Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 128GB VRAM Intel Arc card at a low price would be an OSS developer’s dream come true. It would be the WRT54G of inference.
Of course. A cheap card with oodles of VRAM would benefit some people, I'm not denying that. I'm tackling the question of would it benefit intel (as the original question was "why doesn't intel do this"), and the answer is: Profit/Loss. There's a huge number of people in that community that would love to have such a card. How many are actually willing and able to pony up >=$3k per unit? How many units would they buy?…
In Q1 2023, Intel sold 250,000 ARC cards. Sales then collapsed the next quarter. I would expect sales to easily exceed that and be maintained. The demand for high memory GPUs is far higher than many realize. You have professional inferencing operations such as the ones listed at openrouter.ai that would gobble up 128GB VRAM ARC cards for running smaller high context models, much like how you have businesses gobbling up the Raspberry Pi for low end tasks, without even considering the local inference community.