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Comment by stracer | Hacker News Reader

Too late, and it has a bad rep. This effort from Intel to sell discrete GPUs is just inertia from old aspirations, won't really help noticeably to save it, as there is not much money in it. Most probably the whole Intel ARC effort will be mothballed, and probably many more will.

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What's the alternative?

I think it's the right call since there isn't much competition in GPU industry anyway. Sure, Intel is far behind. But they need to start somewhere in order to break ground.

Strictly speaking strategically, my intuition is that they will learn from this, course correct and then would start making progress.

The idea of another competitive GPU manufacturer is nice. But it is hard to bring into existence. Intel is not in a position to invest lots of money and sustained effort into products for which the market is captured and controlled by a much bigger and more competent company on top of its game. Not even AMD can get more market share, and they are much more competent in the GPU technology. Unless NVIDIA and AMD make serious mistakes, Intel GPUs will remain a 3rd rate product.

> "They need to start somewhere in order to break ground"

Intel has big problems and it's not clear they should occupy themselves with this. They should stabilize, and the most plausible way to do that is to cut the weak parts, and get back to what they were good at - performant secure x86_64 CPUs, maybe some new innovative CPUs with low consumption, maybe memory/solid state drives.

> maybe memory/solid state drives

That's a very low margin and cyclical market since memory/SSDs are basically commodities. I don't think Intel would have any chance surviving in such a market they just have way to much bloat/R&D spending. Which is not a bad thing as long as you can produce better than products than the competition.

Yeah, but they can saturate fabs and provide income, which they need. Intel can't produce better CPU/GPU products than their competition now. Their design and manufacturing of CPUs has serious problems for years now. The big money in GPUs is already captured by NVIDIA, and it's hard to see how Intel can challenge that - people want NVIDIA and CUDA. So Intel should cut down and focus the remaining bloat and R&D spending on the areas where it's plausible they can get competitive in a reasonable time. That is CPUs, and maybe memory and SSDs - they have X-Point which was great, just marketed and priced wrong.

No reviews and when you click on the reseller links in the press announcement they're still selling A750s with no B-Series in sight. Strong paper launch.

The fine article states reviews are still embargoed, and sales start next week.

The mods have thankfully changed this to a Phoronix article instead of the Intel page and the title has been reworked to not include 'launch'.

"old aspirations"

"there is not much money in it"?

WTF?

There is not much money in it for Intel.

Intel tried to get into GPU-like products 14 years ago. They promote their consumer Arc GPUs since 2022, and still almost nobody wants them. Is there a datacenter Intel GPU that some business wants?

The big money is flowing NVIDIA's way, and even if Intel can make a GPU, it won't be able to divert a big part of the flow, similarly to AMD.

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