[Uehreka]

Back in 2021 I needed some stereo cameras for an AR experience I was building for the 2020 World’s Fair Expo (yes, it took place in 2021 but was called 2020). We looked into RealSense, and right around when we did there was some news that Intel had either laid off the RealSense team or stopped manufacturing new cameras. Whatever it was, it made us look elsewhere, as it does not seem like Intel is serious about developing/maintaining this product line.

We ended up going with the ZED 2i from Stereolabs (https://www.stereolabs.com/products/zed-2). They work pretty well, my only issue was that their skeletal tracking doesn’t work well if you mount them vertically (which is probably a big ask, the other features do work in vertical orientation though, which was good).

Stereolabs was pretty active on the software side of things, pushing updates pretty regularly. They’d usually fix a bug within a sprint or two. The hardware is pretty simple, and I find it unsurprising that they’re still selling the ZED 2i at the same price as 4 years ago. It gets the job done, and most of the advancement in the past few years has probably come from throwing more sophisticated AI at the existing stereo video feed.

[MrBuddyCasino]

> it made us look elsewhere, as it does not seem like Intel is serious about developing/maintaining this product line

Everyone has to find out eventually, that unless „product line“ is high-margin CPUs, Intel will cancel it sooner or later. I hope they aren’t stupid enough to do that with their GPUs (again).

[nindalf]

Yep, Intel isn't serious about any product.

People criticise Google for killing products, but Intel has reached a point where their continued existence is threatened by a lack of faith in their ability to continue products without killing them. What lunatic would build on their fab when TSMC exists? And if no one is going to use Intel fabs, then what hope does Intel have to be competitive long term?

[gtirloni]

At least most of Google abandoned projects are software. With Intel, you may be left with a piece of unsupported junk.

[osnium123]

Maybe if the fabs get spun off, they won’t have the luxury of cancelling foundry deals.

[knowitnone]

at this point, they should just discontinue the CPUs. They obviously can't compete in that space. Not being sarcastic here.

[sitkack]

They should just sell one cpu.

[mschuster91]

> I hope they aren’t stupid enough to do that with their GPUs (again).

They have to keep the GPU part alive, if only to be able to compete with AMD. It's no surprise that both the PS5 and Xbox run on a CPU+GPU combination from AMD - if Intel wants to ever get a share of the console market again (which is admittedly low margin, but extremely high volume to make up for it) they have to be able to match the kind of degree of integration that a modern console requires, and seriously I doubt that Intel will hand over enough knowledge to NVidia to get a competitive offer.

In the non-server general compute market, the situation is similar. The ARM threat all comes with established GPUs as part of the SoC, and so does AMD.

[mikepurvis]

Nvidia has that level of integration too— they've been shipping integrated ARM CPU/GPU packages since 2014 on the Jetson series, not to mention the Tegra tablet that became the Switch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra

It really is only Intel that isn't with the programme on this, so no wonder they're willing to bleed money to try to catch up.

[lmz]

I think they were referring to the discrete/ non-integrated GPUs.

[baq]

Discrete GPUs on add-in cards are the high margin market in computer hardware currently and with nvidia universally hated there's a lot of opportunity in the market. The problem is, as usual, execution.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Discrete GPUs on add-in cards are the high margin market in computer hardware currently

For AMD and Nvidia yeah, but Intel is currently bleeding money on their GPUs since they're made on the expensive TSMC nodes instead in their own fabs, and they price them very low to gain market share as sales aren't stellar due to mid performance.

The only reason they haven't cancelled it already is they're playing the long game.

The issue is if the AI bubble bursts by the time they release anything competitive causing margins to tank again.

[ein0p]

At that price why not just get a full blown LIDAR from Unitree? I guess that wasn't available in 2020, but nowadays, why not?

[cma]

252x252 points per second is really low for stuff that doesn't need the range and FOV and any other benefits. Azure Kinect was 1MP depth per 66.6ms in wide fov mode.

[whoevercares]

Same story back in 2016, they either laid off or pivoted heavily on the production plan. Can’t trust those real sense folks