Intel Finally Releases the Arc A580, a Year After Announcing It

Over two years ago, Intel announced it was entering the GPU market to take on Nvidia and AMD, and while Intel is still finding its footing, it has now introduced another graphics card in its Arc series.

Introducing the new #IntelArc A580 graphics cards! Get ready to level up your gaming experience with the latest Intel Arc graphics card from ASRock, GUNNIR, and SPARKLE, available at major retailers in the U.S., China, and Europe. https://t.co/rHIgJgLosB pic.twitter.com/Tj0ZopJCOp

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) October 10, 2023

Intel revealed the Arc A580 GPU, a budgeted desktop graphics card retailing for $179. The Arc A580 features 24 Xe cores and 8GB of GDDR6 memory despite an attractive price, making this, on paper, an attractive GPU.

Tom’s Hardware points out the Arc A580 is a faster card price-wise, but the closest equivalent performance-wise is AMD’s Radeon RX 6600. The A580 is “generally” the faster card, but the RX 6600 does fare better in rasterization or converting a vector-based image or object into a raster or bitmap format. More interestingly, Tom’s Hardware mentions the while the A580 is a great price, for $10 more you can buy the A750 GPU.

Intel releasing the Arc A580 is surprising, as the company announced its first lineup of desktop graphics cards last year, but only the A380, A750, and A770 GPUs saw a release, while the A580’s release date information was absent. Either way, the GPU is a year late and is not a real contender with AMD’s RX 7000 series or Nvidia’s RTX 40 series, especially when Intel’s more powerful GPUs have trouble competing with those same GPU SKUs.

Nevertheless, this is Intel’s first outing in the GPU market, and Intel has previously said it is playing the long game. The company already announced it has at least three other generations planned, codenamed “Battlemage”, “Celestial”, and “Druid”.

Intel’s Arc A580 GPU is available via three OEMs, with GUNNIR, ASRock, and SPARKLE making SKUs for the A580, as seen in the image below.