Intel wanted to enter the GPU market, to fight against AMD and NVIDIA. Now they will be a third source of this type of dedicated graphics cards, since Matrox also sells them, but with chips licensed by AMD. The recent announcement of intel arc has unveiled the new logo and name that the first graphics based on the Xe architecture will have.
The first of them would arrive in 2022, with an architecture that has more similarities with NVIDIA than with AMD (eg: discrete ray tracing units, or AI or XMX discrete block Super-sampling), despite the fact that some of the designers of this project were ex-AMD who were hired by Intel, like Raja Koduri. In addition, the architecture will be scalable,
We will see how these graphs turn out versus AMD and NVIDIA, but everything seems to indicate that they will not be as powerful and will initially have a disadvantage compared to those of these other competitors. However, if Intel gets it right and they sell their cards at a good price, they could compete with the lower-mid-range of their opponents. Will you be able to manufacture the GPUs at TSMC instead of in your own factories (lower profit margin)? We will see…
On the other hand, it seems that Intel is catching up with the drivers for Windows 11, and will continue to give more details on Intel Arc later this year. It is striking that Vulkan it has not been cited at all, just DirectX. Although it is presumed that it would be compatible, not being so would be a serious mistake. On the other hand, it seems that Intel has shelved support for Linux a bit, at least for now. Bad news for users who want to try it on their GNU / Linux machines.
However, everything seems to indicate that this would be resolved later, perhaps in the next year when the graphics cards start selling...