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Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022
- tmccrary55 5y agoI'm down if it comes with open drivers or specs.
- the8472 5y agoIf they support virtualization like they do on their iGPUs that would be great and possibly drive adoption by power users. But I suspect they'll use that feature for market segmentation just like AMD and Nvidia do.
- TechieKid 5y agoPhoronix has been covering the Linux driver development for the cards as they happen: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=DG2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=DG2
- arcanus 5y agoAlways seems to be two years away, like the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne.
- re-actor 5y agoEarly 2022 is just 4 months away actually
- timbaboon 5y ago:O ;(
- midwestemo 5y agoMan this year is flying, I still think it's 2020.
- smcl 5y agoHonestly, I've been guilty of treating much of the last year as a loading screen. At times I've been hyper-focussed on doing that lovely personal development we're all supposed to do when cooped up alone at home, and at others just pissing around making cocktails and talking shite with my friends over social media. So basically what I'm saying is - "same" :D
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoErm, last I checked, four months from now is December 2021.
- dubcanada 5y agoEarly 2022 is only like 4-8 months away?
- dragontamer 5y agoAurora was supposed to be delivered in 2018: https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/07/27/end-of-the-line-for-xeon-phi-its-all-xeon-from-here/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/07/27/end-of-the-line-for-... After it was delayed, Intel said that 2020 was when they'd be ready. Spoiler alert: they aren't: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/doe-confirms-aurora-delayed-frontier-will-be-first-exascale-supercomputer/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/doe-confirms-auro... We're now looking at 2022 as the new "deadline", but we know that Intel has enough clout to force a new deadline as necessary. They've already slipped two deadlines, what's the risk in slipping a 3rd time? --------- I don't like to "kick Intel while they're down", but Aurora has been a disaster for years. That being said, I'm liking a lot of their OneAPI tech on paper at least. Maybe I'll give it a shot one day. (AVX512 + GPU supported with one compiler, in a C++-like language that could serve as a competitor to CUDA? That'd be nice... but Intel NEEDS to deliver these GPUs in time. Every delay is eating away at their reputation)
- Dylan16807 5y agoEdit: Okay I had it slightly wrong, rewritten. Aurora was originally slated to use Phi chips, which are an unrelated architecture to these GPUs. The delays there don't say much about problems actually getting this new architecture out. It's more that they were halfway through making a supercomputer and then started over. I could probably pin the biggest share of the blame on 10nm problems, which are irrelevant to this architecture. As far as this architecture goes, when they announced Aurora was switching, they announced 2021. That schedule, looking four years out for a new architecture, has only had one delay of an extra 6 months.
- dragontamer 5y ago> I could probably pin the biggest share of the blame on 10nm problems, which are irrelevant to this architecture. I doubt that. If Xeon Phi were a relevant platform, Intel could have easily kept it... continuing to invest into the platform and make it into 7nm like the rest of Aurora's new design. Instead, Intel chose to build a new platform from its iGPU architecture. So right there, Intel made a fundamental shift in the way they expected to build Aurora. I don't know what kind of internal meetings Intel had to choose its (mostly untested) iGPU platform over its more established Xeon Phi line, but that's quite a dramatic change of heart. ------------ Don't get me wrong. I'm more inclined to believe in Intel's decision (they know more about their market than I do), but its still a massive shift in architecture... with a huge investment into a new software ecosystem (DPC++, OpenMP, SYCL, etc. etc.), a lot of which is largely untested in practice (DPC++ is pretty new, all else considered). -------- > As far as this architecture goes, when they announced Aurora was switching, they announced 2021. That schedule, looking four years out for a new architecture, has only had one delay of an extra 6 months. That's fair. But the difference between Aurora-2018 vs Aurora-2021 is huge.
- stormbrew 5y agoI know March 2020 has been a very very long month but I'm pretty sure we're gonna skip a bunch of calendar dates when we get out of it.
- RicoElectrico 5y agoMeanwhile overloading a name of an unrelated CPU architecture, incidentally used in older Intel Management Engines.
- dkhenkin 5y agoBut what kind of hash rates will they get?! /s
- vmception 5y agoI'm going to add this to the Intel GPU graveyard in advance
- dethswatch 5y agoCries in Phi
- byefruit 5y agoI really hope this breaks Nvidia's stranglehold on deep learning. Some competition would hopefully bring down prices at the compute high-end. AMD don't seem to even be trying on the software-side at the moment. ROCm is a mess.
- jjcon 5y agoI wholeheartedly agree. PyTorch did recently release AMD support which I was happy to see (though I have not tested it), I’m hoping there is more to come. https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-for-amd-rocm-platform-now-available-as-python-package/ https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-for-amd-rocm-platform-now-a...
- byefruit 5y agoUnfortunately that support is via ROCm, which doesn't support the last three generations (!) of AMD hardware: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm.github.io/blob/master/hardware.md https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm.github.io/blob/master/hardware....
- dragontamer 5y agoROCm supports Vega, Vega 7nm, and CDNA just fine. The issue is that AMD has split their compute into two categories: * RDNA -- consumer cards. A new ISA with new compilers / everything. I don't think its reasonable to expect AMD's compilers to work on RDNA, when such large changes have been made to the architecture. (32-wide instead of 64-wide. 1024 registers. Etc. etc.) * CDNA -- based off of Vega's ISA. Despite being "legacy ISA", its pretty modern in terms of capabilities. MI100 is competitive against the A100. CDNA is likely going to run Frontier and El Capitan supercomputers. ------------ ROCm focused on CDNA. They've had compilers emit RDNA code, but its not "official" and still buggy. But if you went for CDNA, that HIP / ROCm stuff works enough for the Oak Ridge National Labs. Yeah, CDNA is expensive ($5k for MI50 / Radeon VII, and $9k for MI100). But that's the price of full-speed scientific-oriented double-precision floating point GPUs these days.
- 5y ago
- astockwell 5y agoMore promises tied --not to something in hand-- but to some amazing future thing. Intel has not learned one bit.
- tyingq 5y ago"The earliest Arc products will be released in "the first quarter of 2022" That implies they do have running prototypes in-hand.
- Exmoor 5y agoAs TFA rightly points out, unless something drastically changes in the next ~6mo, Intel is going to launch into the most favorable market situation we've seen in our lifetimes. Previously, the expectation is that they needed to introduce something that was competitive with the top end cards from nVidia and AMD. With basically all GPU's out of stock currently they really just need to introduce something competitive with the almost anything on the market to be able to sell as much as they can ship.
- voidfunc 5y agoIntel has the manufacturing capability to really beat up Nvidia. Even if the cards don’t perform like top-tier cards they could still win bigly here. Very exciting!
- flenserboy 5y agoIndeed. Something that's affordable and hits even RX 580 performance would grab the attention of many. Good enough really is when supply is low and prices are high.
- opencl 5y agoIntel is not even manufacturing these, they are TSMC 7nm so they are competing for the same fab capacity that everyone else is using.
- judge2020 5y ago*AMD/Apple is using. Nvidia's always-sold-out Ampere-based gaming chips are made in a Samsung fab. https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-ampere-samsung-8nm-process/ https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-ampere-samsung-8nm-process/
- paulmd 5y agoif NVIDIA cards were priced as ridiculously as AMD cards they'd be sitting on store shelves too
- jeswin 5y agoIf Intel provides as much Linux driver support as they do for their current integrated graphics lineup, we might have a new favourite among Linux users.
- stormbrew 5y agoThis is the main reason I'm excited about this. I really hope they continue the very open approach they've used so far, but even if they start going binary blob for some of it like nvidia and (now to a lesser extent) amd have at least they're likely to properly implement KMS and other things because that's what they've been doing already.
- jogu 5y agoCame here to say this. This will be especially interesting if there's better support for GPU virtualization to allow a Windows VM to leverage the card without passing the entire card through.
- modeless 5y agoThis would be worth buying one for. It's super lame that foundational features like virtualization are used as leverage for price discrimination by Nvidia, and hopefully new competition can shake things up.
- r-bar 5y agoThey also seem to be the most willing to open up their GPU sharding API, GVTG, based on their work with their existing Xe GPUs. The performance of their implementation in their first generation was a bit underwhelming, but it seems like the intention is there. If Intel is able to put out something reasonably competitive and that supports GPU sharding it could be a game changer. It could change the direction of the ecosystem and force Nvidia and AMD to bring sharding to their consumer tier cards. I am stoked to see where this new release takes us. Level1Linux has a (reasonably) up to date state of the GPU ecosystem that does a much better job outlining the potential of this tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXUS1W7Ifys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXUS1W7Ifys
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- cwizou 5y agoThey still are not saying with which part of that lineup they want to compete with, which is a good thing. I still remember Pat Gelsinger telling us over and over that Larrabee would compete with the high end of the GeForce/Radeon offering back in the days, including when it was painfully obvious to everyone that it definitely would not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
- judge2020 5y agoWell there's already the DG1 which seems to compete with the low-end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSseaknEv9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSseaknEv9Q
- bifrost 5y agoI'd be excited to see if you can run ARC on Intel ARC! GPU Accelerated HN would be very interesting :)
- dragontamer 5y agohttps://software.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/documents/the-architecture-of-intel-processor-graphics-gen11-r1new.pdf https://software.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/e... The above is Intel's Gen11 architecture whitepaper, describing how Gen11 iGPUs work. I'd assume that their next-generation discrete GPUs will have a similar architecture (but no longer attached to CPU L3 cache). I haven't really looked into Intel iGPU architecture at all. I see that the whitepaper has some oddities compared to AMD / NVidia GPUs. Its definitely "more different". The SIMD-units are apparently only 4 x 32-bit wide (compared to 32-wide NVidia / RDNA or 64-wide CDNA). But they can be reconfigured to be 8x16-bit wide instead (a feature not really available on NVidia. AMD can do SIMD-inside-of-SIMD and split up its registers once again however, but its a fundamentally different mechanism). -------- Branch divergence is likely to be less of an issue with narrower SIMD than its competitors. Well, in theory anyway.
- mastax 5y agoIntel has talked about Xe-LP which should be a better baseline for Xe-LPG: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15973/the-intel-xelp-gpu-architecture-deep-dive-building-up-from-the-bottom/ https://www.anandtech.com/show/15973/the-intel-xelp-gpu-arch... It's a lot more like the competition, IIRC.
- jeffbee 5y agoInteresting, but the add-in-card GPU market for graphics purposes is so small, it's hard to get worked up about it. The overwhelming majority of GPU units sold are IGPs. Intel owns virtually 100% of the computer (excluding mobile) IGP market and 70% of the total GPU market. You can get almost the performance of Intel's discrete GPUs with their latest IGPs in "Tiger Lake" generation parts. Intel can afford to nibble at the edges of the discrete GPU market because it costs them almost nothing to put a product out there and to a large extent they won the war already.
- selfhoster11 5y agoYou must be missing the gamer market that's positively starving for affordable dedicated GPUs.
- mirker 5y agoI would guess that the main point has to be hardware accelerated features, such as ray-tracing. I agree though that it seems pointless to buy a budget GPU when it’s basically a scaled up iGPU. Perhaps it makes sense if you want a mid-range CPU without a iGPU and you can’t operate it headlessly, or if you have an old PC that needs a mild refresh.
- at_a_remove 5y agoI find myself needing, for the first time ever, a high-end video card for some heavy video encoding, and when I look, they're all gone, apparently in a tug of war between gamers and crypto miners. At the exact same time, I am throwing out a box of old video cards from the mid-nineties (Trident, Diamond Stealth) and from the looks of it you can list them on eBay but they don't even sell. Now Intel is about to leap into the fray and I am imagining trying to explain all of this to the me of twenty-five years back.
- topspin 5y ago"apparently in a tug of war between gamers and crypto miners" That, and the oligopoly of AMD and NVidia. Their grip is so tight they dictate terms to card makers. For example; you can't build an NVidia GPU card unless you source the GDDR from NVidia. Between them the world supply of high end GDDR is monopolized. Intel is going to deliver some badly needed competition. They don't even have to approach the top of the GPU high end; just deliver something that will play current games at 1080p at modest settings and they'll have an instant hit. Continuing the tradition of open source support Intel has had with (most) of their GPU technology is something else we can hope for.
- noleetcode 5y agoI will, quite literally, take those old video cards off your hands. I have a hoarder mentality when it comes to old tech and love collecting it.
- at_a_remove 5y agoThat involves shipping, though. It wouldn't be worth it to you to have my old 14.4 Kbps modem and all of the attendant junk I have.
- jscipione 5y agoI've been hearing Intel play this tune for years, time to show us something or change the record!
- jbverschoor 5y agoNew ceo, so some press releases, but the company remains the same. I am under no illusion that this will change, and definitely not in such a short notice. They’ve neglected almost every market they were in. They’re altavista. Uncle roger says bye bye !
- mhh__ 5y agoThey've been playing this for years because it's only really now that they can actually respond to Zen and friends. Intel's competitors have been asleep at the wheel until 2017, getting a new chip out takes years.
- dleslie 5y agoThe sub-heading is false, I had a dedicated Intel GPU in 1998 by way of the i740.
- acdha 5y agoWas that billed as a serious gaming GPU? I don't remember the i740 as anything other than a low-budget option.
- detaro 5y agoThat's how it turned out in practice, but it was supposed to be a serious competitor AFAIK. Here's an old review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/202/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/202/7
- smcl 5y agoIt's kind of amazing to me that I never really encountered or read about the i740. I got really into PC gaming in 1997, we got internet that same year so I read a ton and was hyper aware of the various hardware that was released, regardless of whether I could actually own any of it (spoiler, as a ~11 year old, no I could not). How did this sneak by me?
- dleslie 5y agoIt was sold as a serious gaming GPU. Recall that this was an era where GPUs weren't yet a thing; instead there was 2D video cards and 3D accelerators that paired with. The i740 and TNT paved the way toward GPUs, while I don't recall whether either had programmable pipelines they both had 2D capacity. For budget gamers, it wasn't a _terrible_ choice to purchase an i740 for the combined 2D/3D ability.
- acdha 5y agoI definitely remember that era, I just don't remember that having anything other than an entry-level label. It's possible that this could have been due to the lackluster results — Wikipedia definitely supports the interpretation that the image changed in the months before it launched: > In the lead-up to the i740's introduction, the press widely commented that it would drive all of the smaller vendors from the market. As the introduction approached, rumors of poor performance started circulating. … The i740 was released in February 1998, at $34.50 in large quantities. However, this suggests that it was never going to be a top-end contender since it was engineered to hit a lower price point and was significantly under-specced compared to the competitors which were already on the market: > The i740 was clocked at 66Mhz and had 2-8MB of VRAM; significantly less than its competitors which had 8-32MB of VRAM, allowing the card to be sold at a low price. The small amount of VRAM meant that it was only used as a frame buffer, hence it used the AGP interface to access the system's main memory to store textures; this was a fatal flaw that took away memory bandwidth and capacity from the CPU, reducing its performance, while also making the card slower since it had to go through the AGP interface to access the main memory which was slower than its VRAM.
- pjmlp 5y agoI keep seeing such articles since Larrabe, better wait and see if this time it is actually any better.
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- fefe23 5y agoThe fact that the selling point most elaborated on in the press is the AI upscaling, I'm worried the rest of their architecture may not be up to snuff.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoMostly unrelated, but I'm still amazed that if you bought Intel at the height of the Dot-com bubble and held on, you still wouldn't have broken even, even ignoring inflation.
- mastax 5y agoIncluding dividend reinvestment?
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoNot including. But you make a good point, dividend reinvestment may have taken the edge off since the bubble.
- desktopninja 5y ago3DFX is joining the party soon ... Matrox, you're up next
- xkeysc0re 5y agoYou laugh but look at the current prices for a Voodoo on eBay