In an official blog post from Intel, the company revealed that its new Arc GPUs will be released in a staggered approach which will first give preference to the system builders and OEMs in China. The laptop chips are exclusive to Samsung laptops at present and it is hoped that it will be further expanded to other manufacturers too.
Intel reported that it is approaching laptop companies like Lenovo, Acer, HP, and Asus to release their laptops with Intel’s entry-level Arc 3 GPUs as soon as possible. The powerful Arc 5 and Arc 7 GPUs for laptops are planned for an early summer release. The company also blamed supply chain and software development for the delay.
As for the desktop GPUs, it is planning to release them in the second quarter and the first GPUs will be the entry-level Arc 3 available to the Chinese system builders and OEMs at the start. This means that it won’t be available to individual system builders at the release. The same pattern follows for the Arc 5 and Arc 7 desktop GPUs later this summer.
Back in February, Intel said that the GPUs will be available for Notebooks in the first quarter, Desktops in the second, and the workstations in the third. It also stated the reason for the staggered approach that it wanted the GPUs to work efficiently with the professional system builders, the Chinese market has a strong demand for such GPUs, and since the factories are present in China the transportation costs can be reduced.
What we infer from this release is that the new Intel Arc GPUs will not be available till the end of this summer in the US and EU markets. On the other hand, Nvidia is expected to release its new 4000 series graphics card and this will make the competition hard for Intel.