Intel has just announced that it is launching its Arc discrete graphics on March 30 at its "A New Stage of the Game" event. Earlier, the company had already confirmed that Arc was coming in Q1 of this year and so it was expected that a reveal was coming sooner or later.
The Intel "A New Stage of the Game" event page reads:
Join us on March 30th at 8 A.M. pacific time to see Intel® Arc™ graphics take center stage and get a first look at our new discrete graphics for laptops.
It is evident from the event page that Intel would launch Arc for laptops on that day and if we are lucky, the firm could also reveal some more details about desktop Arc that are confirmed to be launching in the next quarter.
So while this is really exciting, you could be thoroughly disappointed if you are looking at Intel"s Arc GPUs to immediately take on heavyweights AMD and Nvidia with its first-gen Alchemist A-series GPUs. The company confirmed this itself stating that the third-gen Celestial GPUs will "address the ultra-enthusiast segment".
Although Intel could be down-playing its performance with Arc, it is quite unlikely for a company. Besides, SiSoftware already sort of confirmed this when it took an Arc GPU for an early review noting that the performance of Arc was "nothing special".