Intel aims to ship more than four million discrete GPUs this year

• Intel also has begun work on its ultra-enthusiast gaming architecture, Celestial.
• The tech giant also announced a new program–Project Endgame–an upcoming cloud GPU service.

Since last year, there have been rumors that Intel will soon make its debut in the discrete graphics card space. The chip giant even teased that its Arc lineup will be the brand to take on NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon when it arrives this year. This week, Intel finally unveiled its first generation Arc Alchemist GPUs, with first delivery for desktop expected to take place as early as April.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger during the company’s Investor Day 2022 this week revealed  more information on its upcoming line of consumer graphics cards, the Arc series. He confirmed that the Arc Alchemist GPUs will be coming to the notebook segment in the first quarter this year.

While desktops will get the discrete graphics card update by the second quarter of 2022, workstations will get the first Arc Alchemist powered products by the third quarter of 2022, according to Gelsinger.

As originally announced last August, Intel’s Arc brand will serve as the company’s foothold into a market, taking on GPU giants AMD and Nvidia. Intel also emphasized that it entered the space with the Arc brand for the long term. In fact, its GPUs will span “multiple hardware generations,” under the codenames “Battlemage,” “Celestial,” and “Druid.” 

Alchemist is only the beginning! Work has already begun for the next few years for #IntelArc GPUs. Intel Deep Link will harness our CPU, integrated graphics, and discrete GPU goodness to boost performance. https://t.co/x3WfKDcSkM pic.twitter.com/QWmWbIjoc8

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) February 17, 2022

What do we know about the Arc Alchemist GPUs by Intel?

Besides the release date, Intel under its Arc Graphics Timing and Roadmap reckons that its Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG) expects to ship more than four million discrete GPUs in 2022.

Industry experts reckon that the Arc Alchemist isn’t aiming to compete with the best graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia in terms of raw performance just yet, but will instead target the lower-end of the market at first.

In addition to Arc Alchemist, it looks like Intel is also well underway on the development of its next-generation Arc graphics architecture. In short, Alchemist will be followed by a next-generation Arc GPU code-named Battlemage in the 2023-2024 timeframe, followed by a future generation code-named Celestial in 2024. Intel also says that it has started architecture design work on Celestial, “a product that will address the ultra-enthusiast segment.”

Intel’s head of Accelerated Compute Systems and Graphics Group Raja Koduri said, Celestial will provide performance leadership for GPUs in every segment Intel competes in, from low-power mobile devices to high-performance workstations.

Besides all of the above, Intel also announced that it plans to offer a new ecosystem known as Project Endgame which will allow consumers to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible and low-latency computing experience. 

“Project Endgame will enable users to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience. Project Endgame will be available later this year.” the company said.