QuickTake: Intel's Arc Enters the (Discrete GPU) Arena
It wasn't widely reported outside the tech press, but Intel just launched a major new product extension -- discrete graphics -- that will compete directly with Nvidia and AMD, and indirectly with Apple (and Qualcomm and MediaTek as they get further into PCs).
Intel has been teasing this for a while, but it's actually here, or close enough: you can preorder Samsung's Galaxy Book2 Pro with Arc 3 graphics today, with the laptop starting at $899. That laptop also has an incredible OLED display, so the price point is significant. Intel has already gotten lots of design wins from the rest of the PC vendors with products shipping over the next few months. Arc 5 and Arc 7 systems will be available for purchase this summer, and discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs are coming, too.
Arc is deeply integrated with Intel's latest CPU designs, and adds dedicated AI compute resources (which can be handy for any number of uses), hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding, image upscaling for graphics, ray tracing, new anti-tearing technology, and more.
It’s worth being somewhat skeptical, as Intel didn't provide competitive benchmarks. Still, on paper, Arc should provide some of the incredibly powerful content creation capability/speed we see on Apple's M1 architecture along with rich PC gaming experiences and software compatibility of the best Windows laptops. On laptops, that’s an intriguing combination. On desktop, Intel will have to provide closer performance to rivals to have a chance at …oh, who am I kidding — in this environment, if Intel can ship a not-as-good-as product — but actually ship it, it will sell.
I'm looking forward to testing the Galaxy Book2 Pro and other Arc systems. I'm sure that the incumbents (and Apple) will win on some benchmarks, but this is version 1.0, and GPU/AI competition is good!
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