When I saw the headline that Intel was end of life-ing the ARC A750 I almost had a conniption. The ARC has arguably been one of the best things to happen to the GPU market since before we lost all of the vendors and went down to a two-party GPU ecosystem. While ARC is not huge, it has had a couple of knock-on benefits. It has introduced a small number of viable alternatives to more expensive AMD and nVidia cards that have met the needs of the “good enough” crowd. And it has led to a small improvement in the integrated GPUs that people get in laptops and AIO desktops.
For me personally, I have not built on an ARC GPU or selected it as a replacement for one of mine that needs to be upgraded. I’ve been close; at times when the prices of nVidia RTX GPUs have been astronomical and an AMD RX 9070 XT has not been available in retail pipelines. I hope to do so one day. I have a mutual who built a starter box for their kid as their first gaming PC and built on ARC. The main point being that, even if I do not build on one, they are a good competitive force on the landscape of the DIY and system integrator market. And it would be a shame if they went away.
As it is, I wouldn’t have used the term “end of life” in the headline. Bad on you, Tom’s Hardware. I’d have said “End of Production”. And that is only of the Intel made reference board. AIBs are still free to make them and hopefully will for some time.
And newer SKUs are coming into the fold, although on a sketchy, unclear schedule. Which makes consumers nervous in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, making some stick with AMD and nVidia and failing to woo the already skance few who might’ve seen this as a suitable substitute.
Hopefully Intel gets it together and we see a more proper, aggressive, assault on the low end of the GPU market. Where I think there is room to build a business and undercut AMD and nVidia on price or overachieve them on performance for similar prices. On the low end. And hopefully it can grow from there and give us all a 3rd, viable, alternative in the GPU space.
Rounding Off Infinity 