Intel Arc GPUs to Ship Without Cryptocurrency Mining Limitations

[Lightwreather]

This is gonna be controversial, innit?

Summary

It seems that Intel are following a path of no intervention, letting the market and buyers decide what they use their graphics card for. 

 

Quotes

Quote

In a recent interview with Gadgets 360, Intel's Senior Vice President Raja Koduri and Roger Chandler, an Intel Graphics Product Team member spoke about the upcoming Arc GPUs, due in early 2022.

In the interview, Chandler said that "[…] As far as like software lockouts and things of that nature, we’re not designing this product or building any features at this point that specifically target miners. As far as actions we’re taking to avoid or lock them out, it’s a product that will be in the market and people will be able to buy it. It’s not a priority for us."

Speaking on current market conditions and supply expectations, Intel's graphics head Raja Koduri stated that the company can't really forecast in full detail how availability will pan out when ARC Alchemist actually hits the market - but was quick to point out that neither could AMD or Nvidia. As Mr. Koduri put it, "We’ll be coming in as a third player. I’ll always be very cautious, when the demand is so high and when the market is so hard. I can always use more supply. So I’m not going to say I have enough supply in this high-demand market. I think every one of my competitors will say the same thing right now."

 

My thoughts

Well, this is pretty interesting. Intel isn't going to be using any  kind of mining limiter on their cards. And tbh, I am wholeheartedly behind Intel's rationalization of this move. Letting the customer who bought the card decide what their gonna do with it. (A little shameless promotion: If you can and want to, try using your GPU power for Folding at Home (maybe even fold for the ltt team?)). But anyway, we're gonna have to wait and see, how good these cards are and their availability. But from what I can gather, Intel's certainly not advertising their supply.

Sources

Tom's hardware

Gadget's 360

[StDragon]

Who honestly didn't think Intel would hold no punches in trying to capture as much market share as possible. I would go a step further if I was Intel: for the first generation or two of GPUs, I would optimize for crypto currency to shove as much silicon out the door and rake in the revenue.

[Moonzy]

If they want RnD funds for the next gen GPU, this is the right move

But if there's not much adoption by gamers, game development might be hindered, so it's a double edged sword

 

I wonder how well they'll mine

Only one way to find out

[da na]

Sorry but if you're dumb enough to buy new GPUs for mining at all, let alone first generation GPUs that haven't been tested for efficiency, longevity, and hashrate... you brought it upon yourself. 

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Sorry but if you're dumb enough to buy new GPUs for mining at all, let alone first generation GPUs that haven't been tested for efficiency, longevity, and hashrate... you brought it upon yourself. 

So you suggest we wait until it's out of stock?

[da na]

1 minute ago, Moonzy said:

So you suggest we wait until it's out of stock?

No, it just seems pointless to get into the GPU mining market now as purchasing new GPUs is a massive investment that is not guaranteed you'll even be able to pay back since major coins aren't very profitable to mine with GPUs anymore and Ether's going proof-of-stake soon.

[Moonzy]

22 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

No, it just seems pointless to get into the GPU mining market now as purchasing new GPUs is a massive investment that is not guaranteed you'll even be able to pay back since major coins aren't very profitable to mine with GPUs anymore and Ether's going proof-of-stake soon.

 

I'll see the price of it, if it's low end like a 3060 then I might consider buying one just to play with it

No time to wait for review unless they release benchmarks before they start selling it, but mining benchmarks are almost always available before launch anyways

[adarw]

5 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

No, it just seems pointless to get into the GPU mining market now as purchasing new GPUs is a massive investment that is not guaranteed you'll even be able to pay back since major coins aren't very profitable to mine with GPUs anymore and Ether's going proof-of-stake soon.

but then if it doesnt work crypto mining you can just sell it to all the gamers waiting to buy a gpu, im sure no gamer cares if its a first gen,

[Fasterthannothing]

I'm probably going to buy one just to have it. Heck I might never unbox it if the reviews are bad so in the future after they flop I'll have a rare Intel GPU.

 

[SorryBella]

21 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

No, it just seems pointless to get into the GPU mining market now as purchasing new GPUs is a massive investment that is not guaranteed you'll even be able to pay back since major coins aren't very profitable to mine with GPUs anymore and Ether's going proof-of-stake soon.

Chia just crashed, and you can still mine Conflux with GPU with pretty good ROI.

[JustDenDimi]

Well, I don't think it'll matter much. It's still TSMC that's making the actual chips, which means overall supply of GPU's won't increase (much). (We don't know how many wafers each company will be allotted)

I think people will still be buying more Nvidia and AMD because they know what to expect in terms of performance, stability, divers, etc...

[Sauron]

Artificial limiters don't work anyway, there's no point. Just hope it's not particularly good at it.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

Who honestly didn't think Intel would hold no punches in trying to capture as much market share as possible. I would go a step further if I was Intel: for the first generation or two of GPUs, I would optimize for crypto currency to shove as much silicon out the door and rake in the revenue.

Because nVidia cards have far more use cases than AMD and Intel's currently.

 

nVidia is basically the only card you can do ML on the GPU with. AMD and Intel provide libraries that are often not used because the algorithms require the DNN or RNN nVidia libraries. If you get different results on another GPU, it won't be usable, and likely not compatible with other's.

 

Crypto algorithms are just straight math, they can be tuned on a per-gpu or per-cpu basis. So Intel saying "we won't" right now is basically blind optimism as nobody has their cards to develop such algorithms on, and without those existing, they couldn't limit it anyway, since they would be working off how they work on a competitor's device.

 

At any rate if you are a gamer, and only a gamer, you don't need an nVidia card. The RTX features are basically unused by most games at this point. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-rtx-games-engines-apps/ Most of the games in the list have DLSS, the CAD-related programs use RT.

 

I don't feel Intel is going to come out with a RTX 3090/Quadro A6000 equivalent. At best they might hit a 3070 equivilent.

 

[porina]

Intel should know how many GPUs they can make and when, at least early in the cycle. They'll have some contract in place with TSMC already. What's unknown is how many people will buy them, which will depend on pricing as well as availability. For example, where I am, you can pick up 6000 GPUs easily, but it seems no one wants to at their pricing level. nvidia are still pretty much unobtanium.

 

I'm curious about Arc performance too, but I don't need another 3070-level card assuming that is where it ends up on top end for gaming. Maybe I'll pick up a lower one to play with. 

[Dracarris]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

I would go a step further if I was Intel: for the first generation or two of GPUs, I would optimize for crypto currency to shove as much silicon out the door and rake in the revenue.

Cool plan. Who's going to supply all that 5/7nm silicon? Would be a shame if there was a shortage and you can't cover the demand you created. I hope such a situation never happens, and if, that it is resolved by ample supply after a short time.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

Who honestly didn't think Intel would hold no punches in trying to capture as much market share as possible. I would go a step further if I was Intel: for the first generation or two of GPUs, I would optimize for crypto currency to shove as much silicon out the door and rake in the revenue.

The issue with that idea is that you create ZERO ecosystem and Intel being new to this game, they absolutely NEED this. Otherwise it's just cards with no value attached to them. You get a money injection for the moment and then everyone forgets about you. NVIDIA on the other hand having rich ecosystem of features and functions can afford to do this. They have DLSS, RTX, G-Sync, all the fancy stuff and they always package it that their naming convention sticks in the end even if they are using a standardised thing, for example RTX = DXR. Yet everyone will talk about RTX and that will always lead to their graphic cards in the end. That's the ecosystem I'm talking about. Only ecosystem Intel has is the assumption it's a default graphic chip on any Intelpowered device because they are known to always have a crappy GPU on their CPU's. And that's as far as their ecosystem goes.

 

AMD for example also woke up a bit from their cryosleep of having essentially no ecosystem. And they go as far as mock the competition, like with FSR where they showcased it on GTX 1060. And the CAS sharpening which is the default in ReShade now when you want to sharpen things. And it's AMD's algorithm. Or how they handed over Mantle to become today's Vulkan. Or standardization of Resizable BAR. It has been around for ages yet no one used it. AMD brought it to the masses and then NVIDIA jumped on it too. May be more open approach than NVIDIA, but it's this positive perception and how much people talk about your graphic cards and features that you deliver that make user experience better.

 

Up till recently it was just "who makes more FPS". I've long not cared about that and cared more about cool features that work on top of that. Intel has NONE of that at the moment. If they just dump all the cards to miners, they'll essentially make some money from miners for as long as they'll be interested in this mining nonsense. And then they'll dump them. Also miners will be less inclined to buy Intel graphic cards if you can't sell them easy after if no one wants Intel graphic cards anyway. And they'll just fall into this never ending loop of "not being interesting" to gamers or miners.

[MultiGamerClub]

Good, we have already seen the limiters being hacked or removed 100% already from just a few days ago i read.

[BuckGup]

Sweet Nvidia should take note

 

[StDragon]

31 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

The issue with that idea is that you create ZERO ecosystem and Intel being new to this game, they absolutely NEED this. Otherwise it's just cards with no value attached to them. You get a money injection for the moment and then everyone forgets about you.

 

Unless you're a desperate gamer, no one is going to buy the 1st or 2nd generation Intel when Nvidia and AMD are the better choice with superior driver support and performance. Intel needs to develop a serious GPU ecosystem, but they can't jump right in and expect the adoption rate needed. What they need is a justification to keep the GPU lineup going without half-ass-ing it as they've historically done in the past. I know that catering to crypto is counterintuitive to that, but at this point it's whatever it takes to sell the cards and gain market share in order to justify further R&D to make a real viable GPU that can actually compete against the other two.

I consider the 1st and 2nd generation Intel GPUs to be "beta" products.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, StDragon said:

 

Unless you're a desperate gamer, no one is going to buy the 1st or 2nd generation Intel when Nvidia and AMD are the better choice with superior driver support and performance. Intel needs to develop a serious GPU ecosystem, but they can't jump right in and expect the adoption rate needed. What they need is a justification to keep the GPU lineup going without half-ass-ing it as they've historically done in the past. I know that catering to crypto is counterintuitive to that, but at this point it's whatever it takes to sell the cards and gain market share in order to justify further R&D to make a real viable GPU that can actually compete against the other two.

I consider the 1st and 2nd generation Intel GPUs to be "beta" products.

Honestly, having seen Intel flail and fail on the iGPU and dGPU before, twice, I would be hesitant to buy anything from Intel other than a CPU. I bought an Intel Realsense camera, the following year, entire Realsense development is discontinued, right when VR/AR virtual production is booming, and people don't want to spend $2000 on an iPhone.  The Realsense is a $400 depth camera that potentially could give Apple's FaceID/ARKit a run for it's money, but instead Intel has decided to walk away from it.

 

20 years ago Intel released the i740 (Real3D), and withdrew it after 18 months. Intel literately has a history of abandoning products that are not CPU's. Remember Optane? Intel Phi? Intel Smart Connect?

 

I kinda want Intel to succeed here, but history has shown Intel gives up on everything not deemed profitable.

 

 

 

[StDragon]

9 minutes ago, Kisai said:

20 years ago Intel released the i740 (Real3D), and withdrew it after 18 months. Intel literately has a history of abandoning products that are not CPU's. Remember Optane? Intel Phi? Intel Smart Connect?

Right. Intel has a history of being skittish on anything non-CPU related. That i740, absolute garbage compared to an Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra. About the only thing the i740 was good for was fitting in an AGP slot, even if it could have performed just as well with PCI. 

[porina]

7 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Cool plan. Who's going to supply all that 5/7nm silicon? Would be a shame if there was a shortage and you can't cover the demand you created. I hope such a situation never happens, and if, that it is resolved by ample supply after a short time.

The industry doesn't work that way. Intel have confirmed they will be made on TSMC 6nm. Contracts will already be in place for some capacity. We don't know what that is. We don't know if that is "enough". It is what it is though. If Intel want more beyond whatever they have already secured, they'll have to bid for it alongside everyone else at TSMC. It is not practical to be short term responsive for anyone in the industry.

 

7 hours ago, MultiGamerClub said:

Good, we have already seen the limiters being hacked or removed 100% already from just a few days ago i read.

Actually read it then. It hasn't been hacked or broken in any way. It's just been worked around by partially running a non-limited coin. The original limiter is still functional, although earlier report suggested people had got somewhat above the intended limiting rate but it is not completely bypassed or removed.

 

6 hours ago, StDragon said:

Unless you're a desperate gamer, no one is going to buy the 1st or 2nd generation Intel when Nvidia and AMD are the better choice with superior driver support and performance.

Intel have been in the GPU business for a long time though, just not what most would consider gaming performance. There will inevitably be some rough edges but you can't say they're not experienced in driver production. The main thing they have to work on is providing gamer level support, and they are trying to do that with more frequent updates like red and green.

 

Today nvidia remains basically unobtainium unless you go way over MSRP. AMD is somewhat available but people don't want it for whatever reason, probably pricing. Think it was in the last month I checked, AMD 6000 GPUs in total sold less than 3090 based on Steam hardware survey. I think Intel have a great opportunity here if the pricing is right.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I recently relented and picked up a 1650 because I was sick of having issues with Intel iGPU on Linux.  So to say I'm not convinced their drivers will be stable is an under-statement.

 

I'm glad they're joining the mid-range market though, once things calm down some competition can hopefully bring the RRP back down.

[TetraSky]

I'm desperate enough to attempt to buy a first gen GPU from Intel if the price is right.

[MultiGamerClub]

1 hour ago, porina said:

Actually read it then.

What?

 

1 hour ago, porina said:

not completely bypassed or removed.

Oof, research goes on ig.