News Intel Arc Giveaway Reveals ‘Approximate’ Graphics Card Pricing

[lazyabum]

This won't put a dent in the GPU shortage.

 

[cryoburner]

Do you think they are going to use any OEM/boardpartners ? This would be extremely weird, intel makes their own mobos, ssds and so on without using anybody else, it would seem out of character for them.

According to the article at least, "Intel is working with third-party AIB (add-in board) partners like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and others for the launch." I don't think that's been officially verified, but apparently it was mentioned in an interview last month that Intel was working with graphics board partners. Some articles listed specific names of companies, but the sites later took the articles down after Intel contacted them, and replaced them with a message stating that Intel representatives never provided the names of any graphics OEMs they were working with, and that those were just being speculated on by certain east-asian media outlets.

However, I suspect Intel likely is working with major board partners considering they haven't really been manufacturing consumer graphics cards at scale. Not only for getting the boards made by companies with many years of experience in manufacturing high-end graphics cards, but also for things like brand recognition in the graphics card space. It might be easier to convince someone to try an Intel card for gaming if it has ROG Strix branding, for example.

Intel needs to do all they can to convince people loyal to other brands to switch over to theirs. Due to the current graphics card pricing and availability situation, it's not like they can just undercut the competition on pricing for a given performance level and call it a day, unless perhaps the mining market were to see a big downturn in the coming months. And it seems unlikely that they will be providing gaming performance above and beyond what the competition's high-end is offering with this first generation of cards. And while crypto miners might buy the cards either way, that hasn't exactly been a very stable long-term market, and could collapse at any time. Getting the cards into the systems of people who will continue buying their cards and provide positive word-of-mouth is arguably going to be better for them in the long-term.