News Intel GPUs - Intel launches A580

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psolord

Golden Member
Sep 16, 2009
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I hope Intel attack the LP market with the A3xx, corp and sff market are dying for a decent - and reasonable priced - card to go with their 7th gen and up Intel box. If Intel is smart they would made a driver that can take adv of the Intel iGPU and their ARC card.

What, you mean like the Arc working in parallel with the igpu? Slintelcrosffire?
 
Jul 27, 2020
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So it's happening this time? For real? I'm shocked. After all the delays it was inevitable but man that was a long and tortured journey for one supercomputer.
Late 2022 with expected 60 MW power usage. AMD's El Capitan will deliver the same performance in <40 MW but in 2023.


But El Capitan alone isn’t enough to exhaust these massive capabilities: au contraire, the system is expected to have a power footprint around 30 to 35 megawatts.
 
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Why the delays? Intel initially blamed process technology on Ponte Vecchio first delay, but their blame game on Alchemist is software, which is quite odd. Our friends over at Chips and Cheese did some sleuthing into Intel’s drivers and it indicates that the DG2_G10 and G11 (Alchemist) have many stepping from A0 all the way through C1 and C0 respectively. This could potentially indicate silicon engineering issues that aren’t being discussed in addition to the software issues.

At least they tried hard to get the silicon right.
 

KompuKare

Golden Member
Jul 28, 2009
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At least they tried hard to get the silicon right.
You could put it like that.

However, Intel is large enough to have plenty of internal politics.

So if they had to spin so many revision until they got working silicon, and if all the blame is currently being put on the driver team...

...Then that smells like internal politics and spin, and one team being better at blame than the other.
 

Stuka87

Diamond Member
Dec 10, 2010
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HP announced new laptops today, and they are available with Intel Arc (or nVidia on some models). So that means we should start to see shipping products, and thus benchmarks, to see how they do vs the same machine with nVidia chips.
 
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Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
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HP announced new laptops today, and they are available with Intel Arc (or nVidia on some models). So that means we should start to see shipping products, and thus benchmarks, to see how they do vs the same machine with nVidia chips.

Estimated shipping date is June 17th for those that are curious/interested.
 

KompuKare

Golden Member
Jul 28, 2009
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Can you imagine how hard it is to write drivers for buggy hardware? I'm sure it makes it harder
I was mainly thinking that with that many hardware revisions, the driver team would have had a very moving target to try aim for. If they also had to contend with trying to find workarounds for buggy hardware, or had relied on promised features and later had to re-write when they turned out to not work...

... they may have been far too busy to play politics.
 
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Stuka87

Diamond Member
Dec 10, 2010
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I was mainly thinking that with that many hardware revisions, the driver team would have had a very moving target to try aim for. If they also had to contend with trying to find workarounds for buggy hardware, or had relied on promised features and later had to re-write when they turned out to not work...

... they may have been far too busy to play politics.

Having worked on drivers before, this is normal. You jump through lots of hardware revisions as its being developed. Including hardware errata that may or may not be fixed before release. And as newer stepping comes out for the hardware, the drivers will have to take that into account.
 

DeathReborn

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 2005
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Is anyone looking forward to XeSS tomorrow? Nobody... I am beginning to doubt that Desktop DIY Arc will launch in the west at all.

 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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Is anyone looking forward to XeSS tomorrow? Nobody... I am beginning to doubt that Desktop DIY Arc will launch in the west at all.

I think it will because not launching in the US at all is crazy. US is still where lots of stuff happens and gets sold. By launching in China and Korea first they shield themselves from bad press.

Hope the new accountability metric they brought in(more accurately, brought back in) makes them do much better.

I don't think the delay is bad as them being quiet when asked what happened to the launch as days passed by.
 

Tup3x

Senior member
Dec 31, 2016
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Is anyone looking forward to XeSS tomorrow? Nobody... I am beginning to doubt that Desktop DIY Arc will launch in the west at all.

This December it is then.
I think it will because not launching in the US at all is crazy. US is still where lots of stuff happens and gets sold. By launching in China and Korea first they shield themselves from bad press.

Hope the new accountability metric they brought in(more accurately, brought back in) makes them do much better.

I don't think the delay is bad as them being quiet when asked what happened to the launch as days passed by.
At this rate it will launch together with Battlemage. A bit sad that company like Intel needs to use Chinese/Koreans as alpha testers for their drivers. It doesn't look like hardware is the issue so I'd imagine this might not push Battlemage release date. Considering that they didn't even plan to go against absolute top end from NVIDIA and AMD... they might use Alchemist to fill low end and use Battlemage for top end. For desktop at least.
 

Aapje

Golden Member
Mar 21, 2022
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I don't think that Koreans were used as testers, but it was more to protect themselves from claims by investors and to avoid having to admit that they didn't fulfill their promises.
 

mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
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Considering that even their low end mobile dGPUs are heavily delayed I don't think it's just a driver thing. There are a number of A350M/A370M devices announced, it's not like they won't come out. they are just late and I don't think it's solely driver related. In June or July it seems like a number of such devices starting to become available in western regions. Also most OEMs are Asia based, it makes sense that they shipping it to these regions first and DG2 volume seems limited anyways. I don't think Intel tells us the truth about the slow ramp, from the beginning they never were honest to us.
 
Jul 27, 2020
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A possible factor regarding the delay: game developers use optimization tricks which are vendor dependent. So they may have a code path favoring Nvidia and another favoring AMD and maybe a third for Intel iGPU's. Then there will also be one somewhat slow generic path for any future unknown DirectX compliant GPUs.

Even after writing their drivers completely to DX12 Ultimate spec, Intel may not be getting decent performance on the generic code path and they can't expect studios/indie developers to go back and write a code path specifically for DG2.

So they are likely targeting the AMD code path (coz Raja and co) and trying to mimic it. This could be what is hampering their driver efforts. I think they have gotten around to only 100 top titles so far and surely want to cover as many genres as they can to avoid getting bad publicity from different gaming crowds.

Also, it will be interesting to see the final driver size. With so much shader rewriting, it would be impressive if their driver package size doesn't exceed 500MB.

I can't help wondering: if it weren't for Raja's stupid ambitions, Intel could have simply licensed an older Radeon GPU and enhanced that while outsourcing the driver development to AMD's software teams. We all know AMD doesn't say no to money (they after all did partner with Intel on Kaby Lake-G which came as a total surprise to me).

They could have spent a few years shipping decent low end discrete cards with licensed AMD IP and turning a profit and doing their own GPU development in parallel. This would have been a lot more cost effective and could have helped them get some traction with cost conscious gamers who would then would have been more likely to switch to a higher end Intel GPU when it became available.

All Intel needed to do to learn how to do things right was to look at how Apple went from no in-house GPU to a pretty good one.
 
Jul 27, 2020
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The whole DirectX ecosystem is based on driver hacks. Just stick to the standard, dammit! This is Microsoft's fault, since their entire OS is just a big hunk of hacks trying to fix broken compatibility with old software.

I wrote to them once telling them to create something like an abstraction layer for games so any game no matter how old, will run the way it was intended to run even 100 years later, just like how some emulators are able to consistently and accurately emulate original hardware. Even if that is not always possible, at least allow a compatibility mode that is slower but is guaranteed to run in future.

We may get something like this from enterprising hackers once x86 is dead and we are all running our old games through an x86 emulator on our brand new RISC-V machines. I hope that happens in the next 10 years. I don't want to get too old and lose the passion for gaming.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,229
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I wrote to them once telling them to create something like an abstraction layer for games so any game no matter how old, will run the way it was intended to run even 100 years later, just like how some emulators are able to consistently and accurately emulate original hardware. Even if that is not always possible, at least allow a compatibility mode that is slower but is guaranteed to run in future.

We may get something like this from enterprising hackers once x86 is dead and we are all running our old games through an x86 emulator on our brand new RISC-V machines. I hope that happens in the next 10 years. I don't want to get too old and lose the passion for gaming.
Proton layer in SteamOS? Get a Steam Deck!