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Their consumer GPU segment def does look a bit shaky at the moment. The Arc gen 2 discrete GPUs will only compete current-gen to current-gen with mid tier Nvidi

Their consumer GPU segment def does look a bit shaky at the moment. The Arc gen 2 discrete GPUs will only compete current-gen to current-gen with mid tier Nvidia and AMD chips. However, gen 3 is on an accelerated release schedule, and will likely be arriving late next year (supposedly, with capabilities that will bring it closer to the top tier chips). I think where Intel really shows promise for GPUs and accelerators is in the price-point area. The Gaudi 3 accelerators that entered general availability two months ago manage to outdo Nvidia's hopper chips when comparing precision-to-precision, and retail for half as much. The overall success of that line really depends on whether work to overcome the lock in of CUDA will pan out sufficiently. Personally, I think it will, as AMD, Google, Amazon, and others are all making (and successfully rolling out) chips which depend on breaking the industry out of the walled garden of CUDA via direct integration with the most common higher level tools used by ML engineers. Given the availability bottleneck for Blackwell, there is a growing market for alternatives. And, again, half the price of Hopper chips, for better performance, for a product that's already on the market, is a pretty attractive proposition that will certainly see more orgs coming through the door. Might need to put one of these $14k 128GB intel hopper-peers in my workstation...

BeefWellington 2y ago
Yeah I think Intel is a dark horse here in that AMD has kind of already stated they're pulling back from the extreme end of performance. If Intel's engineering work improves (and notably their driver staff do a good job) iteratively in short order as they've spoken about, I can see them capturing a good chunk of the GPU space and become the de facto discrete option on laptops. CUDA is definitely the biggest hurdle as you pointed out though. NVidia's bet there paid off big time.
KronisLV 2y ago
If they were in better financial circumstances, they could win on consumer product pricing, at least. The 1st gen Intel Arc cards had a bit of a rough launch and still have issues with things like Unreal Engine games, but something like A580 for 150-175 USD and A750 or A770 for 175-250 USD, or even less, feels like good value! While Nvidia is doing whatever they want price wise, the amount of money in my bank account seems to like Intel's line of products more (currently using an A580 which I got for around 200 USD near launch to replace my old RX 580, getting a 3060 would have been and still is like 300 USD where I'm from). While XeSS is pretty good, since they don't have CUDA (it's just entrenched at this point) and framegen, they might as well compete on the price. Which makes their launch of the Core Ultra CPUs that much more puzzling. They easily blow my current Zen 2 based Ryzen CPU out of the water... but I'll probably go for a Ryzen 7 5700X as my next CPU, because at least there the pricing makes sense. Intel's new CPUs being more or less a sidegrade/slight downgrade for gaming (even if improvement for productivity in some cases) wouldn't have been such a big deal if the pricing was actually good, instead of asking for 300 - 600 USD in addition to needing a new motherboard.

BeefWellington 2y ago

Yeah I think Intel is a dark horse here in that AMD has kind of already stated they're pulling back from the extreme end of performance. If Intel's engineering work improves (and notably their driver staff do a good job) iteratively in short order as they've spoken about, I can see them capturing a good chunk of the GPU space and become the de facto discrete option on laptops. CUDA is definitely the biggest hurdle as you pointed out though. NVidia's bet there paid off big time.

KronisLV 2y ago

If they were in better financial circumstances, they could win on consumer product pricing, at least. The 1st gen Intel Arc cards had a bit of a rough launch and still have issues with things like Unreal Engine games, but something like A580 for 150-175 USD and A750 or A770 for 175-250 USD, or even less, feels like good value! While Nvidia is doing whatever they want price wise, the amount of money in my bank account seems to like Intel's line of products more (currently using an A580 which I got for around 200 USD near launch to replace my old RX 580, getting a 3060 would have been and still is like 300 USD where I'm from). While XeSS is pretty good, since they don't have CUDA (it's just entrenched at this point) and framegen, they might as well compete on the price. Which makes their launch of the Core Ultra CPUs that much more puzzling. They easily blow my current Zen 2 based Ryzen CPU out of the water... but I'll probably go for a Ryzen 7 5700X as my next CPU, because at least there the pricing makes sense. Intel's new CPUs being more or less a sidegrade/slight downgrade for gaming (even if improvement for productivity in some cases) wouldn't have been such a big deal if the pricing was actually good, instead of asking for 300 - 600 USD in addition to needing a new motherboard.