Battlemage had the best perf/% and most the driver issues from Alchemist had been ironed out. Another generation or two of steady progress and intel have a big winner on their hands.

Intel's foundry costs are probably competitive with nvidia too - nvidia has too much opportunity cost if nothing else.

The B580 was released in December 2024, and the 4060 in May 2023. So not quite a two year difference.

While it doesn't quite compete at performance and power consumption, it does at price/performance and overall value. It is a $250 card, compared to the $300 of the 4060 at launch. You can still get it at that price, if there's stock, while the 4060 hovers around $400 now. It's also a 12GB card vs the 8GB of the 4060.

So, sure, this is not competitive at the high-end segment, but it's remarkable what they've accomplished in just a few years, compared to the decades that AMD and NVIDIA have on them. It's definitely not far fetched to assume that the gap would only continue to close.

Besides, Intel is not only competing at GPUs, but APUs, and CPUs. Their APU products are more performant and efficient than AMD's (e.g. 140V vs 890M).

This is very short-sighted. The cards are improving, which can't really be said about AMD, the only other potential threat to Nvidia. It's also well known that Nvidia purposefully handicaps their consumer cards to avoid cannibalizing their enterprise cards. That means that the consumer market at least is not as efficient/optimal as it could be, so a competitor actually trying to compete (unlike AMD, apparently) should be able to do that without even having to out-innovate Nvidia or anything like that. Just get close on compute performance, but offer more VRAM or cheaper multi-gpu setups.

nvidia's margins are over 80% for datacenter products. If Intel can produce chips with enough vram and performance on par with nvidia from 2 years ago at 30% margins theyd steal a lot of business, if they can figure out the cuda side of things.

Has Nvidia has ran any fab successfully ?

> It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.

How was Intel "circling the drain"?

They have a very competitive offering of CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and the upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures are very promising. Their products compete with AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM SoCs from the likes of Apple.

Intel may have been in a rut years ago, but they've recovered incredibly well.

This is why I'm puzzled by this decision, and as a consumer, I would rather use a fully Intel system than some bastardized version that also involves NVIDIA. We've seen how well that works with Optimus.

Not everybody wants GPUs for games or for AI.

AMD has always followed closely NVIDIA in crippling their cheap GPUs for any other applications.

After many years of continuously decreasing performance of the "consumer" GPUs, only Intel has offered in the Battlemage GPUs FP64 performance comparable with what could be easily obtained 10 years ago, but no longer today.

Therefore, if the Intel GPUs disappear, then the choices in GPUs will certainly become much more restricted than today. AMD has almost never attempted to compete with NVIDIA in features, but whenever NVIDIA dropped some feature, so did AMD.