Intel Arc Celestial dGPU seems to be first casualty of Nvidia partnership

There's a whole backstory to this.

When he joined only a few months ago, he set the vision of making Intel a worthy participant in the AI space.

Then just a few months later, he announced "we cannot compete".

What happened in the middle? Recent articles came out about the conflict between him and Frank Yeary, the head of the Intel board. He wanted to acquire a hot AI startup, and Frank opposed it. Two factions were formed in the Board, and they lost a lot of time battling it out. While this was going on, a FAANG came in and bought the startup.

I think his announcement that Intel cannot compete was his way of saying "I cannot do it with the current Intel board."

The real quote is:

>"On training, I think it is too late for us,"

Not too late for AI, but too late for training meanwhile there's inference opportunity or something like that

Too late for the AI boom if they have to spend another 2 years and manufacturing investments to get a product out for the segment. We are over-inflated on AI hype. Its relevance will remain but betting a company on it isn't a wise idea.

> of a silicon company

With their own fabs, at that

Agreed, either their business situation is far more critical than we know, this is a gross indictment of their R&D, or this is malpractice on the part of the leadership

Or, a sly way of calling the AI bubble.

Well, but if it's true and there's a better strategy, why wouldn't he do it?

Seems like you'd prefer yet another +1 selling AI oil and promises ...

Even the Arc B580 GPUs could have been a bigger win if they were actually ever in stock at MSRP, I say that as someone who owns one in my daily driver PC. Yet it seemed oddly close to a paper launch, or nowhere near the demand, to the point where the prices were so far above MSRP that it made the value really bad.

Same as how they messed up the Core Ultra desktop launch, of their own volition - by setting the prices so high that they can’t even compete with their own 13th and 14th gen chips, not even mentioning Ryzen CPUs that are mostly better in both absolute terms and in the price/perf. A sidegrade isn’t the end of the world but a badly overpriced sidegrade is dead on arrival.

Idk what Intel is doing.

From a corporate strategy perspective, cancel Arc or keep Arc, I can see it both ways.

Intel has so many other GPU-adjacent products and they will doubtless be continuing most of them, even if they don't pursue Arc further: Jaguar Shores, Flex GPUs for VDI, and of course their Xe integrated graphics. I could possibly see Intel not ship a successor to Flex? Maybe? I cannot see a world where they abandon Xe (first-party laptop graphics) or Jaguar Shores ("rack scale" datacenter "GPUs").

With all of that effort going into GPU-ish designs, is there enough overlap that the output/artifacts from those products support and benefit Arc? Or if Arc only continues to be a mid-tier success, is it thus a waste of fab allocation, a loss of potential profit, and an unnecessary expense in terms of engineers maintaining drivers, and so forth? That is the part I do not know, and why I could see it going either way.

I want to acknowledge that I am speaking out of my depth a bit: I have not read all of Intel's quarterly financials, and not followed every zig and zag of every product line. Yet while can see it both ways, in no world do I trust these supposed leaks.

I agree that he's not that bad, but he's definitely not 100% accurate, in particular with respect to Intel.

Notably this is about the 3rd time in 2 years that he's reported that the Intel dGPU efforts are being killed off.

Even on the latest developments the reporting is contradictory, so someone is wrong and I suspect it's him. https://www.techpowerup.com/341149/intel-arc-gpus-remain-in-...

They had videos saying intel was gonna cancel the dGPU division and focus on datacenter pretty much since the intel cards came out. Amongst many other things they've said. I used to follow them too, but they speak with too much confidence about things they know nothing about.

They're a channel focused on leaks, but most of their leaks are just industry insider gossip masked as factual to farm clicks. Their leaks are useless for any sort of predictions, but may be interesting if you'd like to know what insiders are thinking.

A quick google search also yielded this[1] 2-year old reddit thread that shows videos they deleted because their predictions were incorrect. There's probably many more. (That subreddit seems to be dedicated to trashing MLID.)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BustedSilicon/comments/yo9l2i/colle...

Yeah all the videos I saw where he was right had 100% accuracy, which you'll be reminded of in the next video, the times he was wrong won't be advertised the same.

I'm honestly curious why they keep making them. As far as I can tell, NVIDIA can sell literally as many datacenter AI chips as they can produce, and that would probably continue to be true even if they significantly increased prices. And even without increasing prices, the datacenter products are considerably higher margin than the consumer GPUs. Every consumer GPU they sell is lost revenue in comparison to using that fab capacity for a datacenter product.

The only reason I can imagine for them leaving the money on the table is that they think that the AI boom won't last that much longer and they don't want to kill their reputation in the consumer market. But even in that case, I'm not sure it really makes that much sense.

Maybe if consumer GPUs were literally just datacenter silicon that didn't make the grade or something, it would make sense but I don't think that's the case.

Have you seen the latest generation of Nvidia gaming cards? They are increasingly looking like an after thought.

Intel made fun of AMD for "taping chips together". Intel did everything on a monolithic die for about way too long.

The smaller the node the smaller the yield, chiplets is a necessity now (or architectural changes like Cerebras).

But the same thing that makes GPUs powerful at rendering is what AI needs - modern gaming GPUs are basically supercomputers that provide Hw and Sw to do programmable embarrassingly parallel work. That is modern game rendering but also AI and crypto (and various science engineering) which is the second revolution that Intel completely missed (the first one being mobile).

Depends if one cares about a PlayStation/XBox like experience, or Switch like.