During the company's third-quarter 2024 earnings call, Intel confirmed that its future laptop chips will return to the traditional use of RAM sticks, reversing Lunar Lake's radical...
Panther Lake and Nova Lake laptops will return to traditional RAM sticks
Intel can’t afford to keep making GPUs because it doesn’t have the reliable CPU side to soak up the losses. The GPU market has established players and Intel, besides being a big name, didn’t bring much to the table to build a place for itself in the market. Outside of good Linux support (I’ve heard, but not personally used) the Intel GPUs don’t stand out for price or performance.
Intel is struggling with its very existence and doesn’t have the money or time to explore new markets when their primary product is cratering their own revenue. Intel has a very deep problem with how it is run and will most likely be unable to survive as-is for much longer.
As a Linux user of an Intel Arc card. I can safely say that the support is outstanding. In terms of price to performance, I think it’s pretty good too. I mainly enjoy having 16GB of VRAM and not spending $450-$500+ to get that amount like Nvidia. I know AMD also has cards around the same price that have that amount of VRAM too though
The main things that use up a lot of VRAM for me is definitely doing Blender rendering and shader compilation for things like Unreal Engine. My games probably would use a little more if I had any screen higher than 1080p. The most usage I’ve seen from a game was around 14Gb used
I haven’t messed around with llms on the card just yet but I know that Intel does have an extension for PyTorch to do GPU compute. Having the extra VRAM would definitely be of help there
It boggles the mind that AMD realized the importance of GPUs 20 years ago when they bought ATI and in all that time Intel still doesn’t have a competitive GPU.
Intel realized it back then too, but things didn’t pan out the way they wanted.
nVidia and AMD were going to merge while ATi was circling the drain. Then Jensen and Hector Ruiz got into their shitfight about who was going to be CEO of the marged AMD/nVidia (it should have been Jensen, Hector Ruiz is an idiot) which eventually terminated the merger.
AMD, desperately needing a GPU side for their ‘future is fusion’ plans, bought the ailing ATi at a massive premium.
Intel was waiting for ATi to circle the drain a little more before swooping in and buying them cheap, AMD beat them to it.
That’s a slightly revisionist history. ATI was by no means “circling the drain”, they had a promising new GPU architecture soon to be released, and remember this because I bought ATI stock about 6 months before the merger.
The United States has a few chip fabs that are capable of making military grade hardware. It’s helpful that the defense industry uses chips which aren’t the most advanced possible - they want the reliability mature tech provides. Micron, Texas Instruments, ON semiconductor - there are a few domestic chip companies with stateside fabs.
Intel is also a valuable collection of patents and a huge number of companies would love to get them. Someone will want to step in before the government takes over.
Intel is the only US based and owned foundry that is on the leading edge of fab process technology. That’s what the government wants domestically. Defense isn’t just military and certain intelligence and similar functions need high performance hardware. I somehow don’t think the NSA is using CPUs made on Northrop Grumman’s 180 nm planar CMOS process. Army radios might use that shit but the highest tech defense and intelligence agencies are using modern hardware. Intel is the best option for manufacturing it.
TSMC could be an option now with its US based GIGAFABs but it would be a much more complex deal with the US government where chips made for it would have to be made entirely in the US and possibly by a US domiciled subsidiary instead of TSMC’s main Taiwan based parent company. The same goes for Samsung.
Absolutely wrong. A lot of old and dated information in your post.
They have something no one else has: manufacturing, and very low price and great performance after recent driver updates. They just lack the driver stability which has been making leaps and bounds.
I do not think anyone else can enter the market, let alone with an edge.
I see the idea of Intel dropping arc as good news for AMD. Intel was going to chip at AMD’s marketshare well before Nvidia’s. It would be better to have more competition though.
I wasn’t saying AMD would shut down, but that Intel would take market share from them before truely affecting Nvidia’s market share. ie AMD and Intel would be fighting over the same 25ish% of the pc market.
Intel could have conceivably competed with them there too. If they were still a competent business and not in a crisis of mismanagement. Its amazing how much better AMD is managed compared to Intel.
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Reverting to RAM sticks is good, but not shutting down GPU line. GPU market needs more competiter, not less.
Intel can’t afford to keep making GPUs because it doesn’t have the reliable CPU side to soak up the losses. The GPU market has established players and Intel, besides being a big name, didn’t bring much to the table to build a place for itself in the market. Outside of good Linux support (I’ve heard, but not personally used) the Intel GPUs don’t stand out for price or performance.
Intel is struggling with its very existence and doesn’t have the money or time to explore new markets when their primary product is cratering their own revenue. Intel has a very deep problem with how it is run and will most likely be unable to survive as-is for much longer.
As a Linux user of an Intel Arc card. I can safely say that the support is outstanding. In terms of price to performance, I think it’s pretty good too. I mainly enjoy having 16GB of VRAM and not spending $450-$500+ to get that amount like Nvidia. I know AMD also has cards around the same price that have that amount of VRAM too though
That’s interesting, thanks. Can I ask what that vram is getting used for? Gaming, llms, other computing?
The main things that use up a lot of VRAM for me is definitely doing Blender rendering and shader compilation for things like Unreal Engine. My games probably would use a little more if I had any screen higher than 1080p. The most usage I’ve seen from a game was around 14Gb used
I haven’t messed around with llms on the card just yet but I know that Intel does have an extension for PyTorch to do GPU compute. Having the extra VRAM would definitely be of help there
It boggles the mind that AMD realized the importance of GPUs 20 years ago when they bought ATI and in all that time Intel still doesn’t have a competitive GPU.
Intel realized it back then too, but things didn’t pan out the way they wanted.
nVidia and AMD were going to merge while ATi was circling the drain. Then Jensen and Hector Ruiz got into their shitfight about who was going to be CEO of the marged AMD/nVidia (it should have been Jensen, Hector Ruiz is an idiot) which eventually terminated the merger.
AMD, desperately needing a GPU side for their ‘future is fusion’ plans, bought the ailing ATi at a massive premium.
Intel was waiting for ATi to circle the drain a little more before swooping in and buying them cheap, AMD beat them to it.
That’s a slightly revisionist history. ATI was by no means “circling the drain”, they had a promising new GPU architecture soon to be released, and remember this because I bought ATI stock about 6 months before the merger.
Basically there is only money at the top of the gpu range. Everything else is a budget card with razor thin margins.
AI specific chips will take off over time but even then the ship is starting to sail . These are mostly data center projects.
Intel is too big to fail. And the defense sector needs an advanced domestic foundry. Uncle Sam will bail it out with our tax money.
The United States has a few chip fabs that are capable of making military grade hardware. It’s helpful that the defense industry uses chips which aren’t the most advanced possible - they want the reliability mature tech provides. Micron, Texas Instruments, ON semiconductor - there are a few domestic chip companies with stateside fabs.
Intel is also a valuable collection of patents and a huge number of companies would love to get them. Someone will want to step in before the government takes over.
Intel is the only US based and owned foundry that is on the leading edge of fab process technology. That’s what the government wants domestically. Defense isn’t just military and certain intelligence and similar functions need high performance hardware. I somehow don’t think the NSA is using CPUs made on Northrop Grumman’s 180 nm planar CMOS process. Army radios might use that shit but the highest tech defense and intelligence agencies are using modern hardware. Intel is the best option for manufacturing it.
TSMC could be an option now with its US based GIGAFABs but it would be a much more complex deal with the US government where chips made for it would have to be made entirely in the US and possibly by a US domiciled subsidiary instead of TSMC’s main Taiwan based parent company. The same goes for Samsung.
Absolutely wrong. A lot of old and dated information in your post.
They have something no one else has: manufacturing, and very low price and great performance after recent driver updates. They just lack the driver stability which has been making leaps and bounds.
I do not think anyone else can enter the market, let alone with an edge.
I have no confidence in Intel’s long-term prospects.
Intel has been a mistake since 1978. But evil doesn’t generally die.
I see the idea of Intel dropping arc as good news for AMD. Intel was going to chip at AMD’s marketshare well before Nvidia’s. It would be better to have more competition though.
AMD would never close their GPU department because they sell their apu to Xbox, playstation, steam deck
I wasn’t saying AMD would shut down, but that Intel would take market share from them before truely affecting Nvidia’s market share. ie AMD and Intel would be fighting over the same 25ish% of the pc market.
Intel could have conceivably competed with them there too. If they were still a competent business and not in a crisis of mismanagement. Its amazing how much better AMD is managed compared to Intel.
They have to try revive their idea like they did in intel core i7 8709g first though