or June of this year.
Analysis: Will the Intel Arc Alchemist be worth the wait?
Though it’s pretty clear that Intel has launched the Arc Alchemist mobile GPUs first in order to test them out before the all-important PC launch, Intel’s flagship desktop GPU looks promising.
We saw reports back in January that Intel’s Arc Alchemist XE 512 GPU could rival the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti in power, with a leaked SiSoftware benchmark showing that the XE512 scored 9,017 Mpix/s compared to the RTX 3070 Ti’s 8,369 Mpix/s.
The rumor mill also revealed that the flagship desktop GPU could have as many as 4,096 Execution Cores with 16GB of VRAM and a clock speed of 2.1GHz, though it’s not clear whether that’s base or boosted.
Needless to say, we’re definitely looking forward to June 2022 when we can get our hands on these cards to test ourselves.
