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Intel will start making GPUs
- seg_lol 8mo agoI'd be more excited about Intel making HBM.
- bhouston 8mo agoI am a little confused, I thought Intel had a big push the last couple of years to create its own GPU: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discrete-gpus/arc/desktop/b-series/overview.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre...
- elephanlemon 8mo agoIntel Arc seems to be well liked, this seems to just be bad writing by Reuters. Unclear what is news here exactly as Demmers was hired a month ago…
- BadBadJellyBean 8mo agoI think this is about them creating the silicon. AFAIK their GPU chips were produced by TSMC.
- alt227 8mo agoEven the gpus inside their cpus?
- mastax 8mo agoIntel has been using a fair bit of TSMC in their CPU manufacturing recently, yes. Most recently they’ve been assembling “tiles” of silicon from many process nodes into a single CPU package and IIRC they have been using TSMC for the GPU tiles.
- mrpippy 8mo agoThe original article is here, and it unfortunately is just as confusing: https://www.reuters.com/business/intel-ceo-says-company-will-make-gpus-has-hired-lead-executive-2026-02-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/intel-ceo-says-company-will... Of course Intel has been designing and selling GPUs for years, I guess Lip-Bu means they're going to start manufacturing them as well? Or they're going to be data-center focused now?
- wtallis 8mo agoSince he was touting that they recently hired a well-known GPU architect, it seems unlikely that this is merely about them using their own fabs for discrete GPUs instead of having integrated GPUs being the only ones they fab themselves. Some kind of shift in product strategy or reboot of their GPU architecture development seems more likely, if there's anything of substance underlying the news at all. But this news is somehow even less comprehensible and believable than usual for Intel, whose announcements about their future plans have a tenuous connection to reality on a good day.
- searls 8mo agoAgree, extremely poorly reported out across numerous outlets.
- ginko 8mo agoIntel has been making GPUs since the late 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_process...
- re-thc 8mo agoThey did but then it stopped and was scrapped (chief involved also left). So it's more like "re"-start than start.
- jamesgeck0 8mo agoAny official source? YouTubers have been saying that Intel is shuttering Arc at every minor setback for years.
- beAbU 8mo agoTSMC makes Intel's GPUs
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoIntel has been making GPUs since the early 1980s, starting with the 82720, or the 82716 if you want to be picky and require a pure-Intel design. They announce a new GPU effort every few years, at about the time it's clear that the previous one has failed. Again being picky, in theory their integrated graphics are a "success" in that they sell well, but that's because vendors get them for free with the CPU and so don't have to go through the expense of adding a discrete one.
- SR2Z 8mo agoI mean, they're a success in that even a weak discrete GPU is extremely overkill for the majority of people who just want to browse. You can only integrate that kind of card into another chip because the overhead of adding IO and another PCB is just too high for such a weak GPU.
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoOh, absolutely, 99% of users and particularly business users don't need a gaming-grade GPU so the Intel one is fine. Just for a laugh I once tried playing a 10-15 year old game on a recent Intel GPU. It was pretty dire, many seconds between frame updates. It took me several minutes just to get out of the game because it took so long to respond to keypresses.
- rasz 8mo ago1979 if you really want CRTs to be called GPU :) https://bitsavers.org/components/intel/8275/1979_8275.pdf https://bitsavers.org/components/intel/8275/1979_8275.pdf Used on Intel made iSBX270 video board http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/iSBC/143444-001_iSBX_270_Video_Display_Terminal_Controller_Board_198110.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/iSBC/143444-001_iSBX_270_... for use in Intel iSBX systems.
- chrsw 8mo agoThe silicon is just one piece of the puzzle. CUDA and the rest of the software stack is huge advantage for NVIDIA.
- bhouston 8mo agoyup, which is why AMD struggles so much even though its hardware is usually within 30% of the performance (give or take) of NVIDIA. (Replaced "with 30%" with "within 30%")
- bigyabai 8mo agoIt's also complicated by the notion that raster performance doesn't directly translate to tensor performance. Apple and AMD both make excellent raster GPUs, but still lose in efficiency to the CUDA's architecture in rendering and compute. I'd really like AMD and Apple to start from scratch with a compute-oriented GPU architecture, ideally standardized with Khronos. The NPU/tensor coprocessor architecture has already proven itself to be a bad idea.
- Asmod4n 8mo agoAMD is doing that for their next gen, no idea if khronos is involved.
- roysting 8mo agoThat may be true, but assuming you meant "within 30% of the performance" ... can we just acknowledge that is a rather significant handicap, even ignoring CUDA.
- epolanski 8mo agoThe customers are players that can throw money into the software stack, hell, they are even throwing lots of money in the hardware one too with proprietary tensors and such. And the big players don't necessarily care about the full software stack, they are likely to optimize the hardware for single usage (e.g. inference or specific steps of the training).
- 8mo ago
- BadBadJellyBean 8mo agoGood to hear. More than two players in the GPU market is a really good thing and their recent dedicated consumer GPUs are really good value in their segment. It will take a few generations until they might catch up to Nvidia, but I am hopeful. This is a good thing.
- roysting 8mo agoSo they are just moving GPU production in-house? Weren't they already designing GPUs for contract with TSMC?
- u1hcw9nx 8mo agoDeja Vu all over again. 2016 Nervana. Intel would lead in AI training. The "Nervana NNP" was the future. 2019 Habana Intel announced the Gaudi and Goya chips as their new official AI strategy, effectively killing the Nervana project. 2021 Xe general HPC/AI GPU (Ponte Vecchio) Intel said they will be shifting to the "AI chip" market. 2023 The "AI PC". every consumer CPU would now be an "AI Chip" with NPU (Neural Processing Unit). 2024 Intel is now "AI Systems Foundry" to focus on making AI chips for other people (like Microsoft and Amazon). 2026 Intel will start making GPUs
- netule 8mo agoIf you discount recent AI-specific developments, you can trace this back further to Larrabee, Intel MIC, Xeon Phi, etc., etc., etc.
- usrusr 8mo ago"Intel keeps starting to make GPUs"
- RobotToaster 8mo agoWasn't Itanium marketed as being good for some kind of AI?
- eqvinox 8mo agoDon't beat a dead horse, that's rude ;). They did kinda try to market it as good for everything though, didn't they.
- midnitewarrior 8mo ago3 years too late to get serious about GPUs.
- perbu 8mo agoNot at all. There is no indication that the world won't need more GPUs going forward.
- alt227 8mo agoIntel started making and selling their own gpus many years ago, this news is just that they are going to fab the chips themselves, instead of outsourcing to TMSC.
- ytch 8mo agoIt's too late after Sony and Microsoft choose AMD64 SOC (CPU+GPU) as gaming platform. AMD is the only provider over 10 years.
- Zigurd 8mo agoIt's a confusing article. It's strongly implies that Intel will make GPUs for data centers. It says Intel will produce GPUs without saying whether they are manufacturing them in house or not.
- alexbaden 8mo agoIntel has been designing GPUs manufactured on TSMC nodes across client and datacenter for at least the past 5 years. The client chips are price competitive but not performance competitive with AMD/NVIDIA/Apple. The data center roadmap has historically been a huge mess with cancelled products left and right. But, to say "Intel will start making GPUs" seems misleading. Perhaps "Intel to try to inject sanity into its GPU roadmap" would be a better headline, though I am skeptical one hire will do anything to fix 10+ years of mismanagement.
- bpye 8mo agoI have a B580 in my desktop. Unfortunately AMD still has broken PCIe level reset and so their GPUs don't work well for assignment to a VM, Intel and Nvidia cards both work fine. The perf is fine - it was a $350 CAD GPU after all. I am certainly interested to see where Intel ends up going with their lineup. Having a third player in the GPU space is definitely a good thing.
- alexbaden 8mo agoI have a B580 too. The cool thing about it is architecturally speaking it is basically a mini version of the Ponte Vecchio (PVC) datacenter GPU. You can run most of the datacenter GPU workloads, albeit scaled down to fit the compute/memory constraints of the B580. It's a great vehicle for software development. But you can't buy PVC anymore so it's unclear what you are developing for...
- monster_truck 8mo agoIt is my understanding that this isn't happening in any meaningful capacity, they're simply using the kit no longer relevant to R&D. I'm still not entirely convinced they actually did Arc themselves. It has all the hallmarks of a project that was bought or taken. Every meaningful iteration keeps getting pushed back further out towards the horizon and the only thing they've been able to offer in the meantime is "uhhhh what if we used two"
- re-thc 8mo ago> I'm still not entirely convinced they actually did Arc themselves Raja ex AMD / Radeon ran the project?
- 5G_activated 8mo agointel has been making graphics silicon since the 90s, the current discrete graphics effort has been going for at least a decade, and in areas like low power video decode and encode it could be argued intel is class-leading. the concept of the "GPU" is a quarter of a century old. this is an especially poor article, especially for a publication running as long as techcrunch.
- andrewstuart 8mo agoThe CEO of Intel already specifically said Intel has given up competing with Nvidia. That’s the spirit!
- gilbertjolly 8mo agoThe most rapid path that Intel has to selling competitive GPUs, would be to licence designs from Groq, and apply all effort to getting them working on 14a. Hyperscalers would bite their hand off and would be a viable alternative to TSMC. Nvidia has left the door open with the non-exclusive license in the acquisition
- yolostar1 8mo agoWtf Intel is doing, they can't even communicate well !
- ch_123 8mo agoThey've been trying for nearly 30 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740
- androiddrew 8mo ago“We realized that we were too focused on the consumer market. “ - Intel
- cwillu 8mo ago…again.
- Telaneo 8mo agoDidn't know my A770 wasn't a GPU.
- cromka 8mo ago*Intel Foundry
- Martin_Silenus 8mo agoI wonder what the hell is that damn thing I select sometimes on my Vulkan engine with --gpu-select=Intel :)