Intel To Release Discrete Graphics Card In 2020, GPUs For Desktop PCs Coming, Too

[JamesSneed]

All I'm saying is they better have a darn-good driver team upon initial implementation.
I know of another [primarily] CPU company who bought their way into the discrete GPU market and initially turned a good thing into garbage. It took them around 10 years, a lot of ignorant customers' (including myself) money and a FRAPs reveal to even get them to pull their heads out of their buttocks about their issues.

Intel tends to do better than anyone at what they set their budget to. Since they picked up Raja and are making these claims I suspect there R&D for the discrete graphics is going to be rather huge as in higher than all of AMD's annual R&D for all products.

 

[redgarl]

All I'm saying is they better have a darn-good driver team upon initial implementation.
I know of another [primarily] CPU company who bought their way into the discrete GPU market and initially turned a good thing into garbage. It took them around 10 years, a lot of ignorant customers' (including myself) money and a FRAPs reveal to even get them to pull their heads out of their buttocks about their issues.

Talking about Nvidia? If you are talking about AMD, I can tell you the driver story is extremely exaggerated. I went into 3 generation of cards with them in the last 10 years and all this is blown out of proportion. In fact, I have more problems with my 1000 Nvidia experience than what I was facing in the past with AMD.

 

[redgarl]

All I'm saying is they better have a darn-good driver team upon initial implementation.
I know of another [primarily] CPU company who bought their way into the discrete GPU market and initially turned a good thing into garbage. It took them around 10 years, a lot of ignorant customers' (including myself) money and a FRAPs reveal to even get them to pull their heads out of their buttocks about their issues.

Intel tends to do better than anyone at what they set their budget to. Since they picked up Raja and are making these claims I suspect there R&D for the discrete graphics is going to be rather huge as in higher than all of AMD's annual R&D for all products.

And yet AMD GPU roadmap is threatening. From the number alone, Vega 7nm could be around 50-70% more powerful than Vega 14nm. It is all related to process and frequencies.

 

[Archixor]

Am I the only one thinking discrete graphic card 3 manufacturer .
RGB
Haha

 

[shrapnel_indie]

More like Intel is going to copy AMD's gpu technology. 1st buy gpus for their kabby lake G product with a hidden clause somewhere, hire AMD's engineers to help reverse engineer the design and tweak it so they can call it their own design. Follow up by crippling other vendor GPUs on Intel CPU hardware.

Woe to Intel though if they get caught crippling other vendor GPUs on Intel CPU hardware. After this 5Ghz 28-core CPU fiasco they have to deal with, I don't think there will be too many unpaid people taking it easy on them... that is of course built on the premise of Intel pulls such a stunt AND they get caught. (getting caught is a very likely scenario if they did such a stunt.) I agree that Intel's higher end cards/GPUs will have strong similarities to AMDs GPUs considering the talent in-charge was "stolen" (I use the word loosely here.)

 

[cryoburner]

Follow up by crippling other vendor GPUs on Intel CPU hardware.

Woe to Intel though if they get caught crippling other vendor GPUs on Intel CPU hardware.

That's not something that would make much sense for them to do though, since they would simultaneously be making their own CPUs look bad for gaming when paired with other cards. And that's if it were even possible to hurt the performance of competing GPUs without hurting the performance of other tasks, which seems unlikely.

Now, the other way around could potentially make a bit of sense, as they could certainly optimize the drivers for their own graphics cards to run best on their CPUs. Technically, AMD could do the same, but it probably wouldn't make sense without having their CPUs in the majority of benchmarking systems. It's necessary for AMD to optimize their graphics drivers run competitively on Intel's CPUs, but won't be as important for Intel to optimize their graphics drivers for AMD's hardware.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

Follow up by crippling other vendor GPUs on Intel CPU hardware.

Woe to Intel though if they get caught crippling other vendor GPUs on Intel CPU hardware.

That's not something that would make much sense for them to do though, since they would simultaneously be making their own CPUs look bad for gaming when paired with other cards. And that's if it were even possible to hurt the performance of competing GPUs without hurting the performance of other tasks, which seems unlikely.

Now, the other way around could potentially make a bit of sense, as they could certainly optimize the drivers for their own graphics cards to run best on their CPUs. Technically, AMD could do the same, but it probably wouldn't make sense without having their CPUs in the majority of benchmarking systems. It's necessary for AMD to optimize their graphics drivers run competitively on Intel's CPUs, but won't be as important for Intel to optimize their graphics drivers for AMD's hardware.

I don't disagree. And I do believe that driver optimization would be the first step... Possibly like NVidia and its physics engine technology, PhysX: if it sees Intel (in this case) it kicks in some optimizations that would normally not be there. I don't believe that Intel would be that daft to rig the system for a penalty instead of a preferential boost. (Of course PhysX has had in rumors at least, that the CPU based version, unlike the GPU based version was intentionally left in a state where performance suffered. Something that even to this day, NVidia denies.)

 

[jimmysmitty]

I couldn't imagine Intel would be selling anything below their 60% profit margin like they do with CPUs. This company is not here to provide customers with value-for-money solutions, only products it thinks it can make billions in profit on.

I doubt AMD and nVidia would be concerned too much as Intel's products are always overpriced.

And the Vega 64 isn't overpriced right now?

All companies focus on the profits. AMD may have a lower price currently but they did that knowing they would gain market share and probably edge a profit (they have actually). Besides the real profit is in HPC anyways.

A good example though, the Q6600 G0 launched at $266, which is what I bought it for. AT the same time the only quad core available from AMD was the QuadFX setup which the CPUs bottomed out at $600 bucks, is that not over priced since it couldn't even beat the Q6600? Even when Phenom 1 launched it was priced slightly higher ($283 vs $263). Pricing is relevant to a lot of factors and every company prices accordingly.

Intel announced that the company will bring a discrete graphics card to market in 2020.

Intel has also announced that they will have 10nm CPUs by 2015, and 7nm by 2017. : D

I think their chip designers do a much better job of holding to a schedule than their manufacturing process engineers.

In fairness, it's too easy to sit back and complain about their lack of progress, while they wrestle with the limits of physics, chemistry, and mass production. Only a handful of companies in the world are competitive with their manufacturing tech.

Well to top it off the most competitive companies process wise also have consortiums that fund and work together while Intel works alone so it is understandable that they might run into a few issues here and there.

All I'm saying is they better have a darn-good driver team upon initial implementation.
I know of another [primarily] CPU company who bought their way into the discrete GPU market and initially turned a good thing into garbage. It took them around 10 years, a lot of ignorant customers' (including myself) money and a FRAPs reveal to even get them to pull their heads out of their buttocks about their issues.

Intel does have one of the largest software teams out there. I too would hope they learn from the mistakes of others because in gaming drivers are pretty important. Maybe take a page from nVidia who does a damn good job with driver support.

 

[dorsai]

I had an Inteli740 AGP Starfighter graphics card back in the late 1990's...it was merely ok performance wise and driver support was not very good...Intel eventually just gave up putting out driver updates. I doubt I would be willing to buy another Intel gpu...but competition is always good so I applaud Intels effort to disrupt the nVidia/AMD duopoly...

 

[Math Geek]

my concern would mainly be the way they like to quickly make obsolete last gen stuff. would they maintain driver support for a card 2 gens old? or would they neglect it in an effort to push folks onto newest stuff. constant platform changes and broken promises within chipset compatibility makes me a bit weary of buying from them. i just have little trust in the company as a whole right now.

 

[bit_user]

I had an Inteli740 AGP Starfighter graphics card back in the late 1990's...it was merely ok performance wise and driver support was not very good...Intel eventually just gave up putting out driver updates. I doubt I would be willing to buy another Intel gpu...

Rather than looking all the way back 20 years, you'd do better just looking at their recent driver support for their iGPUs. It's most likely going to be the same team doing the drivers & software support for their dGPUs.

my concern would mainly be the way they like to quickly make obsolete last gen stuff. would they maintain driver support for a card 2 gens old? or would they neglect it in an effort to push folks onto newest stuff.

Again, your best guidance is going to be how they support older generations of iGPUs. I don't have experience with gaming on those, but no issues as far as basic Windows/Linux driver support.

I guess their Media SDK has dropped previous gen iGPUs pretty quickly, on a few occasions.

 

[Math Geek]

i know that my old netbook with an atom chip lacks win 10 igp support. that's not really that old of a product despite how crappy the chip really is. does make me learly but i hope that they would go in 100% if they are gonna spend the money to bring a new design to market. would be a huge waste of resources to let them fall flat right away. they may have the edge in cpu's but in the discrete gpu market, they would be at the bottom of the heap for sure unless they can prove themselves.

 

[bit_user]

i know that my old netbook with an atom chip lacks win 10 igp support. that's not really that old of a product despite how crappy the chip really is.

For all I know, it's 10 years old (i.e. first-gen Atom netbook, running WinXP). Can you be more specific? What SoC is in it?

 

[Math Geek]

it's this one from roughly 2012. https://ark.intel.com/products/58916/Intel-Atom-Processor-N2600-1M-Cache-1_6-GHz
not just mine but that whole line and most all the atom cpu's failed to get win 10 support.

the old netbook still serves its purpose of a cheap little web surfer when i'm on the road and need a keyboard. but it is a pain that i can't control the igp at all. for instance, the screen is at 100% brightness and can't turn it down. kills battery life when half power would be ample most of the time.

and it came with win 7 starter edition installed. VERY stripped down win 7 install but i bumped it to win 10 and have most everything turned off so it runs rather well all things considered. that old chip and 2 gb of ram and it runs better than it did with stripped down win 7 otherwise i'd just put win 7 back and go with that.

 

[ubercake]

Am I the only one thinking discrete graphic card 3 manufacturer .
RGB
Haha

Hahaha. I was thinking that same thing and couldn't help but think there's some conspiracy by which the same few people superseding all three companies are running the show and laughing at all the little consumers forking out the big bucks while they are making money no matter which we decide to buy...

I can see them sitting around planning now:
"Let's give them the choice of red, or green, or now... I've got it blue! It will fully satisfy the cones and make us even more money. Muhahahahaha!"

 

[ubercake]

All I'm saying is they better have a darn-good driver team upon initial implementation.
I know of another [primarily] CPU company who bought their way into the discrete GPU market and initially turned a good thing into garbage. It took them around 10 years, a lot of ignorant customers' (including myself) money and a FRAPs reveal to even get them to pull their heads out of their buttocks about their issues.

Talking about Nvidia? If you are talking about AMD, I can tell you the driver story is extremely exaggerated. I went into 3 generation of cards with them in the last 10 years and all this is blown out of proportion. In fact, I have more problems with my 1000 Nvidia experience than what I was facing in the past with AMD.

Not sure about Nvidia buying a major CPU producer, but I do know AMD initially turned ATI to garbage. Until that time, I bought nothing but ATI cards. You couldn't beat the value/performance.
Going as far back as at least the Radeon 5xxx series (when I stopped using AMD cards) until a few years ago there's well-documented evidence everywhere regarding AMD hardware/driver issues; not even an argument. There is no Lala-land where people do not know about this fact. This is not blown out of proportion. Or maybe you were just the one lucky guy with the perfect omnipotent PC configuration with an AMD video card during that period?
I haven't had an issue with Nvidia cards and I've been using them since the 5xx series. If Nvidia cards or drivers start giving me problems, I may look at AMD again, or I may consider Intel when it comes time. Until now, I've learned to trust that Nvidia cards save me a lot of time and keep me from unnecessary headaches..

 

[Math Geek]

my fav gpu ever is still my old Radaen 9600 pro all-in-wonder.

don't think anyone will ever be able to top all that card offered and could do.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

All I'm saying is they better have a darn-good driver team upon initial implementation.
I know of another [primarily] CPU company who bought their way into the discrete GPU market and initially turned a good thing into garbage. It took them around 10 years, a lot of ignorant customers' (including myself) money and a FRAPs reveal to even get them to pull their heads out of their buttocks about their issues.

Talking about Nvidia? If you are talking about AMD, I can tell you the driver story is extremely exaggerated. I went into 3 generation of cards with them in the last 10 years and all this is blown out of proportion. In fact, I have more problems with my 1000 Nvidia experience than what I was facing in the past with AMD.

Not sure about Nvidia buying a major CPU producer, but I do know AMD initially turned ATI to garbage. Until that time, I bought nothing but ATI cards. You couldn't beat the value/performance.
Going as far back as at least the Radeon 5xxx series (when I stopped using AMD cards) until a few years ago there's well-documented evidence everywhere regarding AMD hardware/driver issues; not even an argument. There is no Lala-land where people do not know about this fact. This is not blown out of proportion. Or maybe you were just the one lucky guy with the perfect omnipotent PC configuration with an AMD video card during that period?
I haven't had an issue with Nvidia cards and I've been using them since the 5xx series. If Nvidia cards or drivers start giving me problems, I may look at AMD again, or I may consider Intel when it comes time. Until now, I've learned to trust that Nvidia cards save me a lot of time and keep me from unnecessary headaches..

I had no issues running a Radeon HD5870 or a Radeon R9-380X. Drivers were solid enough, and updated rather regularly too. I'm running, admittedly, a GTX-1080 right now, but that's because I couldn't get Vega when I was ready to purchase.

 

[Martell1977]

Not sure about Nvidia buying a major CPU producer, but I do know AMD initially turned ATI to garbage. Until that time, I bought nothing but ATI cards. You couldn't beat the value/performance.
Going as far back as at least the Radeon 5xxx series (when I stopped using AMD cards) until a few years ago there's well-documented evidence everywhere regarding AMD hardware/driver issues; not even an argument. There is no Lala-land where people do not know about this fact. This is not blown out of proportion. Or maybe you were just the one lucky guy with the perfect omnipotent PC configuration with an AMD video card during that period?
I haven't had an issue with Nvidia cards and I've been using them since the 5xx series. If Nvidia cards or drivers start giving me problems, I may look at AMD again, or I may consider Intel when it comes time. Until now, I've learned to trust that Nvidia cards save me a lot of time and keep me from unnecessary headaches..

You've been lucky then, I bought my laptop with a 1060 3gb in it on Black Friday 2016 and it's been a headache ever since. There was about 6 months I didn't update the video driver because of installation issues.

My desktop now runs a AMD R9 390, before that crossfire 6870's and a single one before that. I've been using ATI and AMD cards for quite a while and while the drivers have not been perfect, neither has nVidia's. At one point I had intended to buy an nVidia card, but a driver update cooked my cousin's GPU and so AMD seemed the better purchase.
I've yet to have an issue with my Radeon cards, now if I could just get this 1060 to update with having to use DDU every other update...

Will be interesting to see what Intel comes up with, but as someone else mentioned, it will likely be heavily based off reverse engineered Vega. They might throw in some nVidia tweaks for efficiency and call it their own.

 

[ubercake]

my fav gpu ever is still my old Radaen 9600 pro all-in-wonder.

don't think anyone will ever be able to top all that card offered and could do.

I had the 9700 Pro. It was a beaut back in the SW Galaxies days.

 

[ubercake]

Not sure about Nvidia buying a major CPU producer, but I do know AMD initially turned ATI to garbage. Until that time, I bought nothing but ATI cards. You couldn't beat the value/performance.
Going as far back as at least the Radeon 5xxx series (when I stopped using AMD cards) until a few years ago there's well-documented evidence everywhere regarding AMD hardware/driver issues; not even an argument. There is no Lala-land where people do not know about this fact. This is not blown out of proportion. Or maybe you were just the one lucky guy with the perfect omnipotent PC configuration with an AMD video card during that period?
I haven't had an issue with Nvidia cards and I've been using them since the 5xx series. If Nvidia cards or drivers start giving me problems, I may look at AMD again, or I may consider Intel when it comes time. Until now, I've learned to trust that Nvidia cards save me a lot of time and keep me from unnecessary headaches..

You've been lucky then, I bought my laptop with a 1060 3gb in it on Black Friday 2016 and it's been a headache ever since. There was about 6 months I didn't update the video driver because of installation issues.

My desktop now runs a AMD R9 390, before that crossfire 6870's and a single one before that. I've been using ATI and AMD cards for quite a while and while the drivers have not been perfect, neither has nVidia's. At one point I had intended to buy an nVidia card, but a driver update cooked my cousin's GPU and so AMD seemed the better purchase.
I've yet to have an issue with my Radeon cards, now if I could just get this 1060 to update with having to use DDU every other update...

Will be interesting to see what Intel comes up with, but as someone else mentioned, it will likely be heavily based off reverse engineered Vega. They might throw in some nVidia tweaks for efficiency and call it their own.

My first and last gaming laptop was an Asus with a Radeon 7870m. It was supposed to be the best at the time and it sucked. I gave up on laptop graphics at that point. They simply do not compare to the desktop by any stretch. Asus put a proprietary version of the 7870m in the laptop and quit releasing drivers for it within a year.
I can't say I've had personal experience with anything but 580s, 680s, 780s, and 980s in SLI. Never had issues after they'd get release-day issues ironed out from an SLI standpoint. Usually within a week with most titles any SLI issues were sorted out. Worst-case scenario was the games ran at the fps of a single card until the drivers were updated.

Now with a single 960 on one machine and single 1080 on another, I've had no driver issues. It's known AMD got things sorted out after the FRAPS reveal, but they took a beating in sales because people like me jumped ship since the reveal brought to light everything I was complaining about for years.
Moderators on the AMD forums actually banned me from the AMD forums for continuing to look for answers to the problems the FRAPS reveal brought to light. I was not derogatory in any way with anyone on the support site. I was simply persistent with my pursuit of answers while in the face of being told my symptoms were unfounded by moderators on their public support forums. They may be much different now, but I had invested in 3 5850s (maybe $1000+ in AMD video cards - can't remember how much they ran but I think that's in the ballpark) at the time and was being told by moderators I couldn't possibly have a problem.
Can you tell why I have an issue with AMD? Now that I have brought back the memories of dealing with AMD support I remember why it is hard for me to buy AMD anything ever again (almost bought a 2700x recently!).
I can understand we all have our own experiences with the companies, but when my issues were put on display for the world to see (crazy-high framerates while watching choppy video in games), I felt a bit justified and even more angry about my experience, but then I let the feeling quickly pass and put it behind me as my 680s clipped along in SLI without issues.

Because of my experience not only with driver issues, the choppiness discovered through FRAPS, and the stellar experience of being banned from the AMD forums while desperately looking for answers, I'll shy away from any AMD video solution unless I had a 180-experience with something Nvidia. That's yet to happen for me through many generations of Nvidia cards.

It will definitely be good to have a 3rd player in the mix, because it should drive performance up and drive prices down.

 

[Martell1977]

My first and last gaming laptop was an Asus with a Radeon 7870m. It was supposed to be the best at the time and it sucked. I gave up on laptop graphics at that point. They simply do not compare to the desktop by any stretch. Asus put a proprietary version of the 7870m in the laptop and quit releasing drivers for it within a year.
I can't say I've had personal experience with anything but 580s, 680s, 780s, and 980s in SLI. Never had issues after they'd get release-day issues ironed out from an SLI standpoint. Usually within a week with most titles any SLI issues were sorted out. Worst-case scenario was the games ran at the fps of a single card until the drivers were updated.

Now with a single 960 on one machine and single 1080 on another, I've had no driver issues. It's known AMD got things sorted out after the FRAPS reveal, but they took a beating in sales because people like me jumped ship since the reveal brought to light everything I was complaining about for years.
Moderators on the AMD forums actually banned me from the AMD forums for continuing to look for answers to the problems the FRAPS reveal brought to light. I was not derogatory in any way with anyone on the support site. I was simply persistent with my pursuit of answers while in the face of being told my symptoms were unfounded by moderators on their public support forums. They may be much different now, but I had invested in 3 5850s (maybe $1000+ in AMD video cards - can't remember how much they ran but I think that's in the ballpark) at the time and was being told by moderators I couldn't possibly have a problem.
Can you tell why I have an issue with AMD? Now that I have brought back the memories of dealing with AMD support I remember why it is hard for me to buy AMD anything ever again (almost bought a 2700x recently!).
I can understand we all have our own experiences with the companies, but when my issues were put on display for the world to see (crazy-high framerates while watching choppy video in games), I felt a bit justified and even more angry about my experience, but then I let the feeling quickly pass and put it behind me as my 680s clipped along in SLI without issues.

Because of my experience not only with driver issues, the choppiness discovered through FRAPS, and the stellar experience of being banned from the AMD forums while desperately looking for answers, I'll shy away from any AMD video solution unless I had a 180-experience with something Nvidia. That's yet to happen for me through many generations of Nvidia cards.

It will definitely be good to have a 3rd player in the mix, because it should drive performance up and drive prices down.

And that's the wrinkle, different configurations, different experiences. It's just like my cousin and I, I buy ASUS motherboards and never had a issue, he buys MSI. On his advise, I bought an MSI motherboard for a build and RMA'd it twice the first year.

I've never had with AMD GPU's, only ever had one of their CPU's (K6-2 -300) and it was pretty good, but back them I knew a lot less than now. But our individual experiences shape our views.

AMD isn't flawless, but neither is nVidia, and I expect Intel to come up with some interesting driver mistakes.

My laptop runs well, most of the time. The only issue has been driver updates, but I don't update for a week after a driver comes out anyways (AMD or nVidia), just in case that release a GPU killer.

 

[mellis]

I bought one of their dedicated AGP cards back in the mid 90s, but got rid of it when ATI had something much better. I remember when their MX technology was the thing for a short period too. The last time I checked though, they are the number one supplier of video graphics due to on board video cards.

 

[yossi1114.net]

Game developers will definitely suffer from this news...

 

[bit_user]

it's this one from roughly 2012. https://ark.intel.com/products/58916/Intel-Atom-Processor-N2600-1M-Cache-1_6-GHz
not just mine but that whole line and most all the atom cpu's failed to get win 10 support.

Okay, so it's pre-Silvermont. I think this architecture was so slow that Intel initially got MS to continue supporting Win XP on them, after they'd stopped selling it elsewhere.

the old netbook still serves its purpose of a cheap little web surfer when i'm on the road and need a keyboard. but it is a pain that i can't control the igp at all. for instance, the screen is at 100% brightness and can't turn it down. kills battery life when half power would be ample most of the time.

You might investigate putting Linux on there.

i bumped it to win 10

Okay, so there is a Win10 driver and it works, but you're not getting bug-fixes and enhancements? Or are you actually running it in some kind of VGA (VESA) compatibility mode?