Linux devs discover that Intel Arc GPU firmware updates need an Intel CPU

> Update, 7:35 pm ET: Intel told Ars Technica that it is possible for both Intel and AMD-based platforms to update Arc GPU firmware, and that Intel's Management Engine wasn't actually required for firmware updates.

Oh good:) I will be interested to see how things play out for POWER.

I feel like this is the same problem that drove Intel into their current position; they do a really bad job at creating a separation of concerns. Their big turn around plan across the business appears to be treating foundry and chip design like two fully separate entities, so that the foundry will no longer cater to their designers and actually force design to compete on their own merits; a hard-learned lesson.

And yet, here they are functionally subsidizing their CPU business by handicapping the usefulness of their GPU line. That handicap will probably be for at least two generations, since it's almost certain that consumers will now be skeptical of their (already rough) firmware being able to receive updates not only this time around but whenever their next line comes out as well, even if they claim to fix the issue.

Edit: Ars has retracted this story; Intel claims, and Ars has confirmed on Windows at least, that Arc GPU firmware should be upgradable using both AMD and Intel CPUs. Maybe they actually have learned!

It must be extremely hard to enter the GPU market.

Hopefully Intel is aware it will take them some generations of work to become competitive. Hopefully they will stay in the game.

AMD is starting to get its act together and the next generation of GPUs will place some real competitive pressure on Nvidia.

Nvidia shows all the hallmarks of a market leader that has had no effective competition, resulting in overpriced offering with limited features that make things hard for its users. Consider for example that Nvidia artifically limits functionality so that consumers cannot access the full capabilities of their GPUs - with good competition this sort of thing will come to an end.

I don't get it. Intel has, in broad strokes, generally had good products. Why do they have this odd affinity for anti-competitive behavior? Cheating on benchmarks, having their compiler artificially undermine performance on non-Intel CPUs, now tying GPUs to CPUs.

It's unfortunate that Intel seems to be just as closed with its GPUs as the others. If they just sold the chips and provided full documentation, drivers, and firmware for a reference design (i.e. open-sourced everything but the GPU design itself) on their site, I wonder if they'd become even more successful. If you look at Intel's early products and what documentation was available for them, this was what they used to do.

Personally, I think the Chinese GPUs that are starting to appear might become quite competitive and perhaps even more open (if only because leaks/sharing may be more common) --- and I'm saying this as someone who has had a "buy American" mindset for a long time.

Eh whatever I'm sure they'll fix this and it wasn't malicious like a lot of people seem to be thinking.

I am one of the original Odyssey card holders and they sent me an a750 and I've been having a whole lot of fun testing that card and my CPU happens to be an AMD CPU, the 5900x.

A lot of the things that you're seeing is just them not having the resources internally to be testing all of these iterations of configurations. I mean their drivers say that my motherboard doesn't support resizable bar when I clearly have it enabled in the bios Windows reports it as enabled gpu-z reports it as enabled... But I don't see this as a malicious thing it's just a blind spot problem. I'll make them aware of it and I'm pretty sure it'll be fixed.

If you want a competitor to AMD and Nvidia please buy these cards and test weird shit that's on the fringes. Don't worry about the modern stuff don't worry about DirectX 12 or Vulkan stuff. Just make sure to have dgvoodoo2, dxvk, nglide and whatever other wrappers. I've been finding that for old stuff that uses like directx 8 DirectX 9 that I have to jump through about the same amount of hoops on my 2070 super in 2080 TI to get these older games working on modern windows. So the compatibility problems aren't all that bad but the ones that are bad are annoying that they don't work.

Also don't pay attention to benchmarks or reviews from even a couple weeks ago because right now my a750 without an overclock is beating pretty much every benchmark that I originally read just from a week ago from both the a770 and the a750. Improvements in Windows 11 insider along with having a strong CPU along with beta driver updates... AMD fine wine is going to be immediately superseded by this. Intel also has a leg up on tensorflow and other Nvidia specific compute path things to make those eventually work a whole lot easier with just a plug-and-play kind of thing. AMD has been doing this competition thing for how long and they don't even have a fucking chance with that.

When companies show anti-competitive behavior that works against the consumer, we should all massively buy their products and immediately return them. This unfortunately is the only way to tell these companies that they are doing something wrong.

It's sad that Intel Arc 1st Gen is such a failure. I would have loved to see a 3rd vendor in the fight