belval 2 years ago

This really is a bad product launch. From the bad drivers that just don't work/crash your PC to the launch of the A380 ("eSport GPU") in China first and the slipping deadlines that are clearly set to make investors happy with no regard for the actual product.

I have Intel stock, I want to like the ARC GPUs, but this is getting pathetic as they seem dead set on paper launching these 5 times before actually letting people give them money for it.

  • ChuckNorris89 2 years ago

    It's in line with what I was expected. There was no way in hell Intel could leapfrog Ngridia and AMD Radeon on its first try. People expecting otherwise were dreaming. It was just not gonna happen.

    Even those two GPU giants had shipped massive flops throughout their lives (Ngridia with the FX 5000 series and AMD more often and more recently, ironically also unde Raja Kaduri) but they also had decades of experience to refine their development and testing processes and buff out any issues before release, iteration after iteration. Intel is relatively new to this, of course they were gonna fumble.

    I hope they can suck up this failure and come back swinging with the next gen. Consumers and gamers could really use a third player. GPUs are now costing way more than entire gaming consoles.

    • jacooper 2 years ago

      Friendly note, you can still edit the typos in your comment.

      • ChuckNorris89 2 years ago

        Which typos? Nvidia wordplay on greed was intentional as it reflects their anti consumer attitude.

        • NBJack 2 years ago

          It doesn't come through well, and it is phonetically confusing (perhaps doubly so for those with English as a second language). In an age of mobile touchscreen keyboards, it just looks like a bad autocorrect.

          • bilegeek 2 years ago

            It would have worked better if it was something more blatant, like "Ngreedia".

            • bravetraveler 2 years ago

              Agreed, I assumed they had some DC product relating to grids or something

        • kalimanzaro 2 years ago

          "Nvidia" is already punning on a deadly sin, Envy. ("Invidia" in Latin.) Ever wonder why they chose that obnoxious shade of green for their logo? Now you know:)

  • bilegeek 2 years ago

    I'm not a fan of Intel, but honestly this was pretty well expected of them, the delays and driver issues.

    And yes I know it's marketing, but if what they say in their LTT[1] video is true, then GPU driver optimizations are apparently a titanically tedious clustertruck, which... honestly, considering all the weird API's and graphical schenanigans of games past, I concur.

    I think if they didn't release now, even with all the bugs, they were never going to. If it actually makes a profit, they'll finally have in incentive to invest enough that it even COULD catch up.

    [1]https://youtu.be/45n5pnEyw9o

    • tpmx 2 years ago

      IDK; I think they just need to abandon their core principles of only persuing something new for 18 months max. They do have the capital. FFS.

      • bilegeek 2 years ago

        No company can change like that without being entirely gutted and remade.

        ...though they can have splitoff "cells", like the 5150 team or Xerox PARC. I can't tell from here, but given Intel's waffling in the past, maybe this team is a cell.

        • tpmx 2 years ago

          maybe this team is a cell

          let's hope so!

    • Sakos 2 years ago

      NVidia and AMD drivers are 20+ years of piling hacks upon hacks just to make sure games run properly and a paper over obscure bugs. It's gonna take time for Intel to catch up.

    • ahartmetz 2 years ago

      The funny thing about that optimization clusterfuck is that AMD's FOSS drivers get very close to the proprietary drivers in performance without any hacks.

      Instead of millions of lines of code, the user space drivers (where optimizations happen) are more like 100k per major GPU generation (which can span like 10 years) + a few 100k shared between all Mesa drivers.

      • burmanm 2 years ago

        AMD's FOSS drivers for Windows gaming? Where? As the article said, the real problem is in the gaming optimizations on older APIs.

        You need to optimize the driver for each game basically, thus every supported game adds more and more lines in that silly world. This is for all the old DirectX9-11 games.

        • ahartmetz 2 years ago

          That was about OpenGL for Linux. There are a few OpenGL using games that run on Linux and Windows, so direct comparisons are possible.

      • rasz 2 years ago

        >close to the proprietary drivers in performance

        name some examples, few games that get better fps and frame latency under linux+foss driver vs windows+blob

    • faeriechangling 2 years ago

      >but if what they say in their LTT[1] video is true, then GPU driver optimizations are apparently a titanically tedious clustertruck

      That would only imply that Intel's position is even more hopeless than it seems at first blush.

tpmx 2 years ago

No price yet. I hope that Intel for once gives it a good run (like 6-8 years); they seem to always launch new product lines that go nowhere and are cancelled a few years later.

This market needs a third player.

nerpderp82 2 years ago

Is Intel supporting CUDA/PTX? It will only ever be a consumer GPU if not. Ryzen is building Radeon cores into EVERY new Ryzen 7000 part and with CPUs getting HBM, the need for a discrete GPU that just does graphics isn't necessary for the vast number of applications.

  • touisteur 2 years ago

    Well, no. They're all in OneAPI, and DPC++/SYCL, which if they manage to make it not suck too much, may be far better to use and evolve than OpenCL. Yeah you have to port most stuff, but BLAS/mkl and onednn/openvino are getting (slowly) there. That's the first steps and with that they get some hpc or machine learning creds.

    I really wish they'd focus for good on making their sw stack better, debuggable, tooled and far more optimized. No more rebranding, cryptic error messages, outdated docs, hard to install/dev/profile stuff, please.

Avlin67 2 years ago

2 years more trying to sell a product still not available…

Havoc 2 years ago

Finally some good news/PR

Really hope they survive the bad start cause another big player would be good for everyone

genpfault 2 years ago

As always, Newegg link or it doesn't exist :)

Avlin67 2 years ago

Raja Koduri is the best