Can anyone in the space explain why it would be hard for Intel to be competitive in the GPU space? Is GPU development so far away from CPU development that they couldn't succeed?
I'm not "in the space" but there are many reasons a detractor might give for being doubtful.
- Intel is not already experienced in designing high-end graphics cards, so there's less institutional knowledge in the company
- Intel iGPUs have a mediocre reputation
- Intel has a history of failed attempts to enter the GPU/accelerator space (e.g. i740 and Larabee)
- DG2 has been delayed from the timeline that was expected in the techspace when we first heard about it
- The person leading Intel Xe is Raja Koduri who led AMD graphics during AMD Vega (though it's unclear how responsible he is for its shortcomings) and arguably has a history of overpromising.
That said I'm pretty bullish on Intel GPUs because supply still hasn't caught up with demand, so as long as they are reasonably functional, I think they will succeed.
> - The person leading Intel Xe is Raja Koduri who led AMD graphics during AMD Vega (though it's unclear how responsible he is for its shortcomings) and arguably has a history of overpromising.
Raja was the technical leader of ATI in 2001+. His hands were involved in every single GPU from that time until Vega.
Intel has been pretty bad with bringing new products to market and sticking with them.
Intel Optane, Itanium, Xeon Phi, Cell-phone Atom (yes, this was a thing), Intel Edison, etc. etc.
Intel pretty much makes good Ethernet adapters, Wifi adapters, and CPUs these days. Everything else they've tried seems to die off a few years later.
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Its like seeing "Google" try to make a new free webservice. We all know Google has the expertise to make it work, but for some reason, it doesn't.
Similarly, Intel has a wide variety of experts in a number of fields related to chip-making, along with historically successful products and a few chips that are highly important in the field. But something is clearly "off" with Intel's current culture.
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Intel has some GPU-engineers working for them. The question is if the organization as a whole can actually release a product (step 1), and then support it for more than 5 years.
I think its a bit of the "curse of the successful company". No matter what product Intel makes, there's no way its going to make as much money as Intel's CPUs. So the business-minds / bean-counters kill the product.
One reason I can think of is that GPUs are a much newer invention than CPUs, and as such there is less history behind how they work and there are far more active patents on their technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc
Likely they'll be subject to the same price gouging and limited supply as AMD and NVidia GPUs...