Intel Wants to Ship “Millions of Arc GPUs” to PC Gamers Every Year

Raja Koduri, Intel’s Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, has responded via Twitter to an open letter from PC Gamer that addressed the nightmare-like state for GPU pricing and availability, classifying it as “a huge issue for PC gamers and the industry at large”. Intel says they are looking to put millions of Arc GPUs into PC Gamer’s hands as the company fast approaches the end of the reaffirmed Q1 launch window for its new high-performance discrete graphics products. The reading on this is that Intel plans to add to the available mass of GPUs that consumers can buy, thus alleviating the strain from overwhelming consumer demand, and bringing about a much healthier market – with real and acceptable pricing for graphics products.

That Intel plans to ship millions of Arc GPUs to consumers is no surprise; the company definitely wants to recoup its investment in developing consumer-oriented, high-performance graphics architectures. However, any claims or expectations of improved GPU supply in the market should be taken with a grain of salt, as the bottleneck for graphics products stands not at the GPU design level, but at the semiconductor manufacturing one: namely, there are only so many GPU wafers that graphics chips designers can secure from foundry company TSMC, which also serves customers like Apple, Qualcomm, and other technology industry giants.

With Intel offloading its Arc GPU manufacturing to TSMC’s 6 nm process, instead of putting the graphics chips together on their own foundries, graphics card’s supply will still hit against that particular bottleneck: TSMC’s capacity is limited. This means that Intel’s 6 nm orders will bite into both AMD’s (who just released 6 nm GPU products in the form of the RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT graphics cards) and NVIDIA’s, who is rumored to also contract TSMC’s 6 nm process for its next-generation GPUs. Unless TSMC had unused 6 nm manufacturing capacity that Intel was filling with their Arc GPUs (which is highly unlikely, considering how both AMD and NVIDIA can essentially sell every graphics card they bring to market), Intel will only be yet another company competing for still too few wafers to satiate the graphics demand.

It remains to be seen how miners will behave with the transition of Ethereum to Proof of Stake, as mining customers are one of the most relevant demand sinks for graphics cards production supply. And even on that front, Intel has announced that they have no plans to limit workloads on their graphics cards, following AMD instead of NVIDIA, who launched its mining-specific CMP line of graphics cards and limited mining performance on consumer-oriented GeForce RTX GPUs. Considering all of the above, it seems highly unlikely that Intel will be having anything other than a neutral impact on market supply and on how many GPUs actually reach gamers’ hands. It’s just that consumers will now have three players from who to choose their graphics accelerators from.