INTEL is hopping into the video card market

At least, that's the takeaway from this video. It's not going to happen anytime soon (they're saying 2020), but it's interesting that they're moving this direction. Earlier this year they teamed up with their arch-enemy AMD to launch a chip with AMD graphics on it for laptops, and they've obviously been pushing their integrated graphics stuff for a long time, but it's never really been all that competitive with NVIDIA or AMD's discrete chips for higher-end uses like games. It sounds like they think there's money to be made, but the timing is interesting, since it definitely seems like the future of gaming is going to be in streaming boxes (but then I guess streaming boxes have to be connected to a server with a good graphics card, so...).

At any rate it's nice to see NVIDIA get another competitor. AMD's been hanging in there but I have a feeling Intel wouldn't be hopping into discrete graphics cards unless they had plans to be very competitive on a price/performance basis. They certainly have the money to invest to make a good product.

Huh. Alright.

I guess more competition is never a bad thing, especially with AMD not exactly going toe-to-toe with NVIDIA. Intel certainly got the capital and expertise to make a show of it but this teaser is just so much nothing that I don't know how to feel yet. There's kinda a lot of uncertainty in the GPU market right now isn't there? A lot of potential tech-paths to go down, so it's probably decent timing if they want to make an impact. But yeah, who knows if this is even targeted at gaming and not just workstation/AI stuff.

More competition is a good thing. Yet, I think we will see that some entries into THAT market will be far away from gaming. The market for VR & high end imaging is growing, so I think we will see companies like Intel moving into the very high end of video cards - a lucrative niche.

Some of the players the market had 30 years ago existed because "3D graphics" used to be more than just hard. Before there were 3D games there were fortines made my SUN Microsystems and SGI. SUN was bought out by Oracle after many tech-bubbles crashed. Silicon Graphics crashed because of many factors, but some of it was that consumer grade 3D graphics made it possible to do what a Silicon Graphics workstation did cheaper.

I think we are back in a time where specialized chips will take over again because real-time RayTracing is now hard; yet it is very desiabale. There will be room for small start ups with exotic silicon designs for sure. But, those small startups' technology will be bought by Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm or Samsung before we even know who they are. The race for real time Raytracing has already started, there is money being pumped that way, so I expect that many small fortunes will be made and lost in that race.

Keep in mind that Intel made a similar announcement ten years ago that fizzled out before any actual products could be released. That doesn't mean this project won't work out, it's just probably not worth holding back any GPU purchasing decisions for it until they have something more concrete to show.

This has been rumoured for a while, especially since they hired Raja Koduri, but it's good to see them effectively confirm it.

About damn time. Let the competitions begin.

The diction along with the incredibly generic cgi in this video was so laughable it felt like an april fools joke...

Besides that, I've reached a point where video games look good enough for me. It's where CPU's feel like the bottlenecks

Dope! maybe prices will get reasonable again and freesync will be worth it for anybody who doesn't have a amd card.

Sweet. I'll be snagging a 2080 in a couple weeks (if they're in stock), but I'll certainly be open to a non nVidia card a few years after that.

It's been too long since nVidia had some serious competition.

The thing to think about is what can Intel get out of this. A company of Intel's size diving into the discrete GPU business isn't unreasonable, I think a prototype "fell of the back of a truck" a while back also. But what are they trying to get out of it? or how are they planning to achieve it?

Let suppose they can stand toe to toe with nvidia, at best that means they get a cut of nvidia's current dominate market share, but is a fraction of limited size pond worth Intel's time and effort? Their igpu is dominating the lower everyday use end of the spectrum and does what it needs to do pretty well already.

Are/were they counting on bitcoin? Is getting into the discrete GPU business a low enough cost for them now to decide to give it another go? Or is their goal something else altogether? Is it even a consumer level product?

I wonder how much they leverage their dominance in the CPU market if/when they release these. There is nothing stopping them from creating proprietary tech to make their graphics cards play nicer with their CPUs than the competition.

I saw on LTT not that long ago, a month maybe; they acquired a prototype Intel GPU, part of their Larrabee project, and discussed some if its unique architecture and whatnot. It looks like they were indeed planning to go full-blown with it. Interesting.

Smart time to do it with Ryzen being the obvious wise purchase in terms of CPUs for the time being. I'm deeply fascinated by these recent competitive announcements -- new GPU maker, new game clients -- like it's a candidacy rivalry, it's pathetic.

You could argue Intel have already been in the GPU market, but their presence has been limited to laptops.

@flamedrake: True, thanks for pointing that out. Though I think the competition that intel will bring will be worth looking into.

I'll be interested to see how this turns out. It'd be great to see more choices on the GPU market, especially if it helps alleviate the problems that mining has caused.

I will be the super cynical one and say they are doing this for as long as jackass cryto-miners are buying up all the cards and then more or less drop it after that, maybe a few of the technologies they make seep back down into their integrated cards.