Linux devs discover that Intel Arc GPU firmware updates need an Intel CPU

Enlarge / An Intel Arc GPU. (credit: Intel)

In our review of Intel's Arc GPUs, we were generally impressed by their performance for the price, especially as a first-generation product. But buyers have plenty of potential caveats to consider, including unstable drivers, inconsistent performance, and a couple of weird problems that you need to dig around in your computer's BIOS settings to resolve.

Linux developers working on Arc support appear to have uncovered another oddity about the cards. According to developer Richard Hughes (as reported by Phoronix), updating the firmware on Arc GPUs appears to be handled by the Intel Management Engine, a small microcontroller that is only included in PCs with Intel processors. Hughes ran into the problem specifically in the context of IBM's POWER CPU architecture, but it seems to make firmware updates impossible on any non-Intel platform, including those based on AMD or Arm CPUs.

Luckily, these kinds of GPU firmware updates don't happen all that often, and when they do happen, it's usually to fix a specific obscure problem or add minor features—using a GPU with outdated firmware isn't the end of the world. On the other hand, if ever a GPU was going to need important firmware updates somewhere down the line, it would be this first generation of Arc cards, which are Intel's first widely released dedicated GPUs and have already proven to be exceptionally rough around the edges in a bunch of other ways.

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