Intel CEO Says Arc Gaming GPUs Will Hit Retail, Somewhere

Pat Gelsinger holding in Arc A770 GPU.
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is shutting down rumors that Intel is closing its GPU development. In a tweet, Gelsinger wrote that he has received his own personal A770 from Intel graphics head Raja Koduri and that the company is "now getting [the] first batch of A770 cards ready for retail[.]"

(Click "See more" below to expand the tweet.)

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Once the A770 hits the market, it will mark an important step for Intel. The company has shipped mobile Arc GPUs in laptops, though they're only in a few models. The Arc 380 shipped first in China, and it was plagued with driver issues and faced poor reviews.

This led to rumors that Intel would drop GPUs on the back of news that Intel may exit more businesses in 2023. Last week, Koduri shrugged off the scuttlebut, and now Gelsinger is promising the A770 will ship.

What's not clear is where the A770 will ship. The A380 was only in China, and we haven't heard whether or not the A770, the first card Intel will ship with gamers in mind, will follow suit, or whether Intel will bring its Alchemist GPUs to the United States, Europe, and other international markets. That should be the plan, but is it still the plan?

Intel also doesn't have the best timing here. When Intel announced it was getting serious about GPUs, we were in the middle of a massive component shortage that made a third competitor in the space seem like a necessity. Getting one of the best graphics cards meant constantly refreshing online stores or waiting outside of brick and mortar retailers to avoid paying scalpers.

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This tweet comes as GPU prices from Nvidia and AMD are normalizing, often dropping below the suggested retail price as mining operations that focused on Ethereum are unloading their cards following the Merge. Furthermore, Nvidia is expected to announce at least some of the RTX 40-series graphics cards tomorrow during the fall GTC 2022 keynote.

Still, more competition in the space could be good. Intel has previously suggested the Arc A770 delivers stronger ray tracing performance than a GeForce RTX 3060 at 1080p on ultra settings. Combined with Intel's XeSS upscaling, it seems Intel won't be competing at the top-end, but may be able to balance between price and performance in the middle of the pack.

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

  • peachpuff
    Lets come back to this thread when they actually do ship.
    Day 1...
    Reply
  • AnonymousTechTips
    Who cares , just ship that <Mod Edit> over to reviewers and focus on real competitive high end GPUs for real. Talking and all is just marketing , real facts happens those things get inserted into a PC and are actually tested. And then there is the real price in markets ... To be seen...
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    Oh hey, look. Intel is good at executing damage control at least! I'm sure that was on track to be delivered checks notes ...last week only! Splendid!

    Regards.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    Somewhere in China , you know the place where they want to replace everything they buy from the "west" with something designed and built in China.
    Trying to keep your market share in China is a long term lose.
    Reply
  • waltc3
    Every one is right when they say that more competition on the GPU front is welcome...but unfortunately we do not see that from Arc. Gelsinger is not forthcoming about it--he's the guy that decides--my guess is that if it isn't competitive in a couple of iterations that Intel will pull it, and either start over or else drop it. If this is a good product announcement, then I don't want to see a bad one...;) Gelsinger seems to be laughing at the thing!
    Reply
  • ravewulf
    Of course, shipping the cards they already made doesn't mean they aren't going to severely cut back on their plans for Battlemage, Celestial, etc.
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    All eyes on this, is Intel going to stick with it or are MLID sources right and this is the beginning of the end of discrete Arc? Hope the drivers are maturing and I sure hope they have a good way to report bugs to improve them going forward.
    Reply
  • blacknemesist
    thisisaname said:
    Somewhere in China , you know the place where they want to replace everything they buy from the "west" with something designed and built in China.
    Trying to keep your market share in China is a long term lose.

    Much like we in EU would like to have our products not be blown out of proportion because we have to pay import taxes + VAT, that was Ok-ish when the euro was stronger than the dollar but now it is a slap in the face so internal development and manufacturing is the way to go.
    7950x at almost 900 euros? No thanks.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Intel also doesn't have the best timing here. When Intel announced it was getting serious about GPUs, we were in the middle of a massive component shortage that made a third competitor in the space seem like a necessity.
    With the five years stale re-heated performance AMD and Nvidia have launched to populate the low-end, the low-end is still in dire need of something around $180 that performs like an RTX3050. A doubled A380 with 8GB/128bits memory would be able to nail that spot.
    Reply
  • tek-check
    Is anyonhe able to test or verify that ARC GPUs can really output 40 Gbps signal from their alleged DisplayPort 2.0?
    Reply