If Intel does make a viable set of gaming GPUs,I do hope they do a bit of their contrarevenue at the same time,to get AMD and Nvidia to sweat a bit. It seems both the latter and their AIB partners now are taking gamers for whales.

CAT-THE-FIFTH
If Intel does make a viable set of gaming GPUs,I do hope they do a bit of their contrarevenue in at the same time,to get AMD and Nvidia to sweat a bit. It seems both the latter and their AIB partners now are taking gamers for whales.

Why would they do that? The market will take absolutely any cards available atm.

The best thing Intel could do would be to produce a card that is utterly awful at mining, but decent at gaming. Not just a bit bad, AMD's 6000 series have a really poor hash rate compared to Nvidia's cards and yet still miners are buying the damned things. It would need to do 20MH/s at 200W to give gamers a chance to buy them. Availability would make for a lot of very thankful users right now.

Then ofc Intel have to have usable drivers. I've not used their integrated graphics in anger for a while now, so I don't know the current state there.

DanceswithUnix
Why would they do that? The market will take absolutely any cards available atm.

The best thing Intel could do would be to produce a card that is utterly awful at mining, but decent at gaming. Not just a bit bad, AMD's 6000 series have a really poor hash rate compared to Nvidia's cards and yet still miners are buying the damned things. It would need to do 20MH/s at 200W to give gamers a chance to buy them. Availability would make for a lot of very thankful users right now.

Then ofc Intel have to have usable drivers. I've not used their integrated graphics in anger for a while now, so I don't know the current state there.

Intel has done it in the past,especially with things such as the Ultrabook fund,when AMD only had BD uarch CPUs. Intel threw billions of USD at the Ultrabook fund and Atom contrarevenue. They did the same back in the A64 days.

BTW,you might want to see where the current CEO,Pat Gelsinger, was at Intel during his previous stint….he was head of the Intel Digital Enterprise Group from 1989 to 2009,which was the basically the CPU and server division. He was there when Intel did its dealings with Dell,etc to stop AMD from getting traction. Reading some of what Charlie of SA fame has said in the last 2 years,they are also doing some notebook “assistance funds” which is not helping AMD get into a lot of laptops.

Also why they would do it - Intel still needs to prove itself,and many gamers still will be wedded to Nvidia(and to a lesser degree AMD),and to increase marketshare in a market too wedded to the incumbants for dGPUs.

The fact is Intel only needs to price stuff at a slightly lower level(more like a few years ago),and offer contrarevenue deals to OEMs to displace Nvidia/AMD GPUs from prebuilt systems with Intel CPUs. No doubt,once they can get some traction prices will increase but its a viable way to gain as much share as possible.

The issue is Nvidia and AMD have pushed themselves into this corner,because both have been increasing prices upwards for at least the last 5 years. That has coincided,especially with Nvidia,getting record margins and revenue. The Turing price increases actually made Nvidia more money. Its the same thing what Apple and Samsung did - the Chinese companies came along and offered smartphones at more traditional price-points which are still profitable. Now,between them they have a bigger share of the smartphone market worldwide and can now compete at the high end too.

Also,unlike them both,Intel can see only added revenue from GPUs,but Nvidia will get more screwed if Intel shifts the market downwards a bit because at least half their revenue is from consumer GPUs. Intel can fight such a war,because they have very deep pockets.

Cerebra does 1.2 Trillion transistors.

I just got a ping from a Discord channel from my hunt for a 5600X cpu a while back that a 6700XT was available. Whilst I'm not in the market, I thought I would take a look at what price it was going for.

Now I know it's overclockers, but they currently set it at £10000, which is like twice the value of my car (at least).

(edit: this says “Available soon” now, which is a shame as it was a funny placeholder and possibly a good way to mess with the bots).
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/powercolor-radeon-rx-6700-xt-fighter-12gb-gddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-1a5-pc.html

Wonder if they will do a Dutch auction, just slowly drop the price until someone is daft enough to buy a card. They claim to have over 10 of them.


Anyway, I am quite aware of “Kicking” Pat Gelsinger's past exploits. It should make for interesting times ahead. But right now we just need a fair price.

Did you see the recent Linus Tech Tips piece on part availability? The card makers are claiming it is just demand, and he threw in this weird 30% more demand than manufacturers can keep up with figure that I would love to know how they calculated. In the mean time, I've been snooping around some mining threads and discord chats, and he's just flat wrong. Many people have happily been blowing £10K loans on even 3090 cards, basically anything they can get a hold of. Less typical and a bit more extreme, the Son of a Tech youtuber at the start of the current bubble went out and bought 60 5700XT cards to build mining rigs. If people see cards as money printing machines then they will quite literally soak up every single card made and want more. Gamers, well we can only use one card per rig and will run out of space for gaming rigs pretty fast so our market can be saturated, but we are competing against this infinite black hole of demand that can only be sated by the price of bitcoin dropping 80% again taking the altcoins with it.

The last bubble burst was messy, but I can see people either getting a console (like my son who at this point only uses his PC for college work and Minecraft) or even just taking up a new hobby.

OcUK are doing a special system to make sure they can sell GPUs to gamers for as close to RRP as possible:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/voucher-code-deals-concept-plan.18924174/

The price is not the real price,and if you read the comments the staff are now checking for anyone who uses the scheme for scalping,and are apparently have started suspending accounts.

CAT-THE-FIFTH
OcUK are doing a special system to make sure they can sell GPUs to gamers for as close to RRP as possible:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/voucher-code-deals-concept-plan.18924174/

The price is not the real price,and if you read the comments the staff are now checking for anyone who uses the scheme for scalping,and are apparently have started suspending accounts.

I just saw that, thanks for beating me to reporting it :)

Edit: I'm not a forum member over there (not a big user of the company) but that's a nice forum bonus. Bet they're getting a lot of signups :D

Over at TH they have a shot of Raj holding the said tiled chip.
Looks like they've gone heavy on the grout/glue.

DanceswithUnix
Why would they do that? The market will take absolutely any cards available atm.

With the manufacturing capacity of Intel and the right price / performance, Intel would probably be wise to go “all in” on grabbing as much market share as possible for their first dGPU. That attracts more investment, which makes shareholders happy.

With this mining, I still do not get how you make money on it, is it not virtual money like something you would do while building a minecraft world or the likes?

All I see is massive powerbills overall, and where is the safety or what does the safety or guaranties stand in with this? I mean to be able to have something of value, you need some kind of leverage or something with value on to begin with, just keeping the cards as that value as the price rise and rise for VGA cards wont last, as sooner or later the market will crash?

Iota
With the manufacturing capacity of Intel and the right price / performance, Intel would probably be wise to go “all in” on grabbing as much market share as possible for their first dGPU. That attracts more investment, which makes shareholders happy.

That would be fine if Intel had spare capacity. But it is all in use.

QuorTek
With this mining, I still do not get how you make money on it, is it not virtual money like something you would do while building a minecraft world or the likes?

All I see is massive powerbills overall, and where is the safety or what does the safety or guaranties stand in with this? I mean to be able to have something of value, you need some kind of leverage or something with value on to begin with, just keeping the cards as that value as the price rise and rise for VGA cards wont last, as sooner or later the market will crash?

The crypto currency can be exchanged for real money. It has no inherent value, no basis for what it is worth beyond people agreeing it is worth something and they fighting over the limited availability of the worthless numbers. But then banks can be said to be not much better :)

QuorTek
With this mining, I still do not get how you make money on it, is it not virtual money like something you would do while building a minecraft world or the likes?

All I see is massive powerbills overall, and where is the safety or what does the safety or guaranties stand in with this? I mean to be able to have something of value, you need some kind of leverage or something with value on to begin with, just keeping the cards as that value as the price rise and rise for VGA cards wont last, as sooner or later the market will crash?

I get the Blockchain and why it is useful and why bitcoin has value. What I have never really got is this mining business it seems like a pointless water of electricity. Or is the mini process a functional post of the ledger system of the Blockchain? There must be a better way to allocate digital currency.

I have felt for many years that if the do ever create a universal basic income it should be a Blockchain currency as it would be more more acceptable. Every month everyone who has a national insurance number gets a 100 dufusdollars, which can be spent on certain things. It will be rubbish at first but slowly it will establish itself.

Kumagoro
I get the Blockchain and why it is useful and why bitcoin has value. What I have never really got is this mining business it seems like a pointless water of electricity. Or is the mini process a functional post of the ledger system of the Blockchain? There must be a better way to allocate digital currency.

Mining is indeed a criminal waste of power, and it has been proved that it doesn't have to be like that. The thing is, there just doesn't seem to be any real push for change within the crypto community beyond talking about it.

The biggest one is Eth supposedly switching from the current “Proof of Work” scheme that is so inefficient to a “Proof of Stake” system. It is supposedly a couple of years away from taking over, which it has been for years now.
Other crypto currencies already exist that use proof of work. If the community actually cared, they could swap platforms now. Clearly they don't.

Then there is “Nano”, which uses the old Proof of Work but puts some limits on it and clusters things so that performance goes up as you add nodes rather than the usual feeding frenzy of everyone scrabbling for the same work, doing the same computation as everyone else and just hoping they race to an answer first. This scalability gives a claimed ability to perform thousands of transactions per second on the network with zero fees which would be impressive if true. How has this been received? A denial of service attack. The zero fees are used against the network, with random minimal amount transactions being fed in until the network saturates which it seems to have done at quite a low transaction rate, like the sort of throughput you see at a weekend in a big department store chain and not the sort of levels needed for a global payments system.

I think that is where your Dufusdollars will sadly come apart. None of these currencies actually work for real wold use. They all seem to start off promising high throughput and transaction costs of a few cents. Eth was last I looked something like $17 for the most basic of money transfers, and is on its knees in throughput (hence the transaction cost). It can take ages for transactions to be considered complete, with a fail timeout of about an hour before you know it isn't going through.

My kids run Minecraft servers occasionally, and have wanted a system for people to leave tips. A crypto currency would seem ideal, none of the age limits of credit cards and really easy to set up a wallet to take the funds. But I have yet to find anything that is usable.

Interesting read, although I have a basic awareness of crypto I know little of the practicalities and realities of them. Thanks.

I expect this to be a dissapointing as Cyberpunk, but after all, its there first modern proper Graphics card for years. I had one of those i740 years ago. It ran GP2 ok, but I replaced it with a Hercules which blew it away.