While we may not know where the final prices will land when the things actually launch, we do have a pretty good idea of what Intel wanted the prices to be from its scavenger hunt event prizes valuation and the estimations from that were bonkers crazy high to blend in with the AMD and Nvidia crowd during a scalper orgy. The top prize was $900 and if you value the total non-GPU part of the prize to $200, that leaves $700 for the top-end ARC. Now that prices have crashed along with crypto, A380 has proven ARC's performance to be sub-par in most real-world loads at least with current drivers and drivers have also proven to be sub-par, I'd expect Intel to have a hard time getting $400 for those.
As I pointed out in the comments of the article here about that supposed "price leak", the prize valuation was rather vague, since it included other items that were only described as "Intel Arc branded merchandise". Is that a sticker? A t-shirt? A bicycle? And of course, the value of the hardware at the peak of the mining craze might vary substantially from its value in a more normal market. 3060 Ti's could be "valued" at over $800 at the time, so Intel valuing their card accordingly might not be unreasonable, even if they didn't actually expect to price them at that level by the time they actually launched. It would be kind of hard for them to provide a meaningful ARV for a product that wasn't expected to launch for at least half a year in such a volatile market.
Even different silicon will not solve their biggest problems, driver issues. And if 380 is not good enough against almost two year old competition how will 580/780 change that? Leave alone the soon to be launched new gens from AMD and Nvidia.
The new-generation cards around the expected price range for the cards in this lineup are not expected to launch until next year. Nvidia might potentially launch a new enthusiast-level card in few months or so, but it might be over 6 months before we get anything new around the $400 range, let alone at lower price points. AMD just launched the RX 6400 and RX 6500XT 6 months ago, and Nvidia launched the 3050 around the same time, so I can't see them replacing those for a while still.
Graphics card prices are actually a lot better now. I could grab a new RX 6600 for just 150 EUR. Which is pretty amazing value. You think Intel will offer much lower prices than AMD or Nvidia? Not gonna happen. They have to pay TSMC for it. It will not be manufactured for free. The only chance I see Intel lowering prices significantly is another chapter of their contra revenue practices. Which again is no good sign for Arc.
Prices might be "better" than they were a few months ago, but still not "good" by any means. And a new RX 6600 for 150 Euros sounds suspicious. Especially since you suggest the RX 6400 is around 160. >_>
As for "paying TSMC", that's just for the graphics chip, which amounts to only a portion of a card's retail price. Probably not more than $30 or so for the chip in the A380. Add in the cost of VRAM and the rest of the board's components and cooling, and the cards likely cost under $100 to make. Of course retailers and card manufacturers need a cut of the profits, limiting how low pricing can go, but Intel may choose to forgo their share just to help them establish a presence in the market with these early generations of cards.
And the largest card, the A780, might not cost much more than a couple hundred dollars or so to manufacture. So if the card manages to compete well with something like a 3060 Ti, they would likely have a lot of flexibility to price it competitively. Of course, Nvidia could also adjust the pricing on their cards to compete as well, since big profits are being made on those at the moment.
That's the problem. I only know Chinese prices of Arc so far. Intel priced 380 at 1030 Yuan. Which is ~150 EUR. You can get RX 6400 for ~160 EUR at the moment.
Or, as the article points out, the Chinese pricing of this particular model was supposedly equivalent to "approximately $130-$140". And of course, that may not match pricing in the rest of the world, particularly if the cards launch later. Typically though, Intel tends to offer competitive pricing when they enter new hardware markets. And again, even if pricing of their lowest-end model doesn't impress, that won't necessarily apply to the other models. There's a lot more room for making prices competitive while still turning a profit the higher up the product stack you go.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram