Intel Alchemist Gaming GPU
 

After years of speculation and the bad prototype DG1, it seems Intel is finally ready to enter the GPU market. It's code-named the Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid.


Link - https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-dg2-ga…rmance-xe-hpg/

Hopefully it doesn't cost over $500 as it looks like a good alternative to AMD.

Link - https://www.techradar.com/news/intel…amd-rx-6700-xt

Intel seems to rebound after their technical difficulties, but I haven't looked into this new Xe GPU development yet. As long as we have nVidia to save us from ATI, I feel safe ;)

You can keep nVidia and their overpriced garbage.:p

Seriously AMD as well the current GPU prices should be considered price gouging. Another competitor into the monopoly both nVidia and AMD have is a good thing.

Funny enough if someone told me AMD would beat Intel at CPU's again, and that Intel would one day enter the GPU market, my past self would have laughed at that.

One thing I can agree on is DLSS, FSR, and XeSS will make a bigger impact then RTX. That tech from all three brands now allow upscaled 4K gaming on low settings.

They're expensive, that's granted. But I only had problems, with AMD graphics cards, and when I read about people having problems, it's more often with those cards than not. They have a notorious history of unstable drivers. Maybe it's changing, but it will require some time before I overcome my bad impression of them.

I'm not talking about AMD's CPUs, which are great for multithreading. I've read that lately they were getting good for gaming too. Intel and AMD have both a good history of chasing one another (especially after AMD saved its skin by buying NexGen to compete against the Pentium). We'll have to see how nVidia / ARM face them, if they can ever conclude their deal. But it'll become a nice trio to watch.

Intel was screwing the market for decades and stalling the technology progress.
Improve CPU efficiency by 1% then sell the old tech just a bit better for crapload of money, swindle everyone who doesn't know 2500K is the killer chip.

And now, thanks to Microsoft, you can't keep old CPUs and run win11 because… Well… Microsoft?
Or Intel paid under the table just like before.

Unless I see something much better than Ati/3dfx already do, I do not care about their cards.
Even if they give 'em away for free.

I don't have the impression Intel has ever been idle. They couldn't possibly stall the technology process with AMD (and others that came and went) regularly catching up and overtaking them. They have the merit of bringing the performance so far with the initial handicap of a complex instruction set and several modes to support. No, I think ol'Intel did just fine. And they still have their fab.

Perhaps the only reproach was that they didn't dare drop their instruction set and had to carry this heavy weight. Actually they did with their IA-64 and AMD took the opportunity with their back-compatible 64-bit architecture. Perhaps they should have done it earlier, but it's easier said than done.

I never cared much for their graphics cards either though. So far.

Many years ago I had problems with AMD. Lately I've had none. I always read about people claiming AMD's software is a mess as well, but I've never rarely have errors.

It helps that consoles use AMD and most problems are games optimized for nvidia.

We strive to maintain ATI's reputation :p

Yeah, that's probably old news, as I said it needs time to heal. Their drivers were a mess for a long time. And you're right, part of the problems come from games optimized for nVidia at the expense of the other graphics boards.

Guilty as charged only because they used to be affordable.:biggrin:

Nowadays not so much.

There motto should be "Good enough for the average gamer."

In Linux land, AMD has a lot of advantages. They've open sourced their drivers, whereas Nvidia loves making a nuisance of themselves. In fairness, Intel has also been good on Linux and open source, so I'll be curious to see how that shakes out.

One of the things I do (which I guess is a bit of an edge case) is to have two gpus, and do hardware passthrough of one of them to VMs. That gives almost bare-metal performance in a VM, which is extremely handy. AMD lets you do that without problems, but Nvidia's driver tries to stop you if you're using a consumer card - it's a feature they try to restrict to their Quadro pro cards, completely arbitrarily.

Actually I meant that for the nasty things I said on them earlier, but that works too ;)

Oh yes, on Linux it can be a pain. There's an open-source version (nouveau) but last time I tried, it wasn't that stable, nor very performant. Very sad they are closed like that :(

Is that because AMD is the underdog?

Yeah, AFAIK the Nouveau driver is mostly reverse engineered - nowhere near the official proprietary driver.

I think for AMD, being the underdog probably is a factor. When you look at it in market terms, open-source makes most sense when you're trying to encourage collaboration to take down the dominant party. I think it's an interesting dynamic to look at in the software world.

That doesn't look so bad for a new product line.

I've had a Linux dual boot for a long time but I never use it. I only have it in case windows gets destroyed so I can scan for virus' from there but I wouldn't even call myself a beginner linux user. Well, maybe, very vaguely. What is it, sudo apt get update? Bad syntax? =)

But, yeah, I'm not keen on going to win10 or 11. Sure, it doesn't really matter if Bill Gates watches me shower and it's the way the whole internet works. But I'd really love to leave windows behind for my new computer. Running emulators or VMs is still having to deal with the existence of windows, I suppose, but at least I can feel like the OS is mine. Right?

But I've never actually heard about running 2 GPUs for this purpose. Is this hard to do?

Not at all. I wouldn't have expected that level of performance even if it's not against Nvidia's best card.

Pricing is going to be key. I think they'll to have to undercut the 3070 by a significant amount to entice buyers to take a chance on them.

I'm not surprised as Intel has poached a few employees from NVIDIA and AMD over the past few years. Even the man who invented DLSS & RTX works for Intel now as well.

Link - https://www.digitaltrends.com/comput…ired-by-intel/

Intel is serious about competing and I look forward to more cards on the market. Maybe it can even drive down the insane up-marked prices of NVIDIA and AMD's GPUs.

I agree. The primary reason I buy Nvidia is because it works and has for a long, long time. I would only chance Incel if their cards are super cheap in comparison. If it's a hundred bucks, nah.

It won't have much effect on the prices (of Nvidia and AMD), if any, because that has little to do with competition. Crypto mining and the chip shortage are the culprits there.

Not just scalpers blame NVIDIA and AMD as well for stockpiling chips, and selling large shipments to scalpers. Now I read the shortage wont be fixed till sometime in 2023.

Link - https://www.pcinvasion.com/tsmc-chip…e-stockpiling/

You can't even buy a console for MSRP anymore either. It's ridiculous.:(

The articles I read mention they have four variants that will launch for $100 & Up. The first Arc Alchemist GPU to compete with NVIDIA's 3070 GTX will cost $499.

Big question here is how attractive are their cards for crypto miners?

Interesting that Intel will use TSMC's foundry instead of their own for those GPUs. Maybe for the performances, maybe for other reasons as well: apparently they will do the same with some of their CPUs to keep up with the volumes, consumption and yield.

I know that at least one country has made cryptocurrency official, but I'm wondering if it's not time to stop this nonsense and find a less power-hungry method.

The US is thinking of making the currency more official also. Texas is leading the charge and trying to attract lager crypto mining firms in what they call the new gold rush.

Some of those server rooms have thousands of cards working 24 hrs a day.

Well, Texas isn't exactly known for being a hotbed of intelligence. :)

A friend of mine called, wants to buy a new PC, asked anything he should know I recommend.

So I actually browsed some stores, this is a disaster.
Everything and I mean everything except external storage is more expensive than 3 years ago. And I'm not talking about brand new stuff. Outdated technology has a higher price today than on it's release.
Something else unbelieveble before, became a reality: it's cheaper to buy a built rig with a name then buy every part separately.

WTF.
What to tell him, what?
I told him to prepare tons of $.

The funny thing is that cryptocurrency came about to create a currency that wasn't regulated by the government.

Somehow it became a tradable commodity and many sold out to cash in on regulated dollars.

Now those that didn't sellout will find their cryptocurrency government regulated one day and defeat the whole purpose of it to begin with. But I guess on the plus side they will be filthy rich.

As for intel gnu's I'm not really interested in price/performance trade off so wake me if the overtake Nvidia.

Tell him to browse New-egg for pre-built gaming machines or browse one of the many online sellers of pre-built Pc's. Otherwise you'll be paying a lot more to build it yourself.

Open-box or refurnished is a good option as well.
More then likely never gonna happen but they can become another choice like AMD. I'm more worried about the software side and how well games will be optimized.

For years we've been stuck with one dominate maker and AMD on the cheaper side. So more competition is good. Though cheap doesn't apply with current prices.

The free market would dictate otherwise, considering they can't keep GPUs in stock at any price. Blame crypto miners or whatever else you want, but supplies are scarce and getting scarcer for a lot of electronic devices. Apple announced that they had to cut their new production of the next iPhone by something like 10 million units due to chip and rare precious metal shortages. This is why you also can't buy a new PS5 etc.

Sony could raise the price on the PS5 to $999 a unit and they would still sell out, this has been proven by what people are willing to pay to get their hands on one.

A friend of mine who works with supply chains the other day and I were talking about how "mid range" products are going away and price/profit margins are more going towards mass-producing cheap crap that everybody can afford, and on the other end producing very expensive items that are mainly purchased by those we'd call the "top 10%" in the US, at least. So you either go low-end disposable or you go high-end and durable, if you can afford it.

I hope that the supply issues for GPUs clear up eventually because one day I will want to upgrade my 2080.

Will Intel bring more competition or just more competition for raw resources in an already struggling market? Time will tell!

You can ignore my grumbling as I'm just getting frustrated with the whole market in general. Inflation is leaning towards hyper-inflation, and the free market doesn't help.

As you can tell I'm not one of the upper 10% who can waste a thousand dollars easily.

More rumours. :) EDIT: from Gamerant so FWIW, it's not their specialty