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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea of the likely price, but (IMO) this is the sort of disruption that Intel needs to aim at if it's going to make some sort of dent in this market. If they could release this for around the price of a 5090, it would be very interesting.

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> If they could release this for around the price of a 5090

This is not targeted at consumers. It’s competing with nVidia’s high RAM workstation cards. Think $10K price range, not $1-2K.

The 160GB of LPDDR5X chips alone is expensive enough that they couldn’t release this at the $2K price point unless they felt like giving it away (which they don’t)

It's probably spark dgx competition. So around 3-5k would be ideally it.

Any higher and its not really a disruption

In the back of my head floats $200 - $300 for the 64 GiB GDDR7 that you get for spending 7k-10k on an ADA 6000 96 GiB instead of 2k for a 5090 32 GiB. Am I off? Is LPDDR5X more expensive?

Note for myself: each 3 GiB GDDR7 IC costs $10-$15, x32 sums up to $320-$480, https://www.techpowerup.com/337853/samsung-3-gb-gddr7-chips-...

They better watch the price because you can get a 128GB AMD Strix Halo mini pc for ~1700-2000 today, and those will be even cheaper a year from now. If they're trying to be competitive then it really needs to be more in that ballpark than the massively overpriced Nvidia range.

The GDDR7 found next to most Blackwell chips is more expensive than the LPDDR5X next to this or an M-series/Strix Halo chip.

Intel made a dent in the consumer gaming market with Battlemage.

They made a dent in the HPC market / Top500 with intel MAX.

It will be interesting to see if they can make a dent in the AI inference market (presumably datacenter/enterprise).

Not sure where you're getting that from, battlemage has been considered a failure. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-indicates-intels-lates...

Maybe not that low, but given it's using LPDDR5 instead of GDDR7, at least the ram should be a lot cheaper.

Certainly an interesting choice. Dramatically worse performance but dramatically larger only time will tell how it actually goes

Rumor has it (according to MLID, so no one knows whether it's accurate) that AMD is also looking to use regular LPDDR memory for some of it's lower end next gen GPUs to not have to contend with nvidia over limited and cartelled GDDR7 supply. Maybe they're going to increase parallel bandwidth to compensate it? Or have wholly different tricks up their sleeve.

probably just a lot more of it, to capture that consumer ai market

With 160GB, surely they can add more channels to compensate?

Is there anything preventing them from using heterogeneous memory chips, like 1/4 GDDR7 and 3/4 LPDDR? It could enable new MEO-like architectures with finer-grained performance tuning for long contexts.

You'd have to burn more die space for the duplicate but different ram controller logic and cache trees, I bet.

If the internal bus architecture is anything similar to QPI, getting the 'different' parts to communicate reliably is probably also a pain.

It‘s LPDDR5X

LPDDR5x really just means LPDDR5 running at higher than the original speed of 6400MT/s. Absent any information about which faster speed they'll be using, this correction doesn't add anything to the discussion. Nobody would expect even Intel to use 6400MT/s for a product that far in the future. Where they'll land on the spectrum from 8533 MT/s to 10700 MT/s is just a matter for speculation at the moment.

With this much ram don’t expect anything remotely affordable by civilians.

160 GB LPDDR5 is ~$1,200 retail so the card could be sold for $2,000. The price will depend on how desperate Intel is. Intel probably can't copy Nvidia's pricing.

It’d be a disaster for Intel if it sold for less than 3k, personally I think they’re aiming for break even at 5k a pop at least, and I wouldn’t be surprised to advertise 2x memory at half nvidia price, which would put it at ~15-20k? and a healthy margin which they need like oxygen now. Of course it’s all for naught if it doesn’t perform compute-wise.

I also think they have to be substantially cheaper than nvidia to have any chance, but the pro 6000 with 96G is already available at 7-8k - so half the price would have to be significantly below 4k.

Huh didn’t know that, nice. Intel’s still in trouble then :) IMHO they’ll try to sell the increased ram as worth the ‘premium’ (or, worth the ‘reduced not-nvidia penalty’)

I agree with you, based on standard business logic, but the question is whether Intel would be willing to sell a generation at break-even to disrupt, achieve a larger (and somewhat 'sticky') install base, developer engagement, a larger mind-share, etc.?

4x 5090s gets you way faster inference than I suspect this will, or the 6000 pro if you needed datacentre format at expense of raw speed. Given either of those setups is ~8k this will have to come in for less than that.

but it's easier to fit 8x Crescent Island than 40x 5090 into a single chassis

> 160 GB LPDDR5 is ~$1,200 retail so the card could be sold for $2,000.

Prices are set by what the market will bear, not the lowest possible price where they could break even on the BOM and manufacturing costs.

The high cost of the LPDDR5X should be a clue that this is going to be in the $10K range, not the $2K range.

I mean, even without that, the phrase “enterprise GPU”, does not tend to convey “priced for typical consumers”.

Uncle Sam owns a good chunk of Intel now. "Not affordable by civilians" might be precisely the target market: the DoD/national intelligence agencies have money to burn, can fund things long enough to stabilize Intel a little, and in exchange they get first dibs on everything.

Intel for intel on your Intels, perhaps.

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