And while Intel would be trying to break into an established and fiercely competitive market, it would benefit from the experience and gigantic install base that the company had cultivated with its integrated GPUs.
Sure, the GPUs wouldn't compete with top-tier GeForce and Radeon cards, but they would address the crucial mainstream GPU market, and high-end cards would follow once the brand was more established.
Breaking into a mature market is difficult, and experience with integrated GPUs isn't always applicable to dedicated GPUs with more complex hardware and their own pool of memory.
Intel has proven characteristically incapable of meeting its initial launch estimates, just barely managing to pull off a paper launch of two low-end laptop GPUs in Q1 (the original launch window) and failing to follow up with widely available desktop cards in Q2.
A long, conspiratorial video from YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead goes even farther, suggesting (using a combination of "internal sources" and speculation) that people in Intel's graphics division are "lying" to consumers and others in the company about the state of the GPUs, that the first-generation Alchemist architecture has fundamental performance-limiting flaws, and that Intel is having internal discussions about discontinuing Arc GPUs after the second-generation "Battlemage" architecture.