Image: Intel

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

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Peter Brosdahl

As a child of the 70’s I was part of the many who became enthralled by the video arcade invasion of the 1980’s. Saving money from various odd jobs I purchased my first computer from a friend of my...

6 comments

  2. Yeah I haven't heard any positive news out of Camp Arc in a long time. Just Raja saying "We're doing ok, no, really"
    He really needs to get out there and do some damage control since the rumors and hearsay are not going to help with there are already substantial doubts going on.
  4. I don't think people really understood just how hard it would be for Intel to break into the market at a level where it could compete with NVIDIA and AMD at even the low-mid-range price points. These companies have been slugging it out with very aggressive product cycles for a decade and a half. Intel is playing catch up and that's a lot harder in today's market than it was when Intel tried (and failed) the first time.

    I knew from the start that this was going to be extremely tough to do and that Intel might not succeed at all for a couple of generations. It would be a losing proposition for quite some time. Intel certainly can pull this off, but it's going to have to double down and put a lot of work and money into it before it will be viable competition to NVIDIA or AMD in the market.
  5. I don't think people really understood just how hard it would be for Intel to break into the market at a level where it could compete with NVIDIA and AMD at even the low-mid-range price points.
    Two thoughts on that:

    First is -- I don't think it matters what people think about it. It's what Intel was selling. Intel obviously made that miscalculation, and announced products prematurely or inaccurately (or both). I don't blame the people for having the expectation they do when it's entirely based off what Intel has been marketing to them.

    Second is -- Intel continues to do it! They should be properly managing expectations. I don't think they are doing that properly. The news that is leaking from around Camp Intel keeps going from bad to worse. And all we really have to go from via official sources are Raja's statements on Twitter saying "Everything's Fine!", and reading between the lines in the latest Earnings report -- which seems to indicate the DG group may have their heads sitting on the chopping block. Oh, and the latest from Ryan Shrout, basically saying they are giving up on tuning drivers for the older DX engines... which is just more gas on the flaming wreckage that Arc is quickly becoming. But at least Ryan is trying to downplay the hype and manage an expectation - so ... I don't know.

    Right now, Intel doesn't even have a bad product. They have ~no~ product, really.
  6. Well, maybe the board partner who pulled the plug simply had cold feet due to something we don't know about or would expect. Maybe they were trying to make an OC version and couldn't tune it the way they wanted, driver issues would definitely play a hand there, or in order to get the quality level, they wanted the price went up too far. I know I'm grasping at straws but there's just not enough info but maybe Igor will come through with more details. He does tend to have reliable sources, especially when it comes to the nitty gritty part of hardware issues. I do think Intel needs to stay the course but also put more effort into relations with its board partners. Igor's take didn't portray an overly supportive picture of Intel with them.

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