Intel GPUs "on shelves" Q1 2022

[porina]

Quotes

Quote

Today is when Intel does its third-quarter 2021 financial disclosures, and there’s one little tidbit in the earnings presentation about its upcoming new discrete GPU offerings. The earnings are usually a chance to wave the flag of innovation about what’s to come, and this time around Intel is confirming that its first-generation discrete graphics with the Xe-HPG architecture will be on shelves in Q1 2022.

Summary

Intel GPUs "on shelves" in Q1 next year. The time frame has been stated before, but re-stating it in an earnings call as we get closer to the expected time frame, increases the likelihood that time frame will be met. 

 

My thoughts

The GPU shortage certainly doesn't seem to have an end and it remains to be seen if a new player will materially affect that. Note the unwritten rule, if a time frame is given, expect it to be nearer the end of that time. In other words, think March more than January. If it is earlier, great.

 

I wonder where the phrase "on shelves" comes from. Was it actually used by Intel in the call, or an interpretation of the article?

 

Sources

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17026/intel-reaffirms-our-discrete-gpus-will-be-on-shelves-in-q1-2022

[That Franc]

It's fair, I think Intel can push out quite a number of chips, and the adoption rate of the new cards probably won't be as high as for each new generation of Nvidia or AMD.

 

As a side note, I think Intel chose a near-perfect time to release their GPUs because amid the despair due to shortages people will be forced to buy them, especially since usually overpriced Intel products will appear cheap next to 2000-dollar 3080s.

[Fasterthannothing]

4 minutes ago, That Franc said:

It's fair, I think Intel can push out quite a number of chips, and the adoption rate of the new cards probably won't be as high as for each new generation of Nvidia or AMD.

 

As a side note, I think Intel chose a near-perfect time to release their GPUs because amid the despair due to shortages people will be forced to buy them, especially since usually overpriced Intel products will appear cheap next to 2000-dollar 3080s.

I agree I think Intel will be wildely successful if for no other reason than zero stock from their competitors. 

[leadeater]

7 minutes ago, That Franc said:

especially since usually overpriced Intel products will appear cheap next to 2000-dollar 3080s.

And then Intel GPU's come in at $1999 lol

 

I'm optimistic about pricing but not hopeful, or is it supposed to be around the other way? I don't know, would be nice but I doubt Intel is going to massively undercut the market in any meaningful way from day 1, Intel is not one to pass over more money if they can get it.

[jagdtigger]

18 minutes ago, porina said:

"on shelves"

Of warehouses of big-time mining operations......

[porina]

19 minutes ago, That Franc said:

It's fair, I think Intel can push out quite a number of chips

These are made on TSMC 6nm. How stock goes will depend just how many wafers they ordered.

 

On process this would also make them the most advanced GPUs for now. TSMC 6nm is reportedly a refinement on their 7nm process, with density unchanged but some improvement to efficiency. 

 

10 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'm optimistic about pricing but not hopeful, or is it supposed to be around the other way? I don't know, would be nice but I doubt Intel is going to massively undercut the market in any meaningful way from day 1, Intel is not one to pass over more money if they can get it.

While not about GPUs, the following was noted in the financials. Alder Lake is imminent, whereas Arc is less so, and more talk of that might be expected in another quarter. Maybe Intel will have different strategy than historic expectations might suggest.

 

 

[Rauten]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

These are made on TSMC 6nm. How stock goes will depend just how many wafers they ordered.

On process this would also make them the most advanced GPUs for now. TSMC 6nm is reportedly a refinement on their 7nm process, with density unchanged but some improvement to efficiency. 

If anything, this makes me doubt how good they will be. They're gonna have a... partial node advantage and so far every rumour and tidbit points to 3070 parity only. Hopefully it's just a hiccup because it's their first go at it, or the rumours are just plain wrong.

4 minutes ago, porina said:

 

Bold.

Also just remembered I need to buy potatoes. Thank you, Dr. Cutress.

[Blademaster91]

What do they mean by "on shelves" ? On retailer shelves so consumers can actually buy them? I doubt that because any GPU that can mine are being bought up by scalpers and miners.

Also since they're being made on TSMC, I don't expect an Intel GPU to be easily available.

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Rauten said:

If anything, this makes me doubt how good they will be. They're gonna have a... partial node advantage and so far every rumour and tidbit points to 3070 parity only. Hopefully it's just a hiccup because it's their first go at it, or the rumours are just plain wrong.

Depends on the goal, GA102 is rather large and Intel just may not want to go in first generation with a design that large, even if they could. There's probably a lot of things they want to get ironed out and see how it functions in the real world using chips that aren't so costly and focus on volume over performance.

[SupaKomputa]

If they throw anything better than my 580 with retail price, i will snatch it.

[porina]

2 hours ago, Rauten said:

They're gonna have a... partial node advantage and so far every rumour and tidbit points to 3070 parity only.

Doesn't this remind you of AMD's strategy with original Navi? 5000 series was on 7nm so more advanced than both what nvidia had then and even now. The top model 5700 XT was ball park comparable to the 2070 - 2070 Super range. So I'd say it is a kind of stepping stone product. Future generation(s) may aim closer to the top end. Even at 3070 level it will satisfy a lot of the gaming market.

[Quackers101]

would be really cool to see intel in the GPU space, but doubt its worth the "price".

Unless you just need a GPU? But doubt they will have all the needed experience with GPU's, drivers, games, and how its going to work against other systems that works differently or acts differently. In handling ray tracing, physics, shaders etc.

(although forgot they do have some experience like with iGPU)

[StDragon]

 

5 hours ago, porina said:

Intel Crypto Mining Cards "on shelves" in Q1 next year.

Fixed that for you.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

What do they mean by "on shelves" ? On retailer shelves so consumers can actually buy them? I doubt that because any GPU that can mine are being bought up by scalpers and miners.

Also since they're being made on TSMC, I don't expect an Intel GPU to be easily available.

 

All they need to do is come out with a GPU that beats the 3060/3060Ti with 12GB of VRAM to make a dent in adoption. But if they price it where the 3060/3060Ti is right now, it's only going to be purchased by OEM/SI's who have essentially no other option. Pretty much if you go into any computer store right now, the only computers you can buy have 1050Ti/1650/1660's in them, if they have dGPU's at all.  Everything else if it's in stock at all is overpriced, and a poor value compared to holding onto anything 2 years or older.

 

Heck the only reason I bought the 11th gen Intel CPU was because the 4th gen died, and I was otherwise going to hold out for the 12th/13th gen. I have laptops with 7th gen and 9th gen cpu's that I could have otherwise used, but don't have the number of USB ports I need for things.

 

[jagdtigger]

39 minutes ago, Kisai said:

4th gen died

Thats a very bad luck i guess, im still sitting on a 4670k myself. Should last for a while (famous last words....):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qb8f6ve4puby72k/cb-r23.png?dl=0

[Mark Kaine]

I think expecting intel to make many of those is delusional...not that it would be not selling,  but I doubt they bought a lot of 6nm allotments, that shi is expensive and cpus surely are priority. 

 

Back to you Steve~

 

 

[porina]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

I think expecting intel to make many of those is delusional...not that it would be not selling,  but I doubt they bought a lot of 6nm allotments, that shi is expensive and cpus surely are priority. 

Define "many"? TSMC 6nm, as an extension of their 7nm, is based off a mature node. I doubt it would be that much different from 6nm, as anyone who cares about performance would already be looking at 5nm as a bigger jump.

 

And which CPUs do you see as a priority? Not Intel's, since TSMC wouldn't have a hope to keep up with the required volume. AMD's CPUs? Not Intel's problem. That's between AMD and TSMC to work out separately. Intel going 6nm I think is more a matter of timing. It is a natural evolution of the 7nm node without making the much more expensive jump to 5nm, the latter making more sense for higher value products. To put it into old Intel terms, TSMC 6nm might be their 7+.

 

Edit:

For further reading on TSMC 6nm, check out: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16732/tsmc-manufacturing-update

And how it relates to Arc: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16895/a-sneak-peek-at-intels-xe-hpg-gpu-architecture

Some interesting numbers there: N6 is ~18% denser than N7, same defect rate, replaces some DUV steps with EUV simplifying the process. And, from the article in the middle of this year, N6 is expected to be about half of TSMC's "7nm" family output.

 

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, porina said:

Define "many"? TSMC 6nm, as an extension of their 7nm, is based off a mature node. I doubt it would be that much different from 6nm, as anyone who cares about performance would already be looking at 5nm as a bigger jump.

I'm just saying I think this will be intels "Radeon VII"... great card but they didn't exactly make many of them, mostly because they were too expensive to produce  - i just think this will be similar,  of course we don't know how big intels allotment at TSMC is, so its just speculation. 

 

On the other hand,  its true , right now is the best time for a 3rd gpu manufacturer,  if they're serious,  i can't take intel serious however... they're like sony,  too big to die, but ultimately lost all their drive,  and its unclear how their ADL cpus will perform,  so I think that is definitely priority. 

 

Still, *if* intel manages to become a 3rd power in the dgpu market, good for everyone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[RejZoR]

It'll be ridiculously overpriced, MSRP will mean nothing, they'll be unobtainable and whatever of cards that'll actually hit the market will be scalped. Boy, can't wait!

[porina]

9 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

I'm just saying I think this will be intels "Radeon VII"... great card but they didn't exactly make many of them, mostly because they were too expensive to produce  - i just think this will be similar,  of course we don't know how big intels allotment at TSMC is, so its just speculation. 

I think it is very safe to say Intel will blow away the Radeon VII in volume. The VII was not originally intended as a consumer card. It's FP64 performance was in another league from consumer products. That they chose to sell some as such was unexpected and we can only speculate the reasons to why, either they had surplus stocks they couldn't sell into the pro market, or they were otherwise defective for that use.

 

9 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

On the other hand,  its true , right now is the best time for a 3rd gpu manufacturer,  if they're serious,  i can't take intel serious however... they're like sony,  too big to die, but ultimately lost all their drive,  and its unclear how their ADL cpus will perform,  so I think that is definitely priority. 

Intel problems of recent years was not due to them being complacent or otherwise not trying, but they had a major setback in their fab plans. If you have lemons, make lemonade. That recovery is still in progress, and Alder Lake should be their catchup generation. I don't expect it to defeat Zen 3 in every way, but it will give it a good fight where it matters. We're only perhaps a couple weeks from getting some real data so we will see soon. Anyway, ADL is separate from Arc. They have different design teams and they will be made on different processes. Doing one does not directly impact the other.

 

[maartendc]

What is the expected performance tier of these GPU's?

 

Are they going to be competing with gaming cards from AMD and Nvidia? Are they enterprise-type GPU's (like a Quadro?)

 

Are these just for entry level graphics for systems that don't have integrated graphics?

[porina]

54 minutes ago, maartendc said:

What is the expected performance tier of these GPU's?

 

Are they going to be competing with gaming cards from AMD and Nvidia? Are they enterprise-type GPU's (like a Quadro?)

 

Are these just for entry level graphics for systems that don't have integrated graphics?

We don't have an indication of performance but it is targeted at gaming and consumer uses. Best guess people have so far is that the top model will be 3070 class, but we will have to wait and see.

 

While researching topics bought up in this thread, the rumoured die size is on the large side. Comparable to 3070 and bigger than 6700 XT, while being on more advanced process. I wonder if there is something more going on than has been discussed so far. For example, the "7" tier GPUs from red and green only really line up in basic performance, but nvidia clearly have the lead for latest features. I'm wondering if Intel are going more nvidia-like than AMD like, which is a great thing if so.

 

Edit: one way gaming performance was estimated was comparing the rated (or estimated) FP32 performance. However it doesn't necessarily scale as such. I have an idea I'll run numbers on after lunch and see if that might give a different conclusion than I've seen so far.

 

Edit 2: I just had a look at the numbers. According to Anandtech they estimate the top Arc offering to come out around 18.5 TFLOPS (FP32), although it is ambiguous if this is base or boost clock. If we compare to Ampere, this slots right in with the 3070. Looking across to RDNA2, it is more 6800 XT tier. Now the fun begins, if we look at Turing, it is clearly above that range, above the 2080 Ti, above the Titan RTX. Current gen arguably increased FLOPS relatively more than gaming performance. We don't know that ratio for Xe, and looking at current products wont help since there will be some generational difference.

 

Anandtech also observed that Intel seem to be putting in about twice the matrix operation resource in than nvidia do. This is not expected to directly impact gaming performance, but could indirectly in that it would likely be the driving force behind XeSS, Intel's equivalent to DLSS where AMD still are absent.

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, porina said:

 

Edit 2: I just had a look at the numbers. According to Anandtech they estimate the top Arc offering to come out around 18.5 TFLOPS (FP32), although it is ambiguous if this is base or boost clock. If we compare to Ampere, this slots right in with the 3070.

That's not really new, but as I said earlier, all Intel has to do is offer something higher tier than the 3060/3060Ti because that's the bare minimum for a 4Kp60 experience. If they can't hit 3060 performance as their base entry, they may as well not bother. If they can hit 3070, that's good, as that starts putting it in the range where VR or high-refresh rate monitors can be used.

 

But that said, even with Apple's M1 Max, the nVidia 3060 performance tier is the "bare minimum" configuration, and when nVidia inevitably releases a 4060, that will move the goalposts.

 

The fact that we keep seeing laptops and "entry level" desktops with sub-par GPU parts like the existing Intel iGPU's and nVidia x30 and x50 tier parts shows the problem, those "entry level" parts are essentially intended for a non-gaming purpose, many "apps" keep being built on web browser engines, that require both the hardware video decoder and minimum GPU capability for resolution independence.

[maartendc]

21 minutes ago, Kisai said:

That's not really new, but as I said earlier, all Intel has to do is offer something higher tier than the 3060/3060Ti because that's the bare minimum for a 4Kp60 experience. If they can't hit 3060 performance as their base entry, they may as well not bother. If they can hit 3070, that's good, as that starts putting it in the range where VR or high-refresh rate monitors can be used.

 

But that said, even with Apple's M1 Max, the nVidia 3060 performance tier is the "bare minimum" configuration, and when nVidia inevitably releases a 4060, that will move the goalposts.

 

The fact that we keep seeing laptops and "entry level" desktops with sub-par GPU parts like the existing Intel iGPU's and nVidia x30 and x50 tier parts shows the problem, those "entry level" parts are essentially intended for a non-gaming purpose, many "apps" keep being built on web browser engines, that require both the hardware video decoder and minimum GPU capability for resolution independence.

x50 tier cards do serve a gaming purpose. Entry level 1080p gaming or esports titles.

 

x30 tier cards I agree are just video out.

 

All Intel has to do is make anything that performs like a 1050ti or better, and it will fly off the shelves in the current GPU market.

[porina]

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

That's not really new, but as I said earlier, all Intel has to do is offer something higher tier than the 3060/3060Ti because that's the bare minimum for a 4Kp60 experience. If they can't hit 3060 performance as their base entry, they may as well not bother. If they can hit 3070, that's good, as that starts putting it in the range where VR or high-refresh rate monitors can be used.

Gaming is a much wider area than that. Personally I feel a 3070 is the entry point if you want to do 4k60 at high+, although you can get away with less at lower quality. I'd call the 3070 the medium-high end of gaming. Many of us might be there, or want to be there, but there's still a load of PC gaming possible at lower. My laptop is rather absurd in that respect, with a 3070 (130W) an 1080p 165Hz screen. I guess it's for the higher end of the e-sports crowd. A hopefully significantly cheaper 3060 would be plenty for me had it been available at the time.

 

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

the nVidia 3060 performance tier is the "bare minimum" configuration, and when nVidia inevitably releases a 4060, that will move the goalposts.

I guess that depends on how you define it. IMO I'd define a minimum gaming GPU as one capable of playing modern titles at 1080p low 60fps. At a stretch, maybe even 30fps. A few years ago I'd consider a 1050 as enough, but now I'm not exactly sure where I'd draw the line. More VRAM is needed for recent big titles even at lower settings.

 

As for 40 series, that's still almost a year away if nvidia keep to around 2 year cycle. The 60 level parts will be later than launch, so Intel may have perhaps a year or so before needing to worry about that.

 

We don't know what Intel's GPU generational timescales are either. I think it would be wise of them to follow a more CPU like annual cadence especially as they try to grow into the space.

 

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The fact that we keep seeing laptops and "entry level" desktops with sub-par GPU parts like the existing Intel iGPU's and nVidia x30 and x50 tier parts shows the problem, those "entry level" parts are essentially intended for a non-gaming purpose

Non-gaming is still a valid market. IMO a 50 level part is plenty enough for entry level gaming (1080p 60fps, probably doesn't even need to be "low".) Only reason I got the 3070 laptop earlier was because the 1050 laptop wasn't cutting it any more for latest games, but it is only just falling off usable.