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Intel Looks Serious About Becoming a Major GPU Player -- Tech Check

The chip giant has hired several AMD and Nvidia execs to help it bring a line of high-end GPUs to market.

Tom Peterson, Nvidia's (NVDA) director of technical marketing and a 15-year company vet, announced on Friday that he's leaving the company. Shortly after, it was reported that Intel (INTC) has hired Peterson to work on its Game Experience Team.

In late 2017, Intel hired Raja Koduri, who was in charge of AMD's (AMD) GPU R&D efforts, to lead a new "Core and Visual Computing Group" that aims bring high-end GPUs to market for both PCs and servers. The company has also hired Chris Hook, formerly a senior AMD marketing exec, to be its head of graphics marketing.

Intel has promised to launch its first discrete (standalone) GPU in 2020. Taking on Nvidia and AMD in this field; battling Nvidia in the high-end will be particularly tough, given its track record, the scope of its R&D investments and the size of its developer ecosystem. But as GPUs remain a popular choice (if not the only choice) for powering a number of popular and demanding computing workloads, it's safe to say that Intel has made its GPU efforts a company priority.

Intel Looks Serious About Becoming a Major GPU Player -- Tech Check - RealMoney 

4 Replies

Most of me still wonders how far Intel is going to get with a gaming card. Yes they spend more on champagne and caviar than AMD does on R&D, but they're still going to be in the same boat as AMD when it comes to having to circumvent nVidia's stranglehold on game studios, plus, knowing Intel, they're going to prioritize high margin markets, such as the professional and prosumer markets, much more than the low margin consumer ones.

I think they have a darn good chance at making a very high performance SoC, as they already have experience in that market, if they can integrate high performance memory onto the chip itself, something Raja has experience with, but as far as seeing a true competitor in the gaming market, that's not going to be for a while. It took ATI about 3 years to make a competitive video card with the 9600XT as the 7000 and 8000 series weren't very powerful if memory serves, and then they were epic fail for the next...5 years until the HD 4000 series, and you have to imagine both AMD and nVidia are going to go over every Intel card with an electron microscope ensuring not one of the 60 patents Peterson developed at nVidia nor any of Raja's AMD techniques are incorporated into them...All of this on top of Intel's fab issues...

Not that any of us would mind a third player in the market, even though Intel and nVidia both love to gouge more than a loan shark, it is highly unlikely Intel will think about pricing their products against nVidia for some time, and if Navi is able to rival the RTX 2000 series, that'd leave Intel in a very bad place.

Your points are very good. 

It is going to be interesting to see what unravels. IMHO as long as it is a competitive product at any level that is good. If they end up doing what AMD has been doing lately and kinda competing with the lower 2/3rd of Nvidia''s lineup but bring also bringing features the RTX line has or maybe even new features? If anyone has the money to get into the game they should. I am just happy to see some real competition. Back in the day there were a lot more players and competition is always good for us consumers. 

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Just as long as those new features aren't undocumented security holes...Meltdown, Spoiler, VISA...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-visa-undocumented-feature-chipsets-cpus,38954.html

TRU DAT!

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