We’re into the second half of the year and Intel still has not launched its much anticipated Arc Alchemist GPUs. We were beginning to doubt if they were still releasing them this year. Fear not, they are. And now we know what they might look like.
Intel recently held its Intel Extreme Masters tournament in Dallas, Texas. It was the first American tournament since the pandemic ground life to a halt and it chose this tournament to reveal the cooler designs for its reference Arc Alchemist GPUs.
C’mon Intel, give us the goods
Intel @ @IEM
Look at what made an appearance! 👀
Come by the ARC booth and check it out in action pic.twitter.com/vrscP08rHG— Bryce_GfxDriverGuru (@theBryceIsRt) June 3, 2022
Intel’s “Arc Community advocate”, who goes by @theBryceIsRt on Twitter, posted a few pics of the card. The card is positioned so as to not give away what display outputs it supports. But we can see a two-fan shroud and eight- and six-pin power connectors. It seems they’ve changed somewhat since the reference design leaked last year.
We saw a whole lot of news around Intel’s GPU offerings at the beginning of the year. Benchmarks comparing the flagship card to Nvidia’s RTX 3070 leaked and a date was given for the launch of the first GPUs. Intel did launch two GPUs on the announced date. But, unfortunately for almost everyone, they were the discrete laptop GPUs that no one asked for.
That bit of trickery didn’t leave a good taste in the mouths of fans. In the following months, things went a bit quiet. No big news or any other possible launch dates have turned up. The latest delays are to do with software and driver problems, apparently.
Intel probably doesn’t want to wait too long or it’s going to come up against Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series cards and whatever AMD has in store for us towards the end of the year. That will be quite the risk from Team Blue.
Source: PC Gamer