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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

> Would also be great if intel would stay in the GPU race as a third player to put some pressure to AMD and Nvidia.

Are they not?

Their discrete GPU business has had loses over 3.5 Billions so far and it will likely keep loosing money for the near future since they aren't competitive yet and the next gen, Battlemage is not planned till 2024 the earliest.

Their ability to support the losses of the GPU division to keep them in the race for the long run will depend on the other businesses making bank to compensate.

Are they making bank? If not, they might axe the GPU division.

But I wouldn't hesitate to buy one if it's the right card for your needs. I'm likely going to. Even if they axe the discrete cards the tech will make it into CPU's and SOC's so driver support will continue.

And of course their Linux support is open source and top notch.

Yeah, as many other things as I dislike about intel, I give them some grace for how well they support their GPUs on linux. If I could only figure out how to get flux.jl to work with oneapi.jl

I’m loving my A770. Absolutely zero issues with it and it’s handling raytracing and all with aplomb.

I recall seeing some issues with performance on some older games - do you know if this is still the case, or did you not try it? I'm not in the market for a graphics card at the moment, but if there's another competitive company in the space when I am that would be excellent.

I think those massive performance issues were only restricted to games using DX9 because the architecture had no support for it in HW so what they did was use the translation layer DX9 to Vulkan for those titles and performance went up. Shouldn't be an issue anymore.

Ah yeah I remember DX9 support was mentioned. That's good to hear though

The latest driver claims to improve DX9 performance by 60%. Counter-Strike by 120%.

Myself I don't care about old games. As long as they're "good enough", I worry about unreleased games that will force me to get a new video card before I would otherwise.

Nobody has good support for DX9 in their hardware, it's all in the drivers. And that's why the delta between Nvidia and everybody else is so much higher for DX9-DX11 than it is for DX12, Metal & Vulcan.

Tbh I haven’t had a chance to game a ton yet in it but everything I’ve tried has been fine.

Buuut I only have a 2K monitor and the system is also massively overkill (i9-13900k @6.4ghz, 64GB DDR5 @ 6400mhz, striped PCIe4 NVMe drives, Optane PCIe OS drive etc etc). So I’ll be hard pressed to really notice any performance issues since I upgraded from an i5-10500 with 16gb ddr4 and a Radeon Pro WX5100 8GB lol.

other perspective - in the long run, intel can't afford to axe the gpu division, because there's so much potential in that space where x86 and its new generations is increasingly getting bigger competition from arm based designs.

Intel basically has to get gpus right, eventually. AMD is already doing it. Apple is already doing it, for their purposes. Intel has to catch up.

>intel can't afford to axe the gpu division, because there's so much potential in that space

Haha, that's adorable when you consider how many things with potential Intel has either axed, sold off, or abandoned over the years.

  - ARM mobile chips (StrongARM)

  - Mobile modems (now belonging to Apple)

  - Compute stick

  - Itanium

  - The Edison and Curie

  - IoT Gateway

  - Xeon Phy

  - Movidius VPUs haven't been axed but they don't seem to be getting developed further

  - Recon smart glasses

None of those were core to Intel's business in the way GPUs are likely going to be going forward. The closer integration of CPUs and GPUs is an industry wide trend with Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all trying to eliminate the need to go off-chip for as much as possible. Things can be dramatically faster and more efficient across both consumer and server workloads if everything is just part of the same actual chip and you don't have to go out and use things which are plugged into the motherboard. Making that work is a lot easier if you have both your own CPU and GPU architectures. Apple has both in the M1, Nvidia is pairing ARM cores with its GPUs, AMD obviously makes both, and Intel is trying to get in on the game. They recognize that having their own GPU designs are going to be very important to both their consumer and HPC products going forward, especially as use-cases which rely on GPU or GPU-like acceleration (AI stuff) proliferate. Having competitive GPU designs is critical to their future competitiveness.

> ARM

Oh what could have been

Intel actually spent too much effort on the Itanium, it was stillborn. The Xeon Phi was just the product name of the Larrabee without the display output parts, and the Larrabee was demoted to the Xeon Phi BECAUSE it didn't have enough potential to compete with the discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. The current attempt at discrete GPUs is more promising.

Also, they helped develop Infiniband before dropping out. Much later they got back into the Infiniband business by buying QLogic, and from there developed Omnipath which they eventually gave up on, spinning the product line off as a separate company, Cornelis Networks.

Some others: Realsense, Optane, and they sold their NAND busisess to SK Hynix.

Don't forget the Intel purchase of McAfee software for $7.5B

I think they just junked their network switch silicon. Again.

But Intel replaced the Xeon Phi with their discrete GPUs, I would abandon those too, if I had an even better product to sell.

But if they can't afford to keep it running then they will have no choice but to axe it.

They went into this knowing they'd spend billions before making money. Its taken almost a decade of development and Alchemist is out on the market and the drivers continue to improve. Intel's a big company with 28 billion in cash on hand, I don't see them giving up in this space when AI/ML is becoming a burgeoning cash cow.

>They went into this knowing they'd spend billions before making money.

They went into this during the covid and crypto driven GPU scalpocalipse when everything that could render triangles would sell for whatever sticker price you put on it but ended up launching right after the bubble bust. Very unfortunate timing. Now their products need to actually be competitive.

Intel didn't just jump into the gpu market because of the 2020 mining craze. It takes much longer to develop these products. They hired Raja Koduri in 2017:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/intel-poaches-amds-t...

>They hired Raja Koduri in 2017

Ah yes, the person who led the development of the least successful GPUs in Radeon's history. Intel looked at his achievements and thought "that's the rockstar we need".

Thank God I find another person on HN with similar views on Intel's GPU and Raja.

They need to enter the compute market. From what I can tell Intel is the only company serious about OpenCL and even they decided to abandon SVM (shared virtual memory) from OpenCL 2.x and instead introduced their own unified shared memory extension (USM). USM is basically how SVM should have worked in the first place and can be easily implemented on any platform, even non Intel GPUs. Meanwhile SVM is almost impossible to get right and only AMD and Intel ever implemented it and Intel iGPUs already share system RAM with the GPU so there was actually nothing to implement.

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