Intel’s Arc Alchemis series desktop graphics cards have been talk-of-the-town for quite a while, now. But these much-anticipated cards are going to be delayed again. Once upon a time, the cards were said to release in 2021. After that, the release date slipped to the second quarter of 2022 and then to the summer of 2022. And now, according to the sources, the Arc Alchemist series will be delayed again, at least until August, if not later.
According to the report, the new release date window for Intel’s desktop cards is between the beginning of July and the end of August. Delays such as this in this late stage of development are most likely not related to hardware but surely software-related. This could be a bit worrisome as the success of a graphics card is mostly dependent on the driver.
Surely, Intel is not taking this decision lightly. As if they lose this release window, there will be a very short time to establish themselves as the leading contender before Nividia and AMD’s next-gen cards hit the market. Which will be later this year.
It is speculated that the new Acr series cards will have a hard time matching the standards of the current generation GPUs. So, there surely is no hope for them to compete with the next-gen cards like Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace or AMD’s RDNA 3 cards.
But Intel still has a chance to be effective if they sell the cards at a very competitive price and aggressively go after the market share. The battle could be interesting or completely devastating.
Lastly, it is also speculated that the software is not the only reason for this late delay. It is possible that Intel is having issues with other aspects of card development like; after-market support, partner card development, game development, or integration.
Even if Intel is able to take care of all these, the driver still remains a critical issue. A fast launch will not be good if the card has a driver issue. Even Nvidia and AMD still get criticized for this. And they have engineers with decades of experience in this field. This just proves how massive the operation is.
Intel also doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to the timely release of driver updates. If they are trying to enter the gaming market, they need to be ready with driver updates from day zero. They just cannot afford to leave the gamers waiting when a game like God Of War comes out and there’s no optimized driver to support it.
Also, Intel announced that they are purchasing Siru Innovations last week. This is a Finnish company that specializes in graphics and software development. And this timely acquisition is the prove that Intel is committed and they are getting ready for release with new drivers.
Hopefully, Intel will manage to come out strong in the end. The market requires a 3rd vendor. Ultimately, if they get the launch right, it won’t matter how many times they have delayed.
