After months of speculations and rumours, chipmaker giant Intel has now launched the Intel Arc graphics family for laptops. These are the first discrete GPUs from the Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, with desktop and workstation products coming later this year.

Intel has partnered with OEMs to offer a lineup of laptops that feature new and improved gaming and content creation capabilities with Intel Arc graphics and 12th Gen Intel Core processors.

Vice President, General Manager of Graphics and Gaming Team at Intel Roger Chandler said, “We are officially launching our Intel Arc graphics family for laptops, completing the Intel platform. These are the first discrete GPUs from our Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops.”

Many new systems with Intel Arc 3 graphics will feature the Intel Evo platform’s trademark responsiveness, battery life and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity in thin-and-light form factors.

Intel said that laptops with Intel Arc 3 graphics will offer 1080p gaming and advanced content creation, and those with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics will offer the same content-creation capabilities coupled with increased graphics and computing performance.

Chandler added, “For decades, Intel has been a champion for PC platform innovation. We have delivered generations of CPUs that provide computing horsepower for billions of people. We advanced connectivity through features like USB, Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi. And in partnership with the PC ecosystem, we developed the ground-breaking PCI architecture and the Intel Evo platform, pushing the boundary for what mobile products can do.”

Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are said to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. The company has also worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year.

The company has also integrated Intel Deep Link technologies to enable Intel Arc GPUs to work with Intel CPUs and integrated graphics for a performance improvement across gaming, creating and streaming workloads. Intel Deep Link enables dynamic power-sharing, distributing power across the platform to increase application performance by up to 30% in the creation and compute-intensive applications. With Hyper Encode and Hyper Compute, Deep Link allows multi-engine acceleration in transcoding and AI tasks.

The first laptops with Intel Arc 3 GPUs are available to preorder now and will be followed by the more powerful designs with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics later this year.