4 ms·

Who is the target audience for this? Well informed gamers know Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon. Too small

by Havoc 2y ago

Who is the target audience for this? Well informed gamers know Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon. Too small for ML. The only people really happy seem to be the ones buying it for transcoding and I can't imagine there is a huge market of people going "I need to go buy a card for AV1 encoding".

epolanski 2y ago
Cheap gaming rigs. They do well compared to AMD/Nvidia at that price point. Is it a market worth chasing at all? Doubt.
spookie 2y ago
It's cheap, plenty of market when the others have forgotten the segment.
zamalek 2y ago
If it works well on Linux there's a market for that. AMD are hinting that they will be focusing on iGPUs going forward (all power to them, their iGPUs are unmatched and NVIDIA is dominating dGPU). Intel might be the savior we need. Well, Intel and possibly NVK. Had this been available a few weeks ago I would have gone through the pain of early adoption. Sadly it wasn't just an upgrade build for me, so I didn't have the luxury of waiting.
- sosodev 2y ago
  AMD has some great iGPUs but it seems like they're still planning to compete in the dGPU space just not at the high end of the market.
sangnoir 2y ago
> Too small for ML. What do you mean by this - I assume you mean too small for SoTA LLMs? There are many ML applications where 12GB is more than enough. Even w.r.t. LLMs, not everyone requires the latest & biggest LLM models. Some "small", distilled and/or quantized LLMs are perfectly usable with <24GB
- Havoc 2y ago
  If you're aiming for usable, then sure that works. The gains in model ability from doubling size is quite noticable at that scale though. Still...tangibly cheaper than even a 2nd hand 3090 so there is perhaps a market for it
  - tacticus 2y ago
    comparing the bottom of the market cards with a card that is 4+ times the power budget and 6 times the price is um....
screye 2y ago
all-in-1 machines. Intel's customers are 3rd party Cpu assemblers like Dell & HP. Many corporate bulk buyers only care if 1-2 of the apps they use are supported. The lack of wider support isn't a concern.
ddtaylor 2y ago
Intel has earned a lot of credit in the Linux space. Nvidia is trash tier in terms of support and only recently making serious steps to actually support the platform. AMD went all in nearly a decade ago and it's working pretty well for them. They are mostly caught up to being Intel grade support in the kernel. Meanwhile, Intel has been doing this since I was in college. I was running the i915 driver in Ubuntu 20 years ago. Sure their chips are super low power stuff, but what you can do with them and the level of software support you get is unmatched. Years before these other vendors were taking the platform seriously Intel was supporting and funding Mesa development.
- tristan957 2y ago
  The AMD driver has been great on my Framework 13, but the 6.10 series was completely busted. 6.11 worked fine. I can't remember a series where any of my Intel laptops didn't work for that long.
- ryao 2y ago
  This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. File a bug report about a problem and expect to be ignored, especially if it has anything to do with emulation. Intel’s Linux support on the other hand has been very good for me too.
  - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
    Nvidia desktop GPUs may be fine on Linux now, but are very much still trash on Laptops. I can't even begin to express how troublesome they have been on the work laptops I've been forced to use. I would've killed for any non-Nvidia laptop, even if just integrated graphics, but IT won't approve any other models, and the UEFI lacks an option to fully disable the Nvidia GPU.
    - ryao 2y ago
      On Optimus laptops, I usually disable the Intel GPU rather than deal with GPU switching. Those poor souls that have laptops without a proper multiplexer cannot do that, but I doubt it is a huge problem. With vulkan, you can specify the GPU to use via an environment variable.
marshray 2y ago
I'm using an Intel card right now. With Wayland. It just works. Ubuntu 24.04 couldn't even boot to a tty with the Nvidia Quadro thing that came with this major-brand PC workstation, still under warranty.
mappu 2y ago
> Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon Why would that matter? You buy one GPU, in a few years you buy another GPU. It's not a life decision.
- Havoc 2y ago
  >Why would that matter? The game devs are going to spend all their time & effort targetting amd/nvidia. Custom code paths etc. It's not a one size fits all world. OpenCL etc abstraction are good at covering up differences, but not that good. So if you're the player with <10% market share you're going to have an uphill battle to just be on par.
  - kimixa 2y ago
    > The game devs are going to spend all their time & effort targetting amd/nvidia. Custom code paths etc. From my experience they target NVidia and Consoles. AMD might get a look at the code just before release if they notice any big problems. I'd be surprised if many Gamedevs even pick up the phone for an Intel GPU developer.
    - catdog 2y ago
      Consoles use AMD GPUs for years now.
      - kimixa 2y ago
        Yeah, but the different APIs and system integration (shared memory) means many of the specific tunings and optimizations don't carry over very well.
qudat 2y ago
If you go on the intel arc subreddit people are hyped about intel GPUs. Not sure what the price is but the previous gen was cheap and the extra competition is welcomed In particular, intel just needs to support vfio and it’ll be huge for homelabs.
Narishma 2y ago
It's for the low end gaming market which Nvidia and AMD have been neglecting for years.
71bw 2y ago
>Well informed gamers know Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon. If Intel's stats are anything to go by, League runs way better than it did on the last generation and it's the only game that has had issues on the last-gen that's still left running on DX9, CS:GO was another notable one but CS2 has launched since and the game has moved to DX12/VK. This was, literally, the biggest issue they had - drivers were also wonky but they seem to have ironed that out as well.
red-iron-pine 2y ago
something like 60% of the GPUs by volume on Steam are on the mid-to-low end. like a non-trivial number still running 750 Ti's. there are a lot of gamers, and most aren't well-off tech bros. there is a niche for this, though it remains to be seen if it'll be profitable enough for a large org like Intel

by Havoc 2y ago

epolanski 2y ago

Cheap gaming rigs. They do well compared to AMD/Nvidia at that price point. Is it a market worth chasing at all? Doubt.

spookie 2y ago

It's cheap, plenty of market when the others have forgotten the segment.

zamalek 2y ago

If it works well on Linux there's a market for that. AMD are hinting that they will be focusing on iGPUs going forward (all power to them, their iGPUs are unmatched and NVIDIA is dominating dGPU). Intel might be the savior we need. Well, Intel and possibly NVK. Had this been available a few weeks ago I would have gone through the pain of early adoption. Sadly it wasn't just an upgrade build for me, so I didn't have the luxury of waiting.

sosodev 2y ago
AMD has some great iGPUs but it seems like they're still planning to compete in the dGPU space just not at the high end of the market.

sangnoir 2y ago

> Too small for ML. What do you mean by this - I assume you mean too small for SoTA LLMs? There are many ML applications where 12GB is more than enough. Even w.r.t. LLMs, not everyone requires the latest & biggest LLM models. Some "small", distilled and/or quantized LLMs are perfectly usable with <24GB

Havoc 2y ago
If you're aiming for usable, then sure that works. The gains in model ability from doubling size is quite noticable at that scale though. Still...tangibly cheaper than even a 2nd hand 3090 so there is perhaps a market for it
- tacticus 2y ago
  comparing the bottom of the market cards with a card that is 4+ times the power budget and 6 times the price is um....

screye 2y ago

all-in-1 machines. Intel's customers are 3rd party Cpu assemblers like Dell & HP. Many corporate bulk buyers only care if 1-2 of the apps they use are supported. The lack of wider support isn't a concern.

ddtaylor 2y ago

Intel has earned a lot of credit in the Linux space. Nvidia is trash tier in terms of support and only recently making serious steps to actually support the platform. AMD went all in nearly a decade ago and it's working pretty well for them. They are mostly caught up to being Intel grade support in the kernel. Meanwhile, Intel has been doing this since I was in college. I was running the i915 driver in Ubuntu 20 years ago. Sure their chips are super low power stuff, but what you can do with them and the level of software support you get is unmatched. Years before these other vendors were taking the platform seriously Intel was supporting and funding Mesa development.

tristan957 2y ago
The AMD driver has been great on my Framework 13, but the 6.10 series was completely busted. 6.11 worked fine. I can't remember a series where any of my Intel laptops didn't work for that long.
ryao 2y ago
This is repeated often, but I have had very good support from Nvidia on Linux over the years. AMD on the other hand gives lousy support. File a bug report about a problem and expect to be ignored, especially if it has anything to do with emulation. Intel’s Linux support on the other hand has been very good for me too.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
  Nvidia desktop GPUs may be fine on Linux now, but are very much still trash on Laptops. I can't even begin to express how troublesome they have been on the work laptops I've been forced to use. I would've killed for any non-Nvidia laptop, even if just integrated graphics, but IT won't approve any other models, and the UEFI lacks an option to fully disable the Nvidia GPU.
  - ryao 2y ago
    On Optimus laptops, I usually disable the Intel GPU rather than deal with GPU switching. Those poor souls that have laptops without a proper multiplexer cannot do that, but I doubt it is a huge problem. With vulkan, you can specify the GPU to use via an environment variable.

marshray 2y ago

I'm using an Intel card right now. With Wayland. It just works. Ubuntu 24.04 couldn't even boot to a tty with the Nvidia Quadro thing that came with this major-brand PC workstation, still under warranty.

mappu 2y ago

> Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon Why would that matter? You buy one GPU, in a few years you buy another GPU. It's not a life decision.

Havoc 2y ago
>Why would that matter? The game devs are going to spend all their time & effort targetting amd/nvidia. Custom code paths etc. It's not a one size fits all world. OpenCL etc abstraction are good at covering up differences, but not that good. So if you're the player with <10% market share you're going to have an uphill battle to just be on par.
- kimixa 2y ago
  > The game devs are going to spend all their time & effort targetting amd/nvidia. Custom code paths etc. From my experience they target NVidia and Consoles. AMD might get a look at the code just before release if they notice any big problems. I'd be surprised if many Gamedevs even pick up the phone for an Intel GPU developer.
  - catdog 2y ago
    Consoles use AMD GPUs for years now.
    - kimixa 2y ago
      Yeah, but the different APIs and system integration (shared memory) means many of the specific tunings and optimizations don't carry over very well.

qudat 2y ago

If you go on the intel arc subreddit people are hyped about intel GPUs. Not sure what the price is but the previous gen was cheap and the extra competition is welcomed In particular, intel just needs to support vfio and it’ll be huge for homelabs.

Narishma 2y ago

It's for the low end gaming market which Nvidia and AMD have been neglecting for years.

71bw 2y ago

>Well informed gamers know Intel's discrete GPU is hanging by a thread, so they're not hoping on that bandwagon. If Intel's stats are anything to go by, League runs way better than it did on the last generation and it's the only game that has had issues on the last-gen that's still left running on DX9, CS:GO was another notable one but CS2 has launched since and the game has moved to DX12/VK. This was, literally, the biggest issue they had - drivers were also wonky but they seem to have ironed that out as well.

red-iron-pine 2y ago

something like 60% of the GPUs by volume on Steam are on the mid-to-low end. like a non-trivial number still running 750 Ti's. there are a lot of gamers, and most aren't well-off tech bros. there is a niche for this, though it remains to be seen if it'll be profitable enough for a large org like Intel