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Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

arstechnica.com

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Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#161

Post by kllrnohj »

judge2020 wrote: post #124
Yizahi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia would also use TSMC 7nm since it is much better that Samsung 8mn. So potentially they are also waiting for the TSMC availability.

How is it 'much better'? 7nm is not better than 8nm because it has a smaller number - the number doesn't correlate strongly with transistor density these days.

Did you bother trying to do any research or comparison between TSMC's 7nm & Samsung's 8nm or did you just want to make the claim that numbers are just marketing? Despite the fact that numbers alone were not being talked about, but two specific fab processes, and thus the "it's just a number!" mistake wasn't obviously being made in the first place?

But Nvidia has Ampere on both TSMC 7nm (GA100) and Samsung's 8nm (GA102). The TSMC variant has a significantly higher density at 65.6M / mm² vs. 45.1M / mm². Comparing across architectures is murkey, but we also know that the TSMC 7nm 6900XT clocks a lot higher than the Samsung 8nm RTX 3080/3090 while also drawing less power. There's of course a lot more to clock speeds & power draw in an actual product than the raw fab transistor performance, but it's still a data point.

So there's both density & performance evidence to suggest TSMC's 7nm is meaningfully better than Samsung's 8nm.

Even going off of marketing names, Samsung has a 7nm as well and they don't pretend their 8nm is just one-worse than the 7nm. The 8nm is an evolution of the 10nm node while the 7nm is itself a new node. According to Samsung's marketing flowcharts, anyway. And analysis suggests Samsung's 7nm is competitive with TSMC's 7nm.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#162

Post by trangus_1985 »

pjmlp wrote: post #106
015a wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup; three other points I'd add: 1) I hate to say "year of desktop Linux" like every year, but with the Steam Deck release later this year, and Valve's commitment to continue investing and collaborating on Proton to ensure wide-range game support; Linux gaming is going to grow substantially throughout 2022, if only due to the new devices added by Steam Decks. Intel has always had fantastic Linux video driver support.…

Steam will hardly change the 1% status of GNU/Linux desktop. Many forget that most studios don't bother to port their Android games to GNU/Linux, which are mostly written using the NDK, so plain ISO C and C++, GL, Vulkan, OpenSL,..., yet no GNU/Linux, because the market just isn't there.

>Steam will hardly change the 1% status of GNU/Linux desktop.

I agree. But it will change the status in the listings. Steam deck and steamos appliances should be broken out into their own category, and I could easily see them overtaking linux desktop

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#164

Post by Dylan16807 »

dragontamer wrote: post #154
Dylan16807 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Okay I had it slightly wrong, rewritten. Aurora was originally slated to use Phi chips, which are an unrelated architecture to these GPUs. The delays there don't say much about problems actually getting this new architecture out. It's more that they were halfway through making a supercomputer and then started over. I could probably pin the biggest share of the blame on 10nm problems, which are irrelevant to thi…

> I could probably pin the biggest share of the blame on 10nm problems, which are irrelevant to this architecture. I doubt that. If Xeon Phi were a relevant platform, Intel could have easily kept it... continuing to invest into the platform and make it into 7nm like the rest of Aurora's new design. Instead, Intel chose to build a new platform from its iGPU architecture. So right there, Intel made a fundamental shift…

> That's fair. But the difference between Aurora-2018 vs Aurora-2021 is huge.

It is, yes. But none of that difference reflects badly on this new product line. It just reflects badly on Intel in general.

Xe hasn't existed long enough to be "always 2 years away". It's had a pretty steady rollout.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#165

Post by pkulak »

iknowstuff wrote: post #160
015a wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup; three other points I'd add: 1) I hate to say "year of desktop Linux" like every year, but with the Steam Deck release later this year, and Valve's commitment to continue investing and collaborating on Proton to ensure wide-range game support; Linux gaming is going to grow substantially throughout 2022, if only due to the new devices added by Steam Decks. Intel has always had fantastic Linux video driver support.…

Intel sells expensive CPUs which are becoming useless thanks to ARM - as much in consumer devices as they are in datacenters, with big players designing their own ARM chips. GPUs are their lifeboat. Three GPU players is better than two, but I don't see much of a reason to be long Intel.

You’re overestimating the role of the architecture. X86 is just fine, and is perfectly competitive at comparable node generations. Don’t believe everything Apple tells you. ;)

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#166

Post by SCUSKU »

iknowstuff wrote: post #160
015a wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup; three other points I'd add: 1) I hate to say "year of desktop Linux" like every year, but with the Steam Deck release later this year, and Valve's commitment to continue investing and collaborating on Proton to ensure wide-range game support; Linux gaming is going to grow substantially throughout 2022, if only due to the new devices added by Steam Decks. Intel has always had fantastic Linux video driver support.…

Intel sells expensive CPUs which are becoming useless thanks to ARM - as much in consumer devices as they are in datacenters, with big players designing their own ARM chips. GPUs are their lifeboat. Three GPU players is better than two, but I don't see much of a reason to be long Intel.

IMO, the long position on Intel is basically a bet on China invading Taiwan, or the US gov't subsidizing Intel. Both are certainly extreme events, but given Chinese military expansion and US increase in gov't spending, it doesn't seem impossible.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#167

Post by ineedasername »

Exmoor wrote: post #11

As TFA rightly points out, unless something drastically changes in the next ~6mo, Intel is going to launch into the most favorable market situation we've seen in our lifetimes. Previously, the expectation is that they needed to introduce something that was competitive with the top end cards from nVidia and AMD. With basically all GPU's out of stock currently they really just need to introduce something competitive wi…

Yep, basically anything capable of playing new games at low setting and older > 3yr old games at better settings should be highly competitive in the low-end gaming market.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#168

Post by ineedasername »

Exmoor wrote: post #11

As TFA rightly points out, unless something drastically changes in the next ~6mo, Intel is going to launch into the most favorable market situation we've seen in our lifetimes. Previously, the expectation is that they needed to introduce something that was competitive with the top end cards from nVidia and AMD. With basically all GPU's out of stock currently they really just need to introduce something competitive wi…

Yep, basically anything capable of playing new games on lower setting at 720p, and > 3yr old games at better settings should be highly competitive in the low-end gaming market. Especially laptops where they might be a secondary machine for gamers with a high end desktop.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#169

Post by ineedasername »

SCUSKU wrote: post #166
iknowstuff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel sells expensive CPUs which are becoming useless thanks to ARM - as much in consumer devices as they are in datacenters, with big players designing their own ARM chips. GPUs are their lifeboat. Three GPU players is better than two, but I don't see much of a reason to be long Intel.

IMO, the long position on Intel is basically a bet on China invading Taiwan, or the US gov't subsidizing Intel. Both are certainly extreme events, but given Chinese military expansion and US increase in gov't spending, it doesn't seem impossible.

China doesn't even have to invade: just an ever incrementally increasing amount of soft pressure, punctuated by slightly larger actions calibrated to fall just below a provocation that requires a response. See their naval exercises for just one example.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#170

Post by ineedasername »

pjmlp wrote: post #134
015a wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first wave of Steam Decks sold out in minutes. They're now pushing back delivery to Q2 2022. The demand for the device is pretty significant; not New Console large, but its definitely big enough to be visible in the Steam Hardware Survey upon release later this year, despite the vast size of Steam's overall playerbase. Two weeks ago, the Hardware Survey reported Linux breaching 1% for the first time ever [1], for…

It took 20 years to reach 1%, so... I believed in it back in the Loki golden days, nowadays I rather bet on macOS, Windows, mobile OSes and game consoles. It remains to be seen how the Steam fairs versus the Steam Machines of yore.

What's the rate of increase though? Has it been linear, 0.05% per year? No: it has increased about 0.25% since 2019. It's not just that Linux is increasing, it's that it's rate of increase is also increasing.
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