Technology

Intel can't afford to keep making GPUs because it doesn't have the reliable CPU side to soak up the losses. The GPU market has established players and Intel, besides being a big name, didn't bring much to the table to build a place for itself in the market. Outside of good Linux support (I've heard, but not personally used) the Intel GPUs don't stand out for price or performance.

Intel is struggling with its very existence and doesn't have the money or time to explore new markets when their primary product is cratering their own revenue. Intel has a very deep problem with how it is run and will most likely be unable to survive as-is for much longer.

Nadella Satya also laid off employees and increased his wage

Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future.

Reminds me of decades ago when intel didn't bother getting into graphics because they said pretty soon CPUs would be powerful enough for high-performance graphics rendering lmao

The short-sightedness of Intel absolutely staggers me.

Does he think that the demand for AI-accelerating hardware is just going to go away? That the requirement of fast, dedicated memory attached to a parallel processing/matrix multiplying unit (aka a discreet GPU) is just going to disappear in the next five years‽

Maybe the idea is to put it on the CPU/NPU instead? Hence them going so hard on AI processors in the CPU, even though basically nothing uses it.

Probably because APU's are getting better and more pc gamers are doing handhelds and apu laptops instead of dedicated desktops. PC gaming has gotten really expensive.

This is a non comparison for at least the next 5 years. A dedicated gpu is still a better choice hands down for gaming. Even going on a lower end build an older gpu will still beat the current best apu by a good amount, but in 10 years time it may not be so necessary to need a gpu over an apu. GPUs are getting too power hungry and expensive. Gamers gonna game, but they won't all want to spend an ever increasing amount of money to get better graphics, and arc would need at least another 5 years to be competition enough to claim a worthwhile market share from amd or nvidia and that's wishful thinking. Long time to bleed money on a maybe.

contrast to their desktop offerings

That's because server offerings are real money, which is why Intel isn't fucking those up.

AMD is in the same boat: they make pennies on client and gaming (including gpu), but dumptrucks of cash from selling Epycs.

IMO, the Zen 5(%) and Arrow Lake bad-for-gaming results are because uarch development from Intel and AMD are entirely focused on the customers that pay them: datacenter and enterprise.

Both of those CPU families clearly show that efficiency and a focus on extremely threaded workloads were the priorities, and what do you know, that's enterprise workloads!

end of the x86 era

I think it's less the era of x86 is ended and more the era of the x86 duopoly putting consumer/gaming workloads first has ended because, well, there's just no money there relative to other things they could invest their time and design resources in.

I also expect this to happen with GPUs: AMD has already given up, and Intel is absolutely going to do that as soon as they possibly can without it being a catastrophic self-inflicted wound (since they want an iGPU to use). nVidia has also clearly stopped giving a shit about gaming - gamers get a GPU a year or two after enterprise has cards based on the same chip, and now they charge $2000* for them - and they're often crippled in firmware/software so that they won't compete with the enterprise cards as well as legally not being allowed to use the drivers in a situation like that.

ARM is probably the consumer future, but we'll see who and with what: I desperately hope that nVidia and MediaTek end up competitive so we don't end up in a Qualcomm oops-your-cpu-is-two-years-old-no-more-support-for-you hellscape, but well, nVidia has made ARM SOCs for like, decades, and at no point would I call any of the ones they've ever shipped high performance desktop replacements.

• Yes, I know there's a down-stack option that shows up later, but that's also kinda the point: the ones you can afford will show up for you... eventually. Very much designed to push purchasers into the top end.

He’s not wrong that GPUs in the desktop space are going away because SoCs are inevitably going to be the future. This isn’t because the market has demanded it or some sort of conspiracy, but literally we can’t get faster without chips getting smaller and closer together.

While I agree with you on a technical level, I read it as Pat Gelsinger intends to stop development of discrete graphics cards after Battlemage, which is disappointing but not surprising. Intel's GPUs while incredibly impressive simply have an uphill battle for desktop users and particularly gamers to ensure every game a user wishes to run can generally run without compatibility problems.

Ideally Intel would keep their GPU department going because they have a fighting chance at holding a significant market share now that they're past the hardest hurdles, but they're in a hard spot financially so I can't be surprised if they're forced to divest from discrete GPUs entirely

Nvidia does more than just GPUs.

Nvidia makes both SoCs like the Tegra series and server CPUs (Grace; ARM based to be used with their ML/AI cards with much higher bandwidths than regular CPUs).

Nvidia also just announced that they are working on a consumer desktop CPU.

Well I had the same thought a few years ago when APUs started getting better. But then I'm not the CEO of a huge tech company, so nobody lost their job because I was wrong.

I've commented many times that Arc isn't competitive, at least not yet.
Although they were decent performers, they used twice the die size for similar performance compared to Nvidia and AMD, so Intel has probably sold them at very little profit.
Still I expected them to try harder this time, because the technologies to develop a good GPU, are strategically important in other areas too.
But maybe that's the reason Intel recently admitted they couldn't compete with Nvidia on high end AI?

Intel's long term prospects rely on China invading Taiwan.

Intel has been a mistake since 1978. But evil doesn't generally die.

I wonder why both isn't possible, build some into the chip but leave some DIMMs for upgradeability too at bit lower speed.

The transfer speed isn't the big issue, it's the density and reliability. Packing more heat generating stuff onto the SoC package just makes it more difficult to dissipate. The transfer of data to where it needs to be is still the same, so the trade-off is pretty null in that sense except reduction of overall power consumption.

AMD would never close their GPU department because they sell their apu to Xbox, playstation, steam deck

You shouldn't be comparing with DIMMs, those are a dead end at this point. CAMMs are replacing DIMMs and what future systems will use.

Intel likely designed Lunar lake before the LPCAMM2 standard was finalized and why it went on package. Now that LPCAMMs are a thing, it makes more sense to use those as they provide the same speed benefits while still allowing user replaceable RAM.