Intel to reveal Arc Alchemist laptops at March 30 event
Intel Arc Alchemist is going to make a splash at the end of the month.
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It’s been a hot minute since we heard about Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs, and the company is looking to kick things off by launching their first discrete mobile GPU chip, the A370M on March 30th at their new event. While the company initially wanted the Arc Alchemist line of GPUs to appear before March, that statement appears to be holding true, if not cutting it a bit close for Team Blue. In a blog post by Lisa Pearce, VP of the Visual Compute Group at Intel, they answered some of the questions on everyone’s lips surrounding Intel’s impending entry into the world of discrete graphics chips. Most notably, why Intel is choosing to launch their laptop GPUs ahead of their desktop counterparts.
Why is Intel launching Arc Alchemist laptop chips ahead of desktop?
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to why Intel might be doing this aside from wanting to get the chips into as many hands as possible. With Intel shipping a huge number of laptops, they seem to want to penetrate that market first, but the rest of the answer that we get from Lisa Pearce appears to be a load of PR gobbledygook that doesn’t really give anyone a straight answer. This could be due to wanting to have a staggered rollout throughout the year, with the company instead able to hit multiple months of the PR cycle and larger events such as Computex in order to hit the release windows that they’re aiming for.
When are Intel Arc Alchemist desktop GPUs going to release?
Right now we have no official indications for when we might be able to see Intel Arc Alchemist desktop GPUs release. However, our best suggestions would point to competing directly against the likes of AMD and NVIDIA in Q3 and Q4. We’re expecting to see the desktop offerings rear their heads at Computex, with an official release around September of this year for the desktop variants.
When is the Intel Arc Alchemist event?
The Intel Arc Alchemist laptop event is on March 30th at 8 AM PT, and you’ll be able to tune in directly at Intel’s site here. don’t expect to find any desktop GPU news, only that we’re going to see several laptop SKUs of the Arc Alchemist GPU, in addition to announcing the partners that they will be working with in order to integrate it into their existing product stacks with new refreshes of laptops that contain the new Arc Alchemist GPUs instead of the Intel Iris Xe Graphics that we’ve seen so often beforehand. At the event, expect to see graphs containing the performance of the chips themselves in not only gaming workloads but also productivity ones, too.
How good are Intel Arc Alchemist laptop GPUs?
Intel additionally reports that you should see a 2x performance uplift in comparison to integrated graphics solutions, meaning that you’ll be able to get yourself a graphics solution that will boost performance workloads for gaming and creators. With Apple rapidly improving their silicon offerings, Intel needs to stay ahead in all areas, and Arc Alchemist is a huge part of ensuring that they are able to deliver high-end experiences when it comes to their laptops. The M1 chips are now fully rolled out, and Intel could stand to lose a significant amount of market share to Apple’s ARM-based solution. Unfortunately, until we manage to get our hands on one, we won’t be able to do apples-to-apples comparisons for identical workloads to see just how well Arc Alchemist stacks up against the competition.
Waht is Intel Project Endgame?
Project Endgame is what Intel calls their initiative to make cloud gaming platform similar to GeForce Now or Google Stadia. They aim to make gaming much more accessible to people worldwide, and that includes solutions that are not simply based on discrete silicon, with just milliseconds of latency, according to this blog post. They say that we should expect to see more from this initiative at intel later in Q2. This is an increasingly crowded market, with Amazon recently also having entered the fray with Amazon Luna. So, it remains to be seen if this is a viable option and strategy, if the biggest names in tech are already involved, then Intel will already be running behind the curve. We remain to be pretty sceptical about this particular project, until we get more details directly from Intel.
