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Yeah but MLID says they are losing money on every one and have been winding down the internal development resources. That doesn't bode well for the future. I w

Yeah but MLID says they are losing money on every one and have been winding down the internal development resources. That doesn't bode well for the future. I want to believe he's wrong, but on the parts of his show where I am in a position to verify, he generally checks out. Whatever the opposite of Gell-Mann Amnesia is, he's got it going for him.

derektank 2y ago
Wait, are they losing money on every one in the sense that they haven't broken even on research and development yet? Or in the sense that they cost more to manufacture than they're sold at? Because one is much worse than the other.
- rockskon 2y ago
  They're trying to unseat Radeon as the budget card. That means making a more enticing offer than AMD for a temporary period of time.
- ryao 2y ago
  The former is likely true, but the latter is not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 That being said, the IP blocks are shared by their iGPUs, so the discrete GPUs do not need to recoup the costs of most of the R&D, as it would have been done anyway for the iGPUs.
sodality2 2y ago
MLID on Intel is starting to become the same as UserBenchmark on AMD (except for the generally reputable sources)... he's beginning to sound like he simply wants Intel to fail, to my insider-info-lacking ears. For competition's sake I really hope that MLID has it wrong (at least the opining about the imminent failure of Intel's GPU division), and that the B series will encourage Intel to push farther to spark more competition in the GPU space.
- ryao 2y ago
  My analysis is that the B580 is profitable if they build enough of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 The margins might be describable as razor thin, but they are there. Whether it can recoup the R&D that they spent designing it is hard to say definitively since I do not have numbers for their R&D costs. However, their iGPUs share the same IP blocks, so the iGPUs should be able to recoup the R&D costs that they have in common with the discrete version. Presumably, Intel can recoup the costs specific to the discrete version if they sell enough discrete cards. While this is not a great picture, it is not terrible either. As long as Intel keeps improving its graphics technology with each generation, profitability should gradually improve. Although I have no insider knowledge, I noticed a few things that they could change to improve their profitability in the next generation: * Tom Petersen made a big deal about 16-lane SIMD in Battlemage being what games want rather than the 8-lane SIMD in Alchemist. However, that is not quite true since both Nvidia and AMD graphics use 32-lane SIMD. If the number of lanes really matter and I certainly can see how it would if game shaders have horizontal operations, then a switch to 32-lane SIMD should yield further improvements. * Tom Petersen said in his interview with Hardware Unboxed that Intel reported the active transistor count for the B580 rather than the total transistor count. This is the contrary to others who report the total transistor count (as evidenced by their density figures being close to what TSMC claims the process can do). Tom Petersen also stated that they would not necessarily be forced by defects to turn dies into B570 cards. This suggests to me that they have substantial redundant logic in the GPU to prevent defects from rendering chips unusable, and that logic is intended to be disabled in production. GPUs are already highly redundant. They could drop much of the planned dark silicon and let defects force a larger percentage of the dies to be usable by only cutdown models. I could have read too much into things that Tom Petersen said. Then again, he did say that their design team is conservative and the doubling rather than quadrupling of the SIMD lane count and the sheer amount of dark silicon (>40% of the die by my calculation) spent on what should be redundant components strike me as conservative design choices. Hopefully the next generation addresses these things. Also, they really do have >40% dark silicon when doing density comparisons: * ARC B580: 72.1M / mm² * Nvidia 4070 Ti: 121.8M / mm² * TSMC claim for 5nm: 138.2M / mm² They have 41% less density than Nvidia and 48% less density than TSMC claims the process can obtain. We also know that they have additional transistors on the die that are not active from Tom Petersen’s comments. Presumably, they are for redundancy. Otherwise, there really is no sane explanation that I can see for so much dark silicon. If they are using transistors that are twice the size as the density figure might be interpreted to suggest, they might as well have used TSMC’s 7nm process since while a smaller process can etch larger features, it is a waste of money. Note that we can rule out the cache lowering the density. The L1 + L2 cache on the 4070 Ti is 79872 KB while it is 59392 KB on the B580. We can also rule out IO logic as lowering the density, as the 4070 Ti has a 256-bit memory bus while the B580 has a 192-bit memory bus. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3950 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes The hardware unboxed interview of Tom Petersen is here: https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM
oofabz 2y ago
The die size of the B580 is 272 mm2, which is a lot of silicon for $249. The performance of the GPU is good for its price but bad for its die size. Manufacturing cost is closely tied to die size. 272 mm2 puts the B580 in the same league as the Radeon 7700XT, a $449 card, and the GeForce 4070 Super, which is $599. The idea that Intel is selling these cards at a loss sounds reasonable to me.
- tjoff 2y ago
  Though you assume the prices of the competition are reasonable. There are plenty of reasons for them not to be. Availability issues, lack of competition, other more lucrative avenues etc. Intel has neither, or at least not as much of them.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  At a loss seems a bit overly dramatic. I'd guess Nvidia sells SKUs for three times their marginal cost. Intel is probably operating at cost without any hopes of recouping R&D with the current SKUs, but that's reasonable for an aspiring competitor.
  - 7speter 2y ago
    It kinda seems they are covering the cost of throwing massive amounts of resources trying to get Arc’s drivers in shape.
    - KeplerBoy 2y ago
      I really hope they stick with it and become a viable competitor in every market segment a few more years down the line.
    - ryao 2y ago
      The drivers are shared by their iGPUs, so the cost of improving the drivers is likely shared by those.
- ryao 2y ago
  The idea that Intel is selling these at a loss does not sound reasonable to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 The only way this would be at a loss is if they refuse to raise production to meet demand. That said, I believe their margins on these are unusually low for the industry. They might even fall into razor thin territory.
ryao 2y ago
That guy’s reasoning is faulty. To start, he has made math mistakes in every video that he has posted recently involving math. To give 3 recent examples: At 10m3s in the following video, he claims to add a 60% margin by multiplying by 1.6, but in reality is adding a 37.5 margin and needed to multiply by 2.5 to add a 60% margin. This can be calculated by calculating Cost Scaling Factor = 1 / (1 - Normalized Profit Margin): 2.5 = 1 / (1 - 0.6) 1.6 = 1 / (1 - 0.375) https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ At 48m13s in the following video, he claims that Intel’s B580 is 80% worse than Nvidia’s hardware. He took the 4070 Ti as being 82% better than the 2080 SUPER, assumed based on leaks from his reviewer friends that the B580 was about at the performance of the 2080 SUPER and then claimed that the B580 would be around 80% worse than the 4070 Ti. Unfortunately for him, that is 45% worse, not 80% worse. His chart is from Techpowerup and if he had taken the time to do some math (1 - 1/(1 + 0.82) ~ 0.45), or clicked to the 2080 SUPER page, he would have seen it has 55% of the performance of the 4070 Ti, which is 45% worse: https://youtu.be/-lv52n078dw https://youtu.be/-lv52n078dw At 1m2s in the following video, he makes a similar math mistake by saying that the B580 has 8% better price/performance than the RTX 3060 when in fact it is 9% better. He mistakenly equated the RTX 3060 being 8% worse than the B580 to mean that it is 8% better, but math does not work that way. Luckily for him, the math error is small here, but he still failed to do math correctly and his reasoning grows increasingly faulty with the scale of his math errors. What he should have done that gives the correct normalized factor is: 1.09 ~ 1 / (1 - 0.08) A factor of 1.09 better is 9% better. https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg He not just fails at mathematical reasoning, but lacks a basic understanding of how hardware manufacturing works. He said that if Intel loses $20 per card in low production volumes, then making 10 million cards will result in a $200 million loss. In reality, things become cheaper due to economics of scale and simple napkin math shows that they can turn a profit on these cards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 His $20 loss per card remark is at 11m40s: https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg His behavior is consistent with being on a vendetta rather than being a technology journalist. For example, at 55m13s in the following video, he puts words in Tom Petersen’s mouth and then with a malicious smile on his mouth, cheers while claiming that Tom Petersen declared discrete ARC cards to be dead when Tom Petersen said nothing of the kind. Earlier in the same video at around 44m14s, he calls Tom Petersen a professional liar. However, he sees no problem expecting people to believe words he shoved into the “liar’s” mouth: https://youtu.be/xVKcmGKQyXU https://youtu.be/xVKcmGKQyXU If you scrutinize his replies to criticism in his comments section, you would see he is dodging criticism of the actual issues with his coverage while saying “I was right about <insert thing completely unrelated to the complaint here>” or “facts don’t care about your feelings”. You would also notice that he is copy and pasting the same statements rather than writing replies addressing the details of the complaints. To be clear, I am paraphrasing in those two quotes. He also shows contempt for his viewers that object to his behavior in the following video around 18m53s where he calls them “corporate cheerleaders”: https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ In short, Tom at MLID is unable to do mathematical reasoning, does not understand how hardware manufacturing works, has a clear vendetta against Intel’s discrete graphics, is unable to take constructive criticism and lashes out at those who try to tell him when he is wrong. I suggest being skeptical of anything he says about Intel’s graphics division.

derektank 2y ago

Wait, are they losing money on every one in the sense that they haven't broken even on research and development yet? Or in the sense that they cost more to manufacture than they're sold at? Because one is much worse than the other.

rockskon 2y ago
They're trying to unseat Radeon as the budget card. That means making a more enticing offer than AMD for a temporary period of time.
ryao 2y ago
The former is likely true, but the latter is not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 That being said, the IP blocks are shared by their iGPUs, so the discrete GPUs do not need to recoup the costs of most of the R&D, as it would have been done anyway for the iGPUs.

sodality2 2y ago

MLID on Intel is starting to become the same as UserBenchmark on AMD (except for the generally reputable sources)... he's beginning to sound like he simply wants Intel to fail, to my insider-info-lacking ears. For competition's sake I really hope that MLID has it wrong (at least the opining about the imminent failure of Intel's GPU division), and that the B series will encourage Intel to push farther to spark more competition in the GPU space.

ryao 2y ago
My analysis is that the B580 is profitable if they build enough of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 The margins might be describable as razor thin, but they are there. Whether it can recoup the R&D that they spent designing it is hard to say definitively since I do not have numbers for their R&D costs. However, their iGPUs share the same IP blocks, so the iGPUs should be able to recoup the R&D costs that they have in common with the discrete version. Presumably, Intel can recoup the costs specific to the discrete version if they sell enough discrete cards. While this is not a great picture, it is not terrible either. As long as Intel keeps improving its graphics technology with each generation, profitability should gradually improve. Although I have no insider knowledge, I noticed a few things that they could change to improve their profitability in the next generation: * Tom Petersen made a big deal about 16-lane SIMD in Battlemage being what games want rather than the 8-lane SIMD in Alchemist. However, that is not quite true since both Nvidia and AMD graphics use 32-lane SIMD. If the number of lanes really matter and I certainly can see how it would if game shaders have horizontal operations, then a switch to 32-lane SIMD should yield further improvements. * Tom Petersen said in his interview with Hardware Unboxed that Intel reported the active transistor count for the B580 rather than the total transistor count. This is the contrary to others who report the total transistor count (as evidenced by their density figures being close to what TSMC claims the process can do). Tom Petersen also stated that they would not necessarily be forced by defects to turn dies into B570 cards. This suggests to me that they have substantial redundant logic in the GPU to prevent defects from rendering chips unusable, and that logic is intended to be disabled in production. GPUs are already highly redundant. They could drop much of the planned dark silicon and let defects force a larger percentage of the dies to be usable by only cutdown models. I could have read too much into things that Tom Petersen said. Then again, he did say that their design team is conservative and the doubling rather than quadrupling of the SIMD lane count and the sheer amount of dark silicon (>40% of the die by my calculation) spent on what should be redundant components strike me as conservative design choices. Hopefully the next generation addresses these things. Also, they really do have >40% dark silicon when doing density comparisons: * ARC B580: 72.1M / mm² * Nvidia 4070 Ti: 121.8M / mm² * TSMC claim for 5nm: 138.2M / mm² They have 41% less density than Nvidia and 48% less density than TSMC claims the process can obtain. We also know that they have additional transistors on the die that are not active from Tom Petersen’s comments. Presumably, they are for redundancy. Otherwise, there really is no sane explanation that I can see for so much dark silicon. If they are using transistors that are twice the size as the density figure might be interpreted to suggest, they might as well have used TSMC’s 7nm process since while a smaller process can etch larger features, it is a waste of money. Note that we can rule out the cache lowering the density. The L1 + L2 cache on the 4070 Ti is 79872 KB while it is 59392 KB on the B580. We can also rule out IO logic as lowering the density, as the 4070 Ti has a 256-bit memory bus while the B580 has a 192-bit memory bus. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-b580.c4244 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3950 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4070-ti.c3... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Nodes The hardware unboxed interview of Tom Petersen is here: https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM https://youtu.be/XYZyai-xjNM

oofabz 2y ago

The die size of the B580 is 272 mm2, which is a lot of silicon for $249. The performance of the GPU is good for its price but bad for its die size. Manufacturing cost is closely tied to die size. 272 mm2 puts the B580 in the same league as the Radeon 7700XT, a $449 card, and the GeForce 4070 Super, which is $599. The idea that Intel is selling these cards at a loss sounds reasonable to me.

tjoff 2y ago
Though you assume the prices of the competition are reasonable. There are plenty of reasons for them not to be. Availability issues, lack of competition, other more lucrative avenues etc. Intel has neither, or at least not as much of them.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
At a loss seems a bit overly dramatic. I'd guess Nvidia sells SKUs for three times their marginal cost. Intel is probably operating at cost without any hopes of recouping R&D with the current SKUs, but that's reasonable for an aspiring competitor.
- 7speter 2y ago
  It kinda seems they are covering the cost of throwing massive amounts of resources trying to get Arc’s drivers in shape.
  - KeplerBoy 2y ago
    I really hope they stick with it and become a viable competitor in every market segment a few more years down the line.
  - ryao 2y ago
    The drivers are shared by their iGPUs, so the cost of improving the drivers is likely shared by those.
ryao 2y ago
The idea that Intel is selling these at a loss does not sound reasonable to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 The only way this would be at a loss is if they refuse to raise production to meet demand. That said, I believe their margins on these are unusually low for the industry. They might even fall into razor thin territory.

ryao 2y ago

That guy’s reasoning is faulty. To start, he has made math mistakes in every video that he has posted recently involving math. To give 3 recent examples: At 10m3s in the following video, he claims to add a 60% margin by multiplying by 1.6, but in reality is adding a 37.5 margin and needed to multiply by 2.5 to add a 60% margin. This can be calculated by calculating Cost Scaling Factor = 1 / (1 - Normalized Profit Margin): 2.5 = 1 / (1 - 0.6) 1.6 = 1 / (1 - 0.375) https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ At 48m13s in the following video, he claims that Intel’s B580 is 80% worse than Nvidia’s hardware. He took the 4070 Ti as being 82% better than the 2080 SUPER, assumed based on leaks from his reviewer friends that the B580 was about at the performance of the 2080 SUPER and then claimed that the B580 would be around 80% worse than the 4070 Ti. Unfortunately for him, that is 45% worse, not 80% worse. His chart is from Techpowerup and if he had taken the time to do some math (1 - 1/(1 + 0.82) ~ 0.45), or clicked to the 2080 SUPER page, he would have seen it has 55% of the performance of the 4070 Ti, which is 45% worse: https://youtu.be/-lv52n078dw https://youtu.be/-lv52n078dw At 1m2s in the following video, he makes a similar math mistake by saying that the B580 has 8% better price/performance than the RTX 3060 when in fact it is 9% better. He mistakenly equated the RTX 3060 being 8% worse than the B580 to mean that it is 8% better, but math does not work that way. Luckily for him, the math error is small here, but he still failed to do math correctly and his reasoning grows increasingly faulty with the scale of his math errors. What he should have done that gives the correct normalized factor is: 1.09 ~ 1 / (1 - 0.08) A factor of 1.09 better is 9% better. https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg He not just fails at mathematical reasoning, but lacks a basic understanding of how hardware manufacturing works. He said that if Intel loses $20 per card in low production volumes, then making 10 million cards will result in a $200 million loss. In reality, things become cheaper due to economics of scale and simple napkin math shows that they can turn a profit on these cards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505496 His $20 loss per card remark is at 11m40s: https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg https://youtu.be/3jy6GDGzgbg His behavior is consistent with being on a vendetta rather than being a technology journalist. For example, at 55m13s in the following video, he puts words in Tom Petersen’s mouth and then with a malicious smile on his mouth, cheers while claiming that Tom Petersen declared discrete ARC cards to be dead when Tom Petersen said nothing of the kind. Earlier in the same video at around 44m14s, he calls Tom Petersen a professional liar. However, he sees no problem expecting people to believe words he shoved into the “liar’s” mouth: https://youtu.be/xVKcmGKQyXU https://youtu.be/xVKcmGKQyXU If you scrutinize his replies to criticism in his comments section, you would see he is dodging criticism of the actual issues with his coverage while saying “I was right about <insert thing completely unrelated to the complaint here>” or “facts don’t care about your feelings”. You would also notice that he is copy and pasting the same statements rather than writing replies addressing the details of the complaints. To be clear, I am paraphrasing in those two quotes. He also shows contempt for his viewers that object to his behavior in the following video around 18m53s where he calls them “corporate cheerleaders”: https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ https://youtu.be/pq5G4mPOOPQ In short, Tom at MLID is unable to do mathematical reasoning, does not understand how hardware manufacturing works, has a clear vendetta against Intel’s discrete graphics, is unable to take constructive criticism and lashes out at those who try to tell him when he is wrong. I suggest being skeptical of anything he says about Intel’s graphics division.