Card shark Intel bets with discrete graphics chips, shuffles AMD's GPU boss into the deck Intel will be making its own discrete graphics cards, and it has hired away the head of AMD's GPU unit to lead the effort. Raja Koduri will take the title of chief architect and senior veep of Core and Visual Computing, the business unit in charge of Chipzilla's new graphics card line as well as the integrated graphics …
Am I the only one who feels like they woke up in Bizzaro world?
I mean Intel's on die graphics architecture is embarrassingly bad (mostly due to the use of shared memory, for which they can only blame themselves) but what is AMD seeing in this deal that I am missing?
In short: Money.
The arrangement is likely something like this:
- AMD gets more dollars than the zero they were previously getting
- Intel get a bigger cut of the pie
- nVidia get a kick in the teeth
AdoredTV explains better than I do: https://youtu.be/mNY5e5CFlbc
And it's not the first time AMD have bailed out Intel. x64 vs Itanic.
Most new Intel initiatives die a few years later. The only thing they manage to do is keep the x86 zombie alive.
One wonders what they've been doing all this time, apart from relying on their brand name.
AMD has spun off their GPU brand a little to allow it to work with other CPU and manufactures in general.
See the Xbox etc as an example of why they should do this, and current prices/market demand for GPUs. If they can get some of that money, any way, it is good for them.
Suddenly Monday's news makes a lot more sense. Looks like Intel really was planning to move into discrete graphics after all.
However, I still think this is pointless. They won't get the gaming segment, and apparently they're not even going to try. They "desperately covet" AI, allegedly.
[Sniff] Is that the smell of Gnome underpants?
Why wouldn't they get the gaming segment? The multi-chip module recently announced offers graphics capabilities only slightly behind discrete graphics - unlike the new mobile Ryzens, which are much better than Intel's ordinary integrated graphics, but which are still significantly more limited than discrete.
So Intel, with what it has announced, would become the only company offering a chip that allows a good gaming laptop to be as thin and light as one with limited graphics - instead of having extra bulk to accommodate a discrete video card.
Given current trends in what laptops are offering, it certainly seems as though it is at least believed that there is a huge demand for thin and light, at least from those who can afford to pay for it. That presumably includes at least some of the gamers who use laptops instead of desktops. Only the likely premium pricing will stand in the way of Intel getting a lock on the games market, it would seem to me.
Games is a small segment of the GPU industry, even nVidia will tell you that. The real money is in ML, AI and XR. Just an example there are going to be millions of cars driving around in the next 10 years that will have more compute power then your home PC.
Volta pro range costs 10x the price of a consumer graphics card yet probably doesn't cost much more to manufacture. Server farms aren't just buying one or two of them but thousands you can understand why gaming just happens to be a byproduct rather than a target.
Just an example there are going to be millions of cars driving around in the next 10 years that will have more compute power then your home PC
Oh yeah? Like the jet powered flying cars we were going to have in the 1950s and 60s?
For all the vast resources thrown at AI and ML, it has yet to produce any useful output. Look at the miserable business performance of IBM's Watson. AI and ML will probably deliver something, but not soon, and whatever it is won't be universal, but specific niche applications, and it'll only be as good as the data it has to work on (so outside the lab and the test suite, a bit crappy). Now, you might choose to disregard that view from a mere commentard, but it was broadly speaking the conclusion of a high powered ML event hosted by the Royal Society. How I got in I'll never know, but everybody else there really knew their stuff.
Are you suggesting that people should not be able to move freely to a new job? As long as he has worked his notice period he is free to leave and work elsewhere. Some companies have tried to put non-compete agreements in employment contracts to prevent them going to rivals, but these have usually been ruled as unenforcable when they have gone to court.
AMD could have put a long notice period in his contract and then insisted he goes on gardening leave as long as they are willing to pay him to sit around at home. If they didn't, he can go where he wants.
My lawyer used to give me a solid piece of wisdom, "I'll sue anyone for anything as long as you pay upfront." I signed a non-compete, quit the company, and got sued for a million dollars. I was a small fish, yet the lawyers came out with blood in the water and the blood was mine. We settled for $40k. Thankfully my new employer had deep pockets.
"We have exciting plans to aggressively expand our computing and graphics capabilities and build on our very strong and broad differentiated IP foundation, [...] we will add to our portfolio of unmatched capabilities, advance our strategy to lead in computing and graphics, and ultimately be the driving force of the data revolution."
We can only be happy with this. With prices between $ 300 - $ 700, advanced graphics capabilities provided by cards like he NVIIDIA GTX 1060-1080, are quite costly, and hampering the adaptation of VR.
So maybe in a few years, people wanting to buy a PC with top of the bill graphics can choose between three alternatives instead of just one.
For INTEL it is completely new product line, since their "HD Integrated Graphics" is not even halfway a serious attempt to make anything usable to do anything beyond viewing MS-Word and Excel documents.
Actually, the media transcoding abilities of Intel integrated GPUs has been power efficient. Anandtech consider the latest Intel iGPUs to be good and feature-rich, considering the modest target performance, but suggest the challenge is to see if they can be scaled into more powerful (ie equivalent to mid and high end gaming GPUs). They also note that it is only really Apple that has used Intel's most powerful integrated GPUs.
Think of ARM cpu's market share of the computing market which includes phones, tabelets, graphics etc. not one segement with x86-64 cpu's and one has the answer or part of the answer.
AMD is becoming a design company not a manufacturing co. With no foundry to design for and multible fabricators of chips it now opens up the hardware and cpu designs to anyone who will pay their fee for the design similar to ARM/Softbank..
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