[knowitnone3]

Any business people here that can explain why companies announce products a year before their release? I can understand getting consumers excited but it also tells competitors what you are doing giving them time to make changes of their own. What's the advantage here?

[jsnell]

In this case there is no risk of anyone stealing Intel's ideas or even reacting to them.

First, they're not even an also-ran in the AI compute space. Nobody is looking to them for roadmap ideas. Intel does not have any credibility, and no customer is going to be going to Nvidia and demanding that they match Intel.

Second, what exactly would the competitors react to? The only concrete technical detail is that the cards will hopefully launch in 2027 and have 160GB of memory.

The cost of doing this is really low, and the value of potentially getting into the pipeline of people looking to buy data center GPUs in 2027 soon enough to matter is high.

[baq]

Given how long it takes to develop a new GPU I’m pretty sure this one was signed off by Pat and given it survived Lip-Bu’s axe that says something, at least for Intel.

[AnthonyMouse]

If customers know your product exists before they can buy it then they may wait for it. If they buy the competitor's product today because they don't know your product will exist until the day they can buy it then you lose the sale.

Samples of new products also have to go out to third party developers and reviewers ahead of time so that third party support is ready for launch day and that stuff is going to leak to competitors anyway so there's little point in not making it public.

[fragmede]

If you're Intel sized, it's gonna leak. If you announce it first, you get to control the message.

The other thing is enterprise sales is ridiculously slow. If Intel wants corporate customers to buy these things, they've got to announce them ~a year ahead, in order for those customers to buy them next year when they upgrade hardware.

[Perenti]

It can also prevent competitors from entering a particular space. I was told as an undergraduate that UNIX was irrelevant because the upcoming Windows NT would be POSIX compliant. It took a _very_ long time before that happened (and for a very flexible version of "compliant"), but the pointy-headed bosses thought that buying Microsoft was the future. And at first glance the upcoming NT _looked_ as if the TCO would be much lower than AIX, HPuX or Solaris.

Then of course Linux took over everywhere except the desktop.

[AnthonyMouse]

That wasn't even necessarily false. Windows NT on commodity hardware from the likes of Dell arguably did have a lower TCO than proprietary UNIX on proprietary hardware.

But then Linux on that same commodity hardware was lower yet.

[epolanski]

I don't think you're giving much advantage to anybody really on such a small timeframe.

Semiconductors are like container ships, they are extremely slow and hard to steer, you plan today the products you'll release in 2030.

[pointyfence]

It's more than a year. They're sampling this to customers in the second half of 2026. It's a 2027 launch at best.

Intel has practically nothing to show for an AI capex boom for the ages. I suspect that Intel is talking about it early for a shred of AI relevance.

[reactordev]

This is a shareholder “me too” product

[thenaturalist]

What are they gonna do with their own FAB?

Not release anything?

There'll be a good market share for comparatively "lower power/ good enough" local AI. Check out Alez Ziskind's analysis of the B50 Pro [0]. Intel has an entire line-up of cheap GPUs that perform admirably for local use cases.

This guy is building a rack on B580s and the driver update alone has pushed his rig from 30 t/s to 90 t/s. [1]

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBbJy-jhsAA

1: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o1k5rc/new_int...

[reactordev]

Watson…

Yeah even RTX’s are limited in this space due to lack of tensor cores. It’s a race to integrate more cores and faster memory buses. My suspicion is this is more me too product announcement so they can play partner to their business opportunities and continue greasing their wheels.

[toast0]

Adding on to everyone else. It might help with sales for those with long procurement cycles.

If you're planning a supercomputer to be built in 2027, you want to look at what's on the roadmap.

[Mars008]

To keep investors happy and stock from failing? Fairy tales work as well, see Tesla robots.

[teeray]

> What's the advantage here?

Stock number go up

[creaturemachine]

The AI bubble might not last another year. Better get a few more pumps in before it blows.

[Mars008]

AI is not going anywhere. Now everyone wants to get a piece. Local inference is expected to grow. Documents, image, video, etc processing. Another obvious is driverless farm vehicles and other automated equipment. "Assisted" books, images, news,.. already and grows fast. Translation also a fact.

[thenaturalist]

The technology, maybe - and if on local.

The public co valuations of quickly depreciating chip hoarders selling expensive fever dreams to enterprises are gonna pop though.

Spend 3-7 USD for 20 cents in return and 95% project failures rates for quarters on end aren't gonna go unnoticed on Wall St.

[Mars008]

So far there is no 'plateau' in the nearest future. 'AI' as a science and its applications should develop further for the next several years. Models will get more efficient, but still the bigger the better. This is obvious. Even if models don't scale up well, they can be used collectively in parallel 'brainstorming'. This will still create demand for hardware. Stagnation is still possible in case of recession. In this case even stable businesses will suffer.

As for efficiency, replacing one programmer in group of 10 with AI already will increase productivity and lower the price. In most cases. In reality adding AI accounts to existing group works better. This is _now_, not hopes or sci-fi.

That's why I'm saying there is no way back. 'AI winter' is as likely as smartphones winter.

[thenaturalist]

Your entire argument is whoefully ignoring the CapEx economics of all of this.

But that's the foundation.

And there is a plateau in real money spent on AI chips.

You're ignoring a whole group of economic and finance professionals as well as - if you're inclined to listen to their voices more - Sama calling it a bubble.

If not for AI spending, the US already would be in a recession.

So your argument might sound nice and practical from a purely scientific perspective or the narrow use case of AI coding support, but it's entirely detached from reality.

[Mars008]

The basics here is return for investments. If it's all just a bubble it will pop. We'll see soon. For now it doesn't look like, to me. And that creates a lot of complexity on top of 'digital divide' we already have.

[baq]

There is a serious possibility this isn’t a bubble. Too many people watched the big short and now call every bull a bubble; maybe the bubble was the dollar and it’s popping now instead.

[thenaturalist]

Have you looked in detail at the economics of this?

Career finance professionals are calling it a bubble, not due to their suddenly found deep technological expertise, but because public cos like FAANG et. al are engaging in typical bubble like behavior: Shifting capex away from their balance sheets into SPACs co-financed by private equity.

This is not a consumer debt bubble, it's gonna be a private market bubble.

But as all bubbles go, someones gonna be left holding the bag with society covering for the fallout.

It'll be a rate hike, it'll be some Fortune X00 enterprises cutting their non-ROI-AI-bleed or it'll be an AI-fanboy like Oracle over-leveraging themselves and then watching their credit default swaps going "Boom!" leading to a financing cut off.

[baq]

It's possible, circular financing is definitely fishy, but OTOH every openai deal sama makes is swallowed by willing buyers at a fair market price. We'll be in a bubble when all the bears are dead and everyone accepts 'a new paradigm', not before; there's plenty of upside capitulation left judging by some hedge fund returns this year.

...and again, this is assuming AI capability stops growing exponentially in the widest possible sense (today, 50%-task-completion time horizon doubles ~7 months).