Following confusion about when these graphics solutions will be available, Intel has confirmed that its Arc Alchemist laptop GPUs will be available in laptops in the “coming weeks”.
In March, when Intel announced its first Arc 3 mobile GPUs, they said they’d be available in gaming laptops by the end of the month (March 30 is the exact date), but they’ve yet to be seen – at least not in most regions.
As a result, when Intel Graphics tweeted about some of the innovative features of these GPUs, an Arc laptop purchaser asked: “But when can we actually purchase them?””””
The Intel Support account responded that they’d be “available for purchase by the end of the second quarter of 2022”, but then clarified that this was not the case.
Is the near future not looking good then?
At the end of March when Intel announced that laptops with Arc GPUs would be available right away, as the first Alchemist products were unveiled, we assumed this would mean North America. Thus far, the GPUs have only been available in Korea, and this is a week and a half after launch, with no sign of them appearing elsewhere.
Intel would have provided a more optimistic launch timeline suggestion if shipping in other regions was going to happen in the coming weeks – like next week for example. Therefore, we might have to wait some time before laptops with Arc 3 GPUs are available in the US, Europe, and other regions – maybe not until the end of Q2, but maybe as late as May.
Technically, Intel was right to say Arc notebooks would start arriving immediately, but it’s clear there’s a lot of disappointment outside of Korea that the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro – presumably the system Intel is referring to in its tweet – isn’t yet available abroad, and probably won’t be for a long time.
Hopefully, the Arc desktop graphics cards won’t run a similar course with a faulty launch and floundering availability afterward, though the rumor mill has hinted that Intel will shoot for good quantities of stock before anything else. I am crossing my fingers on that score.
