Discrete GPUs have historically been a relatively small and volatile niche compared to CPUs, it's only in the last few years that the market has seen extreme growth.
edit: the market pretty much went from gaming as the primary pillar to gaming + HPC, which makes it far more attractive since you'd expect it to be much less cyclical and less price sensitive. Raja Koduri was hired in late 2017 to work on GPU related stuff, and it seems like the first major products from that effort will be coming out this year. That said, they've obviously had a lot of failures in the acelerator and graphics area (consider Altera) and Koduri has stated on Twitter that Gelsinger is the first CEO to actually treat graphics/HPC as a priority.
CUDA came out in 2007. Wikipedia puts the start of the GPU-driven 'deep learning revolution' in 2012 [1] and people have been putting GPUs into their supercomputers since 2012 as well [2]
I find it strange that Intel has basically just left the entire market to nvidia, despite having 10-15 years warning and running their own GPU division the whole time.
Competing with Nvidia on Gaming GPU wasn't something Intel were keen to do after their failure with i740. The Gaming market wasn't as big, and you are ultimately competing on Driver optimisation, not on actual hardware.
CUDA and Deep Learning may have started in 2007 and 2010. But their usage, or their revenue potential was unclear back then. Even in 2015, Datacenter revenue was less than one eighth of gaming revenue. And rumours of Google AI Processor ( now known as TPU ) started back in 2014 when they started hiring. In 2021, Datacenter is roughly equal to Gaming revenue, and are expected to exceed them in 2022.
Intel sort of knew GPGPU could be a threat by 2016 / 17 already. That is why they started assembling a team, and hired Raja Koduri in late 2017. But as with everything Intel in post Pat Gelsinger era, Intel was late to react. From Smartphone to Foundry Model and now GPGPU.
They created the Xeon Phi[1] for that niche. It was spun out of Larabee[2]. I presume they will be taking advantage of their coming GPU architecture for more going forward.
They tried to check many, some, maybe possibly more of the boxes with the Xeon Phi, and it kinda seems like things simply didn't go their way.
Cuda wasn't as flexible, and the payoff wasn't as big in 2010 or so as it is now.
I've never used a phi, but i can see where they were coming from i think. No need for a full rewrite like Cuda (maybe). The hardware is also more flexible than a GPU, but that turned out to be less important than they thought it might be.
this isn't true. the phi was extremely complex to program for, and it was not simply a port of standard x86 code. it required you to pay attention to multiple levels of memory hierarchy, just as the GPU did.
Intel produced good, as in "cheap and always working", integrated GPUs. For great many tasks, they are adequate. I'm not a gamer, and if I needed to run some ML stuff, my laptop's potential discrete GPU won't be much help anyway.
Also, Intel has a history of producing or commissioning open-source drivers for its GPU. I like the peace of mind I get from knowing I'm not going to have to fight dirty for the privilege of getting my own GPU to do the work I bought it to perform.
While I view my Intel iGPU as a backup, I don't have any negative impressions about its performance like many gamers do. I have the 11900K which has an iGPU capable of 720P gaming. Which is quite remarkable to be honest considering it's integrated into my CPU. Cheap and "just works" is exactly how I view it, but they're getting better in the last 2 generations.
I can't find a new dGPU at MSRP so I'm going to see if the Intel Arc cards are more readily available, and if not, I'm probably going to part out my desktop and move permanently to using Intel NUCs. Mostly for the GPU contained within. It seems like the days of getting your hands on a dGPU are over, and I'm not fighting over them.
GPU shortages are nearing an end and with next generation products from Nvidia, AMD and Intel on deck, well probably be in a really good spot for GPU consumers come q4 2022.
It’s been so long now, 2.5 years that I now view GPUs like I do gas prices. You can’t trust in a stable market. It’s not like GPUs didn’t skyrocket in price in the years leading up to the shortage anyway.
Best long term lifetime decision is to get off any dependency for either of them. I’m looking at electric cars and Intel NUCs. A lot of people that I know moved to laptops for the same reason. A lot of us gave up and many like me no longer trust the market.
Besides integrated GPUs for actual graphics usage that other comments mentioned, Intel did make some attempts at the GPGPU market. They had a design for a GPU aimed primarily at GPGPU workloads, Larrabee, that was never released [1], and adapted some of the ideas into Xeon Phi, a more CPU-like chip that was intended to be a competitor to GPUs, which was released but didn't gain a lot of market share [2].
The space has two competitors, but NVidia makes most of the GPUs and most of the money. If there's barely room for a second player, there's no room for a third. That being said, they are releasing a GPU soon so we'll see how that goes. Unless the market continues to be insane I'm going to guess it won't go over very well.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc