[DiabloD3]

Yep, but the flip side is you can get two B70s for the price of a single 3090 (MSRP, obviously; 3090s used go for about the same as a new B70), and they're true 2 slot, so they can fit on x8/x8 consumer boards fine.

The side effect is Intel has fired their entire Arc team, including the driver team, as well have canceled all Celestial products (only low end combined GPU + IO die products will have Celestial, as its too late in production to change). All future Intel products will have Nvidia graphics tiles.

Llama.cpp is, of course, still trying to better support the existing Intel products, but its kinda hard when they might stop working any day due to driver breakage.

[mstaoru]

"Intel has fired their entire Arc team"? "All future Intel products will have Nvidia graphics tiles"?

Can you point to a source of these wild claims?

[DiabloD3]

HN front page circa September through December of last year. Its part of the $5B investment into Nvidia, and the new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, happily did whatever Nvidia told him to do.

Nova Lake (Series 4) is already too late in development to switch, so its shipping with Celestial, and Titan Lake (Series 5) after it will be essentially a Nova Lake refresh using a hybrid tile that is Celestial's graphics engine with Druid's media, memory, and bus controllers (since Druid development has been halted).

Serpent Lake (Series 6) will be the first that can ship with Nvidia tiles, which should launch in early 2028.

Unless something changes, there will be no DGPU Celestial products.

Unfortunately, the ink on the contract is already dry, so this is the end of Intel's GPU unit.

[mstaoru]

I see. "My" (double checked) information is:

- Arc discrete (!) gaming (!!) GPUs are canceled,

- consumer gaming (!) SoC Serpent Lake w/RTX in 2028,

- Arc is continued in mobile, professional, iGPU, and DC GPUs,

- Arc team is just fine, Intel cut some jobs but not "the whole team".

[DiabloD3]

Serpent Lake (and its siblings) cover both consumer desktop and laptop.

Arc's team was disproportionately effected by the layoffs. A lot of the major engineers that worked there changed their Linked in details to list Nvidia, AMD, etc.

As for DC and Workstation GPUs, they also seem to be canceled.

We'll see next year, I guess.