Preparations for the release of Intel Arc Alchemist graphics accelerators have long been out of schedule. Discrete video cards Arc A770 and A750 were supposed to appear at the end of last year, but their announcement has not yet taken place. As it turned out, the delay is largely due to the closure of the Russian office of Intel.
Details regarding the processes taking place in the graphics direction of Intel, shared well-known IT-journalist Charlie Demerjian. According to him, initially Intel was going to release discrete graphics cards of the Arc Alchemist family at the end of last year. However, covid restrictions did not allow this plan to be implemented – due to forced downtime, the company’s production partner was unable to produce samples of video cards by the deadline.
Then the announcement of the Arc A-series accelerators was shifted to the second half of the first quarter, but this plan was not destined to come true either. He broke due to the fact that at the beginning of spring Intel stopped the work of the Russian office of the company, including the branch located in Nizhny Novgorod. The fact is that a significant part of the work on creating the necessary software was carried out in it. Russian specialists were responsible for one of the key components of the graphics driver – the shader compiler.
The Russian division was too closely integrated into the structure of Intel, so that its closure might pass without a trace for its business. About 1,200 Intel employees worked in our country, and the local office was one of the largest in Europe. A large team of highly qualified engineers worked in Russia, which was engaged in the creation of the oneAPI and OpenVINO tools, and, as it now turns out, made a significant contribution to writing the graphics driver for the Intel Arc family of video cards.
Problems with the Arc Alchemist driver have not been resolved so far. From the tests of the younger video card Arc A380 knownthat the Arc Alchemist family has performance issues in DirectX 9 and 11, is unstable in some games, and is prone to a host of other software issues. Unfortunately, it is not possible to quickly correct the situation.
Intel made an extraordinary effort to keep the Russian development team working on the Arc Alchemist driver. However, according to Demerdzhyan, this was not fully achieved. The employees were offered relocation, but not all key specialists agreed to move, in addition, the emigrated developers were scattered around Intel offices in different countries, which made their further joint work on the driver difficult.
All this causes Intel to delay the release of the Arc A770 and A750 once more and once more. The company is faced with a choice: either release video cards with a “raw” driver and vague prospects for fixing deficiencies in the near future, or first solve the problem with frames and normalize driver development, and only then attempt to enter the market of mass gaming accelerators. In any case, according to Demerjian, the Arc Alchemist family is already hopelessly outdated, and Intel’s first full-fledged application to compete with AMD and NVIDIA in the graphics market will be the next generation of GPUs – Arc Battlemage (DG3).
If you notice an error, select it with the mouse and press CTRL + ENTER.
