They are forecasting a lower demand in the short term future. I’d guess they ran the numbers and producing fewer high cost items is more cost effective for them.
Unfortunately, this likely means more shortages and costs stay high for the consumer.
Unfortunately, this likely means more shortages and costs stay high for the consumer.
Intel's new Arc product is the first competitor from another company in a very long time.
GPUs are insanely complex and the drivers are full of hacks (even per game basis, a driver could swap shaders with ones written by Nvidia/AMD if it detects you're playing the newest popular title). The threshold to enter the market is incredibly high.
Intel is hitting that problem head-on; no game is written to take advantage of its new GPUs, and has to suffer a ton for it. It's not a guarantee Intel will ever be able to escape this problem.
Companies like TensTorrent, Graphcore and Lightmatter (for example) try to hit different spots of the architectural landscape (seemingly all optimising for 'cheap to tapeout' in all sorts of clever ways, but you still have to code for it (even though you often get python APIs and deep learning tensorflow/torch support, but that's probably not getting you to to max perf). Very interesting to watch, and hopefully one can get their hands on that kind of hardware and build a community around it.
We really need the forces that be to change this.