I have a couple of these too, and I strongly believe Intel is effectively subsidizing these to try to get a foothold in the market.
You get me equivalent of a $500 Nvidia card for around $300 or less. And it makes sense because Intel knows if they can get a foothold in this market they're that much more valuable to shareholders.
At current market pricing on dramexchange, 128GB of 16Gbit GDDR6 chips would cost $499.58. That only leaves $100.42 for the PCB, GPU die, miscellaneous parts, manufacturing, packaging, shipping, the store’s margin, etcetera. I suspect that they could not do that without taking a loss.
I wonder if they could mix clamshell mode and quadrank to connect 64 memory chips to a GPU. If they connected 128GB of VRAM to a GPU, I would expect then to sell it for $2000, not $600.
+ about $150 for the pcb, cooler and other stuff, I didn't consider
Times a 1.6 to 1.75 factor if they like actually being profitable (operations, rnd, sales, marketing, ...).
So about $1.5k, I guess.
Multiply that with a .33 "screw the competition" factor and my initial guess is almost spot on.
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Real problem:
The largest GDDR7 package money can buy right now is 3GB. That's a 1376bit bus right there. GL fitting that to a sub 500mm2 die.
In the future you could put that amount of vram on a 512bit bus, tho.
Also normal DDR is getting really fast atm. 8 channel can already challenge most vram configurations. Maybe it's time soon to switch back to swappable memory.
>+ about $150 for the pcb, cooler and other stuff,
Assuming I had access to gerbers I could order replica of 5090 PCB for $65, including shipping. Intel PCB is half that. Again this is for a dude off the street buying 1-5 copies, not a bulk order.
This makes no sense.
Currently 24GB is the sweet spot to stay competitive and 32GB is the maximum amount of memory you could stick on a card and still have a decent memory to bandwidth ratio.
What they should do instead is make the cards thinner and more efficient so that you can easily put two of them in a case.
They are definitely selling them at close to no profit, but they are not anywhere near subsidizing them unless they botched their supply chain so badly that they are overpaying the BOM costs.
I'm proud to support them. Intel is also selling their lunar lake chips fairly cheaply too. Let's all hope they make it through this rough patch. I can't imagine a world where we only have one x86 manufacturer.
R&D is a sunk cost that is largely paid by their iGPUs. Selling at cost is not a subsidy and that is not relevant here since they should be making money off every sale. I tried estimating their costs a few months ago and found that they had room for up to a 10% margin on these, even after giving retailers a 10% margin. If they are not making money from these, it would be their fault for not building enough to leverage economics of scale.
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Acer Arc A770 16gb GPU w/Free Game & Shipping $229.99
$229.99 $399.99 at Newegg
Sure that margin is holding when they had to mark the first generation down to get them off the shelves. It would truly surprise me if they've made a significant profit off these cards.
Server code tends to be extremely portable. Just recompile for the new architecture and you are done. The porting work for servers has already been done by the community. The main exception would be game servers, which are binary blobs, but box86/box64 can run those.
A number of businesses have switched to using arm EC2 servers from x86 EC2 servers for lower costs and things work fine on them.
Imagine if AMD never existed. Everything about owning a computer would be worse. Likewise now we need Intel ( or someone else, perhaps a Chinese OEM) to make competition.
You get me equivalent of a $500 Nvidia card for around $300 or less. And it makes sense because Intel knows if they can get a foothold in this market they're that much more valuable to shareholders.
Great for gaming, no real downsides imo.