Intel has officially discontinued its own Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition 16GB graphics cards, removing one of the already small number of available Intel Arc graphics cards from the market.
The Limited Edition cards are equivalent to Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition, with them being made and sold as completely Intel-made products. That’s in contrast to how most graphics cards are made, which is by the GPUs being sold to board partners such as Asus, MSI, and Zotac who then finish producing the whole board.
The discontinuation news comes via a product change notification issued by Intel that states the card with product code 21P01J00BA will be discontinued from June 20, 2023. Such a notice would be issued to manufacturers and other business partners, so it doesn’t necessarily mean all stock of these cards will immediately disappear but rather that no more will be made.
While somewhat surprising and potentially alarming for users of the cards, Intel has confirmed it remains committed to continuing its Intel Arc graphics line and that it will continue to supply its partners with A770 silicon. Moreover, while the 16GB version of the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition is being discontinued, the 8GB version lives on as does the cheaper A750 card.
However, given all the recent coverage of the importance of larger amounts of VRAM it’s surprising to see Intel discontinue its product with the most VRAM. Plus, the removal of one of its own graphics cards isn’t exactly the most reassuring move for consumers thinking of buying into the relatively new range of gaming GPUs. That’s especially true as it means there are just three variants of the A770 16GB now still available from other board partners – compared to dozens for most AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
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