Since they fired the entire Arc team and a lot of the senior engineers already updated their Linkedins to reflect their new positions at AMD, Nvidia, and others, as well as laying off most of their Linux driver team (GPU and non-GPU), uh...
WTF?
This is a chip they've had lying around for a while. It's the same architecture as used in the Arc B580 that launched at the end of 2024; this is just a slightly larger sibling. Intel clearly knew that their larger part wouldn't make for a competitive gaming GPU (hence the lack of a consumer counterpart to these cards), but must have decided that a relatively cheap workstation card with 32GB might be able to make some money.
I didn't know this. Have they officially given up on building discrete GPUs? Is this a last gasp of Arc to offload decent remaining architectures at a lower price than nvidia?
It is crazy to me that a world newly craving GPU architecture for AI, and gamers being largely neglected, that Intel would abandon an established product line.
You are exaggerating, right? They didn't really fire the entire Arc team did they? I couldn't find a source saying that.