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This is not good. We already know what happened when CFO took over. It was a time when Intel totaly lost control. They are gona get bought for penies. OMG Inst

This is not good. We already know what happened when CFO took over. It was a time when Intel totaly lost control. They are gona get bought for penies. OMG Instead of saying to AMD they will be in the rearview mirror, they should have been paranoid. Not do stupid GPUs. and destroy others where it mattered

merpkz 2y ago
Are those GPUs really stupid? They seem like a great price for performance devices when ultra high level gaming is not the priority. EDIT: I personally always liked intel iGPUs because they were always zero bullshit on Linux minus some screen tearing issues and mumbo-jumbo fixes required in X11.
- egeozcan 2y ago
  They can encode AV1 even. Really amazing, amazing chips for the price. The "stupid" thing with them (maybe) is that they cannot do anything exceptionally good, and that while having compatibility problems. They are cheap yes, but there are many other chips for the same price, and while they are less capable, they are more compatible. Make A380 cost 30% less or invest way more to the drivers and IMHO it'd been completely different.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Another nice thing—it looked like Intel was lagging AMD in PCIe lane counts, until somewhat recently. I suspect selling GPUs has put them in the headspace of thinking of PCIe lanes as a real figure of merit.
  - tpm 2y ago
    AMD AM5 are also not great at having enough PCIe lanes, hence at most one connected PCIe5 x16 GPU, if you need more it's x8 for 2 GPUs and so on, and that's before we connect fast M2 storage, fast USB4 slots etc. If you need more PCIe lanes, you have to buy a Threadripper or Epyc and that's easily 10 times the price for the whole system.
    - colejohnson66 2y ago
      PCIe lanes and DDR channels take up the most pins on a CPU connector (ignoring power). The common solution (for desktops) is to have a newest generation protocol (5) at the CPU level, then use the chipset to fan out more lanes at a lower generation (4).
      - tpm 2y ago
        I understand the tradeoff, but it left a segment of the market between pure consumer solutions and pure productivity/server solutions in no mans land.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Yeah. Theadripper/Epyc is what I’m thinking of—it isn’t obvious (to me at least) if it was just a coincidence of the chiplet strategy or what, if so it is an odd coincidence. The company that makes both CPUs and GPUs has ended up with data center CPUs that are a great match for the era where we really want data center CPUs that can host a ton of GPUs, haha.
- leeman2016 2y ago
  I am basically biased towards discrete GPU = asking for trouble in Linux. Driver stability, less heat and fan noise, battery life is almost assured in the Intel iGPU.
  - riskable 2y ago
    Nah. AMD discreet GPUs are fantastic in Linux these days. You don't need to install a proprietary driver! They just work. It's really nice not having to think about the GPU's drivers or configuration at all. The only area where AMD's discreet GPUs are lagging behind is AI stuff. You get a lot more performance with Nvidia GPUs for the same price. For gaming, though AMD is the clear winner in the price/performance space. Of course, Nvidia is still a bit of a pain but it's of their own making. You still need to install their proprietary driver (which IMHO isn't that big a deal) but the real issue is that if you upgrade your driver from say, 550 to 555 you have to rebuild all your CUDA stuff. In theory you shouldn't have to do that but in reality I had to blow away my venv and reinstall everything in order to get torch working again.
  - ryao 2y ago
    Nvidia's GPUs work well on Linux. A friend and I use them and they are fairly problem free. In the past, when I did have some issues (mainly involving freesync), I contacted Nvidia and they fixed them. More specifically, I found that they needed to add sddm to their exclusion list, told them and they added it to the list after a few driver releases. They have also fixed documentation on request too.
- ripe 2y ago
  On the question of integrated versus discrete GPUs, what are the practical differences? I am trying to learn this but having difficulty finding good explanations. I know the Wikipedia-level overview, but need more details.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
The GPUs are elemental for a shift to APUs - the future as Apple has shown for performance and energy efficiency. Strix Halo will be a game changer, without a GPU Intel has no future on the laptop (and later desktop).
- keyringlight 2y ago
  One of the things I was wondering about a few years ago is whether intel would attempt to bid on the Sony/MS console contracts which AMD has had tied up for a long time now and would be a dependable income along with reduced software compatibility concerns compared to the breadth and history of windows games. I don't think they got to the point of having a big iGPU integrated to the extent that AMD has had for years though. Apparently AMD has at least the Sony PS6 contract now.
Cumpiler69 2y ago
>Not do stupid GPUs Hard disagree here x100. Investing in GPUs in the time when Nvidia and AMD started to gouge the market is actually the best decision Intel did in recent times. It's the piece of semiconductor with some of the highest margins in the business and they already own a lot of the patents and IP building blocks to make it happen. The only stupid thing they did was not getting into GPUs earlier so they would already be on the market during the pandemic GPU shortage and AI boom.
- bhouston 2y ago
  I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. There are a lot of strategic shifts Intel could do but their timeline to paying off at the scale Intel needs is very long. What I see is a bunch of endeavours that get killed off too quickly because they were not paying off fast enough and this creates mistrust in the community around Intel’s new initiatives that are not core that make them harder to succeed going forward. It is a bit of a death spiral. Basically big companies find it hard to learn new tricks when their core offering starts to fail. The time to learn new tricks was a while ago, now it is too late.
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    >I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with making Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999, since that's its focus, not venture into making stupid stuff like Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's the core focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules those markets forever.
    - bhouston 2y ago
      Apple under Steve Jobs is exceptional and not the rule. Trying to use that the fact Einstein or Muhammad Ali or any other genius in his area could do something or did something is not a counterpoint.
timschmidt 2y ago
The GPUs seemed smart. Too late, and timid, but smart. What continually blew my mind was Intel's chiplet strategy. While AMD was making scads of a single chiplet and binning the best for Epyc and recovering cost at the low end with Ryzen, Intel designed and fabricated a dizzying number of single-purpose chiplets. In some cases, just the mirror image of another otherwise identical chiplet. The mind boggles. What phenomenal inattention to opportunity.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  Same with the general preparedness for the AGI Cambrian explosion. Give their position, they should have been able to keep pace with Nvidia beyond the data center, and they fumbled it. Their purported VRAM offerings for Battlemage are also lower than hoped for, which is going to be a turnoff to many buying for local inference. I think we have too many decision-makers gunshy from crypto mining that haven't yet realized that compute isn't just a phase.
- HelloNurse 2y ago
  What you describe is mad inattention to costs, not only to opportunities: maybe a symptom of widespread misaligned incentives (e.g. delivering a design with mirrored chiplets quickly could be more "useful" for an engineer than saving a few millions for the company by taking one more week to design a more complex assembly of identical chiplets) and toxic priorities (e.g. theoretical quality over market value and profits, risk aversion, risk/cost externalization towards departments you want to be axed instead of your own).
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    Couldn't agree more. To me, AMD's approach demonstrates planning and buy-in across multiple teams (CPU die, Ryzen IO die, Epyc IO die, etc), and that suggests a high degree of management involvement in these engineering decisions. Intel's activities seem comparatively chaotic. Which I agree smells of disincentives and disinterested middle management hyperfixated on KPIs.
theandrewbailey 2y ago
The AI revolution runs on GPUs. Intel needs every last bit of GPU experience and prowess it can get, otherwise it will continue to be left behind.
baq 2y ago
Intel without GPUs will be an ARM competitor. Maybe. With some luck. GPUs are existential for them. They’ve got 2 years.
tw04 2y ago
>They are gona get bought for penies. No they aren't - much like Boeing, at this point they are considered a national security asset.
hypercube33 2y ago
I disagree. They need to have a dedicated GPU and iGPU they had needs to be improved or they will absolutely fail. The current path forward is an APU or more of a system on a chip with CPU, GPU, and I guess, NPU. Their dGPU is also pretty promising, I have it on my list to get - even if not for gaming, its possibly the best media encoding / decoding card for the money to get today. The only thing holding it back for entry level or mid level gaming is the drivers - for some games, it wont matter it seems, but for others it has some growing pains but they seem to be diligently working on them with every driver release.
riskable 2y ago
> Not do stupid GPUs. "Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future." (from: https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-lunar-lake-integrated-memory-design.html https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-lunar-...) Gelsinger apparently agreed with you. However, the market very clearly has enormous demand for discreet GPUs. Specifically for AI workloads (not PC gaming). If I was on Intel's board I would've fired him for this statement. The demand for GPUs (parallel matrix processors with super fast local memory) is NOT going to go down. Certainly not in the next five to ten years! I know Intel makes a lot of things, has a lot of IP, and is involved in many different markets but the fact that they're NOT a major player in the GPU/AI space is their biggest failure (in recent times). It's one of those things that should've been painfully obvious at some point in 2022 and here we have Gelsinger saying just a few months ago that somehow demand for AI stuff is just going to disappear (somehow). It's magic hand waving like this that got him fired.
- astrange 2y ago
  There's someone else who makes computers with a lot of memory that are good at AI inference but don't have discrete graphics cards. …Although it looks like Intel tried to go that route without understanding why and got cold feet.
Night_Thastus 2y ago
The GPUs aren't a stupid idea. Right now Nvidia basically controls the market and has totally abandoned the lower/mid range end. Intel has made vast improvements even within their first generation of dedicated desktop cards. They will likely never compete with cards like a 4080/4090, but they may be great options for people on a budget. Helps put pressure on AMD to be better as well.

merpkz 2y ago

Are those GPUs really stupid? They seem like a great price for performance devices when ultra high level gaming is not the priority. EDIT: I personally always liked intel iGPUs because they were always zero bullshit on Linux minus some screen tearing issues and mumbo-jumbo fixes required in X11.

egeozcan 2y ago
They can encode AV1 even. Really amazing, amazing chips for the price. The "stupid" thing with them (maybe) is that they cannot do anything exceptionally good, and that while having compatibility problems. They are cheap yes, but there are many other chips for the same price, and while they are less capable, they are more compatible. Make A380 cost 30% less or invest way more to the drivers and IMHO it'd been completely different.
bee_rider 2y ago
Another nice thing—it looked like Intel was lagging AMD in PCIe lane counts, until somewhat recently. I suspect selling GPUs has put them in the headspace of thinking of PCIe lanes as a real figure of merit.
- tpm 2y ago
  AMD AM5 are also not great at having enough PCIe lanes, hence at most one connected PCIe5 x16 GPU, if you need more it's x8 for 2 GPUs and so on, and that's before we connect fast M2 storage, fast USB4 slots etc. If you need more PCIe lanes, you have to buy a Threadripper or Epyc and that's easily 10 times the price for the whole system.
  - colejohnson66 2y ago
    PCIe lanes and DDR channels take up the most pins on a CPU connector (ignoring power). The common solution (for desktops) is to have a newest generation protocol (5) at the CPU level, then use the chipset to fan out more lanes at a lower generation (4).
    - tpm 2y ago
      I understand the tradeoff, but it left a segment of the market between pure consumer solutions and pure productivity/server solutions in no mans land.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Yeah. Theadripper/Epyc is what I’m thinking of—it isn’t obvious (to me at least) if it was just a coincidence of the chiplet strategy or what, if so it is an odd coincidence. The company that makes both CPUs and GPUs has ended up with data center CPUs that are a great match for the era where we really want data center CPUs that can host a ton of GPUs, haha.
leeman2016 2y ago
I am basically biased towards discrete GPU = asking for trouble in Linux. Driver stability, less heat and fan noise, battery life is almost assured in the Intel iGPU.
- riskable 2y ago
  Nah. AMD discreet GPUs are fantastic in Linux these days. You don't need to install a proprietary driver! They just work. It's really nice not having to think about the GPU's drivers or configuration at all. The only area where AMD's discreet GPUs are lagging behind is AI stuff. You get a lot more performance with Nvidia GPUs for the same price. For gaming, though AMD is the clear winner in the price/performance space. Of course, Nvidia is still a bit of a pain but it's of their own making. You still need to install their proprietary driver (which IMHO isn't that big a deal) but the real issue is that if you upgrade your driver from say, 550 to 555 you have to rebuild all your CUDA stuff. In theory you shouldn't have to do that but in reality I had to blow away my venv and reinstall everything in order to get torch working again.
- ryao 2y ago
  Nvidia's GPUs work well on Linux. A friend and I use them and they are fairly problem free. In the past, when I did have some issues (mainly involving freesync), I contacted Nvidia and they fixed them. More specifically, I found that they needed to add sddm to their exclusion list, told them and they added it to the list after a few driver releases. They have also fixed documentation on request too.
ripe 2y ago
On the question of integrated versus discrete GPUs, what are the practical differences? I am trying to learn this but having difficulty finding good explanations. I know the Wikipedia-level overview, but need more details.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

The GPUs are elemental for a shift to APUs - the future as Apple has shown for performance and energy efficiency. Strix Halo will be a game changer, without a GPU Intel has no future on the laptop (and later desktop).

keyringlight 2y ago
One of the things I was wondering about a few years ago is whether intel would attempt to bid on the Sony/MS console contracts which AMD has had tied up for a long time now and would be a dependable income along with reduced software compatibility concerns compared to the breadth and history of windows games. I don't think they got to the point of having a big iGPU integrated to the extent that AMD has had for years though. Apparently AMD has at least the Sony PS6 contract now.

Cumpiler69 2y ago

>Not do stupid GPUs Hard disagree here x100. Investing in GPUs in the time when Nvidia and AMD started to gouge the market is actually the best decision Intel did in recent times. It's the piece of semiconductor with some of the highest margins in the business and they already own a lot of the patents and IP building blocks to make it happen. The only stupid thing they did was not getting into GPUs earlier so they would already be on the market during the pandemic GPU shortage and AI boom.

bhouston 2y ago
I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. There are a lot of strategic shifts Intel could do but their timeline to paying off at the scale Intel needs is very long. What I see is a bunch of endeavours that get killed off too quickly because they were not paying off fast enough and this creates mistrust in the community around Intel’s new initiatives that are not core that make them harder to succeed going forward. It is a bit of a death spiral. Basically big companies find it hard to learn new tricks when their core offering starts to fail. The time to learn new tricks was a while ago, now it is too late.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with making Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999, since that's its focus, not venture into making stupid stuff like Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's the core focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules those markets forever.
  - bhouston 2y ago
    Apple under Steve Jobs is exceptional and not the rule. Trying to use that the fact Einstein or Muhammad Ali or any other genius in his area could do something or did something is not a counterpoint.

timschmidt 2y ago

The GPUs seemed smart. Too late, and timid, but smart. What continually blew my mind was Intel's chiplet strategy. While AMD was making scads of a single chiplet and binning the best for Epyc and recovering cost at the low end with Ryzen, Intel designed and fabricated a dizzying number of single-purpose chiplets. In some cases, just the mirror image of another otherwise identical chiplet. The mind boggles. What phenomenal inattention to opportunity.

washadjeffmad 2y ago
Same with the general preparedness for the AGI Cambrian explosion. Give their position, they should have been able to keep pace with Nvidia beyond the data center, and they fumbled it. Their purported VRAM offerings for Battlemage are also lower than hoped for, which is going to be a turnoff to many buying for local inference. I think we have too many decision-makers gunshy from crypto mining that haven't yet realized that compute isn't just a phase.
HelloNurse 2y ago
What you describe is mad inattention to costs, not only to opportunities: maybe a symptom of widespread misaligned incentives (e.g. delivering a design with mirrored chiplets quickly could be more "useful" for an engineer than saving a few millions for the company by taking one more week to design a more complex assembly of identical chiplets) and toxic priorities (e.g. theoretical quality over market value and profits, risk aversion, risk/cost externalization towards departments you want to be axed instead of your own).
- timschmidt 2y ago
  Couldn't agree more. To me, AMD's approach demonstrates planning and buy-in across multiple teams (CPU die, Ryzen IO die, Epyc IO die, etc), and that suggests a high degree of management involvement in these engineering decisions. Intel's activities seem comparatively chaotic. Which I agree smells of disincentives and disinterested middle management hyperfixated on KPIs.

theandrewbailey 2y ago

The AI revolution runs on GPUs. Intel needs every last bit of GPU experience and prowess it can get, otherwise it will continue to be left behind.

baq 2y ago

Intel without GPUs will be an ARM competitor. Maybe. With some luck. GPUs are existential for them. They’ve got 2 years.

tw04 2y ago

>They are gona get bought for penies. No they aren't - much like Boeing, at this point they are considered a national security asset.

hypercube33 2y ago

I disagree. They need to have a dedicated GPU and iGPU they had needs to be improved or they will absolutely fail. The current path forward is an APU or more of a system on a chip with CPU, GPU, and I guess, NPU. Their dGPU is also pretty promising, I have it on my list to get - even if not for gaming, its possibly the best media encoding / decoding card for the money to get today. The only thing holding it back for entry level or mid level gaming is the drivers - for some games, it wont matter it seems, but for others it has some growing pains but they seem to be diligently working on them with every driver release.

riskable 2y ago

> Not do stupid GPUs. "Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future." (from: https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-lunar-lake-integrated-memory-design.html https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-lunar-...) Gelsinger apparently agreed with you. However, the market very clearly has enormous demand for discreet GPUs. Specifically for AI workloads (not PC gaming). If I was on Intel's board I would've fired him for this statement. The demand for GPUs (parallel matrix processors with super fast local memory) is NOT going to go down. Certainly not in the next five to ten years! I know Intel makes a lot of things, has a lot of IP, and is involved in many different markets but the fact that they're NOT a major player in the GPU/AI space is their biggest failure (in recent times). It's one of those things that should've been painfully obvious at some point in 2022 and here we have Gelsinger saying just a few months ago that somehow demand for AI stuff is just going to disappear (somehow). It's magic hand waving like this that got him fired.

astrange 2y ago
There's someone else who makes computers with a lot of memory that are good at AI inference but don't have discrete graphics cards. …Although it looks like Intel tried to go that route without understanding why and got cold feet.

Night_Thastus 2y ago

The GPUs aren't a stupid idea. Right now Nvidia basically controls the market and has totally abandoned the lower/mid range end. Intel has made vast improvements even within their first generation of dedicated desktop cards. They will likely never compete with cards like a 4080/4090, but they may be great options for people on a budget. Helps put pressure on AMD to be better as well.