Igor Wallossek has said that at least one Intel Arc board partner has told him they have pulled the plug on production. His source stated production was halted over quality concerns.
The news behind the news: At least one of the big board partners has even stopped the production of Intel cards completely (“ due to quality concerns ”), as I could find out yesterday and today. Which brings us back to pulling the symbolic plug. If this proves to be true across the board and continues even further, Intel will have a real problem and would have to live off its own, self-produced reference cards for the time being.
This is not the first time this year that a line of graphics cards has been put on hold after it was expected to go into production as a similar thing happened in January with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. At the time no reason was given and eventually, NVIDIA’s flagship card did launch a few months later. However, this latest possible issue for the long-awaited Intel Arc launch is only one of many the new line is now facing.
Presently the PC market is flooded with a backstock of graphics cards which has led to significant price drops in an effort to clear inventory for the next launch of cards that are expected to arrive before the end of the year. It has been suggested that Intel may have to drop its prices for the Intel Arc GPU significantly, perhaps at a loss, in order to compete under current market conditions.
Igor has also reported that dealers, distributors, and manufacturers have told him they have little to no interest in the Intel Arc cards due to a lack of price guarantee from Intel and performance concerns. Factor in this latest potential development and the launch of the Intel Arc graphics card has a list of challenges that are quickly growing and will need to be addressed expeditiously. Other board partners have told him that they’ve capped their production for the forthcoming cards and that Intel has told them to focus on OEM offerings vs retail sales.
Source: Igor’s Lab