Intel’s highly anticipated Arc GPUs have gotten a step closer to gamers’ hands: the company announced at CES 2022 that it’s already started shipping its first-generation Alchemist GPUs to OEM customers for desktop and laptop systems, including Acer, Asus, Clevo, Dell, Gigabyte, Haier, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, MSI, and NEC.
The Arc GPUs are a big deal for Intel, set to package the company’s new Xe graphics architecture into discrete laptop and desktop GPUs, marking the biggest foray yet for Intel (which is best known for its CPUs) into the graphics world. Arc GPUs promise support for high-level gaming and creative features, too, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and XeSS, Intel’s AI-accelerated supersampling. In short, Arc is Intel’s biggest effort yet to take on AMD and Nvidia’s GPU hegemony for both laptops and desktops.
Unfortunately, there’s still no word on when exactly the first computers with Intel’s Arc GPUs will be shipping, either in pre-built OEM desktops and laptops or for customers to buy on their own and integrate into their existing gaming rigs. Similarly, there’s no official word yet on crucial details like how many different models of Alchemist GPUs there will be, what the actual specs on the graphics cards are, or — most importantly — how much they’ll cost.
Intel also announced at CES 2022 that discrete Arc GPUs will be required on Intel Evo-branded laptops featuring its new 12th Gen H-series chips, so it’s likely that we’ll start to see at least mobile versions of the new graphics systems make their way out in the world in the coming months.