Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger confirmed this week that Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards will launch in the second quarter of 2022.
"AXG is on the right track," Gelsinger said. "And we launched mobile SKUs. We'll have desktop SKUs in the second quarter. And we'll have more SKUs during the year as well. We'll complete the product line."
In February, Intel announced that "AXG plans to ship more than 4 million discrete GPUs by 2022" in an investor press kit before confirming that its launch would be delayed until May or June of this year.
Review: Will Intel Arc Alchemist be worth the wait?
While it's pretty clear that Intel released the Arc Alchemist mobile GPUs first for testing ahead of the big PC launch, Intel's flagship desktop GPU looks promising.
We saw reports in January that Intel's Arc Alchemist XE 512 GPU could rival the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti in power, with a leaked SiSoftware benchmark showing the XE512 scoring 9017 Mpix/s compared to 8369 Mpix/s from the RTX 3070 Ti.
The rumor also revealed that the flagship desktop GPU could have up to 4096 execution cores with 16GB of VRAM and a clock speed of 2,1GHz, though it's unclear if it's base or upgraded.
Needless to say, we're looking forward to June 2022 when we can get our hands on these cards to put ourselves to the test.