we all know there won’t be enough stock available. Intel are the same as Nvidia and Amd, they all use the same parts and suppliers. If Amd, Nvidia, Microsoft and Sony can’t get enough parts for their current products then Intel aren’t going to magically find enough supplies to get decent stock.
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Intel Arc series unveiled with the Alchemist dGPU to arrive in Q1 2022
- Thread starter CAT-THE-FIFTH
- Start date
we all know there won’t be enough stock available. Intel are the same as Nvidia and Amd, they all use the same parts and suppliers. If Amd, Nvidia, Microsoft and Sony can’t get enough parts for their current products then Intel aren’t going to magically find enough supplies to get decent stock.
I'm quite sure there's a huge amount of market manipulation and cartel like behaviour going on. These companies are better served by agreeing to keep prices high than by competing with each other and there are multiple excuses used for why prices go high and remain high for months or years afterwards. It's broken capitalism and it's quite widespread especially in markets with fewer players where it serves all manufacturers to cooperate rather than compete. Then you get the army of paid undercover shills who argue that the new high price is somehow justified because of 'reasons' few of which are significant long term but can be used as an excuse to keep milking the consumer. The phone market was like this with Nokia and then Apple until we got more players on the scene (from China) who were willing to compete rather than collude and cheat their customers.
What would be great to have is some more market segmentation.
A 4th player focused on delivering last-gen performance at bargain prices could potentially make a killing in the current market and I'm sure it's far from impossible.
Either Via/Zhaoxin or a mobile player like PowerVR (although I wouldn't mind someone like Matrox trying their hand again and they are a current AMD semi custom user) could potentially find their own niche, of course it's not exactly a risk-free investment...
A 4th player focused on delivering last-gen performance at bargain prices could potentially make a killing in the current market and I'm sure it's far from impossible.
Either Via/Zhaoxin or a mobile player like PowerVR (although I wouldn't mind someone like Matrox trying their hand again and they are a current AMD semi custom user) could potentially find their own niche, of course it's not exactly a risk-free investment...
Man of Honour
I think that's most likely what will happen, but I think there's an outside chance that something quite different will happen. Intel is in an unusual position in this market. The dGPU market is a duopoly that Intel is seeking to enter as a third player, but Intel is already a very big player in related markets. They're a known name. They have suitable distribution networks already in place. They have agreements with other companies. They very plausibly claim to have a dGPU product that's competitive in the budget to low midrange segments of the market. In short, they're very well placed to be a major player in the dGPU market if they decide to really push for that and if they can make and sell enough and if they get enough coverage.
They could enter the dGPU market with a couple of budget cards and a "flagship" card that's low midrange and make them in fairly small quantities and sell them at the current vastly inflated prices because they can. That would get them some sales, mostly from people who'd prefer the more mature products from AMD or nvidia but can't buy any of them due to lack of supply and so go with the untried product from Intel as being better than nothing. Intel would mainly be the second or third choice, for when the preferred choice is unavailable. They'd get some coverage, probably mostly along the lines of "Not a bad choice, but not the best choice". They'd get a small market share.
But if they could enter the dGPU market with a couple of budget cards and a "flagship" card that's low midrange and make them in significant quantities and sell them at a price that's high (e.g. £400 for a low midrange card a little below a 3070) rather than vastly inflated they'd immediately get a huge market share and a vast amount of extremely positive publicity, massive amounts of free advertising that couldn't be bought at any price. Buying it would be the only sensible choice and Intel would be the knight in shining armour riding in glory to rescue gamers. They'd be lauded all over the net, from 30 second videos of people squealing on TikTok to 30 page highly detailed reviews from major hardware websites, every one of them singing Intel's praises. Instant big time entry into a market that was previously a duopoly. That's good for business. They might do it if they can. Maybe. If they can.
Man of Honour
Even the most ridiculous excuses are being trotted out. Like, for example, the increase in the price of copper. Which has increased the cost of making a graphics card by maybe as much as 50p but which has been falsely portrayed as a significant increase in costs that justifies a huge increase in selling price. Lying is profitable when the companies involved agree to lie together.
Soldato
and what fab would they use thats not already over subscribed ?
Soldato
I'm pretty sure Intel have their eyes very much focussed on the laptop dGPU market. That's where the volume is, and frankly where NVIDIA is weakest.
we're clearly talking about dgpu here
I was talking about graphics chips and how given the massive market share Intel has they are unlikely to give up on the dgpu as it is cross developed and shares costs with the inbuilt graphic chips. So they are not going to give up due to not making enough money when a large part of the development cost is already covered and making profit.
Man of Honour
Nothing about price. Even performance is somewhat speculative. There aren't any hard numbers from actual products with finished drivers. The top end will probably be around the 3070/6700XT level, but there's still a fair bit of "probably" about that.
Intel Arc Flagship GPU appears in SiSandra database, clocks up to 2.1ghz and slightly beats RTX3070ti
https://wccftech.com/intels-flagshi...with-nvidia-rtx-3070-ti-up-to-2-1-ghz-clocks/
https://wccftech.com/intels-flagshi...with-nvidia-rtx-3070-ti-up-to-2-1-ghz-clocks/
That's not bad from Intel really for a first effort. However, If the flagship doesn't come out till later in the year, it may seem rather slow compared to Nvidia's 4XXX series though. Could take their flagship to a mid-high tier to low-mid tier instantly.
Is SiSandra's spec based performance estimation thing anywhere near to being an accurate gauge of gaming performance though?
Because calculating GFLOPS, ROPS etc. is all very well but paper specs alone aren't enough.
While entirely possible, you'd hope Intel would sort out their drivers before they start thinking how they could architecture their drivers to work better on their CPUs and AMD's!
Still, if ARC got a huge driver re-write (as we would hope and expect) then maybe when they sat down to spec it they certainly would have gone for things which would favour their CPUs.
Caporegime
Intels drivers for integrated GPUs are pretty dire, I wouldn't fancy running their dGPU drivers.