Intel confirms standalone Arc Graphics due in Q2, also ‘Project Endgame’ this year

Intel has confirmed some updates to their tech roadmap today and the good news is that Arc Graphics are on the way.

For notebooks, Intel Arc will be arriving in the first quarter of this year. We already mostly knew this though, as they confirmed that before. At least now though, we’re getting clearer info on standalone cards for desktops – which will be due out in Q2 (April – June). Intel think they will manage to ship “4 million” discrete GPUs in 2022 which would be across laptops, consumer desktops and workstations.

Not only that, they’ve begun work on what they’re calling Celestial, gearing up for the “ultra-enthusiast segment”, so those will likely be cards directly facing off against something like an NVIDIA 3080 Ti / 3090.

This is going to be great. Not only will we finally see what another major GPU vendor can bring to the table for competition, but also more GPUs on the market as a whole. Oh, and since it’s Intel, the drivers will be open source on Linux too of course which is fab.

Something else caught our eye in their press announcements — it’s called “Project Endgame”. Intel say it will allow users “to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience” and that will come at some point later this year. The keyword being users, so it’s for us regular folk – but for what? Well, cloud obviously.

In other news, Intel recently announced plans to acquire Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 Billion. Intel say it “creates a globally diverse end-to-end foundry to help meet growing semiconductor demand and brings more value to customers across the nearly $100 billion addressable foundry market”.