Monday, September 12th 2022
Intel's Raja Koduri Refutes Rumors About Company Cancelling Arc Graphics
Intel's accelerated computing group head Raja Koduri, who heads the team behind the Arc "Alchemist" graphics, on late-Sunday, refuted rumors about the company shutting down the Arc graphics product line. Responding to a question to that effect on Twitter, Koduri tweeted "we are shrugging about these rumors as well. They don't help the team working hard to bring these to market, they don't help the PC graphics community..one must wonder, who do they help?..we are still in first gen and yes we had more obstacles than planned to overcome, but we persisted."
Rumors about Intel dropping the axe on Arc have been around for some time now, after repeated delays in getting the products to market, limited regional launches; and gathered steam as Intel closed down the Optane Memory business last quarter. Last week, after Intel presented a less-than-perfect outlook for its processor business hinted that it could exit "other" unprofitable businesses.
Source:
Raja Koduri (Twitter)
Rumors about Intel dropping the axe on Arc have been around for some time now, after repeated delays in getting the products to market, limited regional launches; and gathered steam as Intel closed down the Optane Memory business last quarter. Last week, after Intel presented a less-than-perfect outlook for its processor business hinted that it could exit "other" unprofitable businesses.
81 Comments on Intel's Raja Koduri Refutes Rumors About Company Cancelling Arc Graphics
We can buy Intel A380 for couple of months now. Only in China, though, and even there it's not widely available. And reviews aren't favourable.
Graphics card sales have plummeted. No cryptomaniacs, and gamers aren't jumping on slightly discounted cards from 2020, when the new generation is coming right now. Where they even are discounted, in Europe prices are still above MSRP mainly. And, of course, recession is looming.
And Intel is competing in low and mid 2020 range. Even if it will be available only in late 2022, early 2023. So, a range nobody's buying any more.
Because a simple google supported the march claim where intel was on track with Optane development and was even talking about the next version sooo that checks out.
And intel cutting parts of their business was an article on this very website, you can probably find if if you just scroll down.
So go ahead then, make your case.
1) They spent upwards of ~10 billion dollars on mobile SoC's & then bailed on with literally billions in losses.
2) SSD's yup they bailed on that as well.
3) Optane, which isn't SSD but still a major loss (for the industry) :shadedshu:
5) G modem ~ remember that, me neither :laugh:
For anyone thinking Intel wouldn't abandon a project after sinking billions in there either doesn't know their past or is just too ignorant to see the (possible) future!
I probably could find a few others but why bother :ohwell:
If i were intel, i would never quit at this stage.
Alchemist can't beat a 3070/6700XT, and now will have to deal with 2nd hand market as well. Max sales price $350
Battlemage could double the performance and it still will not beat mid range 7600XT/4060 next gen cards. Max sales price will again be $350
Celestial gets to compete with 8000 series and 5000 series from AMD and Nvidia respectively. I don't think the scenario will change.
Intel completely missed the target by a good 2 years and now will be catching up to the mid range for the next 6 years of product cycles. It does not look good from an investor perspective, and the investors and shareholders are the only people that matter in the end.
This doesn't mean Arc is gone completely, I do think Intel will still find a market in notebooks.
I mean... I'm definitely no Acti/Blizz fan but what these fellas do over there at WCCF, etc., and there are even worst publishers out there that WCCF just look over and/or PRAISE that pubs that has the same rumours/scandals as AB, just shows us that, it is NOT about what is "right & balanced" but... what it is about is... THEM and THEIR AGENDA!
From reading the financials over the past few years, intel is not doing as well as they should be, hence the exiting of money losing projects.
I'm not into the "it will be cancelled" bandwagon but it's hard to deny things aren't going well and with the amount of times this is being mentioned it just seems more and more likely for there to be some truth to it - latest one i think is that consumer discrete will be dumped and only integrated and server continue. That seems dumb but might be the way forward for at least a couple generations until everything (like cpu and manufacturing) gets their footing.
Alchemist is pretty much complete, and the development of Battlemage is already underway. Intel (as well as AMD and Nvidia) plan for multiple generations ahead. Shutting down Arc would mean shutting down the work of multiple R&D teams. After so much money spent, I don't think it'd be worth it. People always come up with the Itanium example, but let's not forget that it involved finished products. Seeing that your investment isn't returning enough profit, and cancelling it before seeing if it actually returns any are two different things. One is a nunsuccessful business venture with net loss, the other is just money down the toilet.
It's entirely possible that Intel will kill off the consumer GPU division, but given that they're going to be making future architectures for HPC and IGP it doesn't really make a lot of sense unless they're losing money from specifically the desktop card market. I think it'll mostly come down to the driver situation and how much time/money the software side is going to cost them along the way.
For those citing Optane as precident that's a pretty weak one: they sold off their half of the only fab that made it, then Micron stopped making it and sold the fab entirely. Intel never spun up a fab for production and Gelsinger isn't a fan of memory type products (dumb chips) so the writing was on the wall it was only a matter of time. Now I very much think it's a huge loss for everyone since further R&D might have gotten prices down close enough to NAND for consumers and more businesses to justify the premium (even 2x the cost may have worked, but P5800x is about 6-7x the cost of similar sized enterprise NAND).
Raja still with Intel, good :D
So, why would Intel, RISK, allowing so-called fear-mongers/conspiracy theorists aka - LIARS, continue to ruin its market share, and its investors' confidence, If such so-called bullshit... I mean, alleged reports were true?!
I'm confident that an Intel executive/PR rep will make an official statement soon to kill this noise.
What would MLID, CB, etc. feed their crowd then I wonder?!
Oh... that's right. They'll find a way to spin that too. :roll:
raja shouldn't be bed per se, but is likely having some psychological issues that drive him from one embarrassment to another.
The move into GPU world is strategic for intel.
Backing off, just because it didn't work on the first try would be bad not only for Intel, but also for the consumers.
Entering traditional GPU market should be quite doable for a company of Intel's caliber.