Intel to produce discrete GPUs
06.10.07 - 04:43am
There has been a lot of interesting news surfacing from Computex 2007 but the most interesting announcement came from graphic card vendors stating that Intel plans on entering the discrete GPU segment with a mid-range card. Supposedly Intel is looking to launch in the $300 bracket which would currently place it up against the 8800GTS 320MB, sadly rumor has it that we won’t see hardware until Q2 2008. Considering how a good portion of the old 3DLabs team was hired by Intel I’d say they have a fair shot as doing a decent job on this first launch. Intel already has the CPU market cornered, the integrated graphics market heavily in their favor, and perhaps they’ll launch a killer card and snag the discrete graphics market.
Intel has the chance to really come out swinging if they can get a solid architecture down and scale it to multiple levels. One of the biggest issues with current DX10 cards is the immaturity of the drivers, neither AMD or Nvidia have been doing a good job lately with these. By Q2 08 Nvidia will be using their new G90 architecture(or is it G100, somebody said they were skipping G90) and AMD will be up to R700 so it’s relatively unknown as to what Intel will have to compete with but Nvidia has already said they are aiming for double the performance out of their next-generation cards compared to current cards so that’ll be a factor to keep in mind. If Intel can create a competitive GPU that consumes less power than the competition and is priced to move then they could have a winner on their hands. Supporting onboard physics along with x86 execution would also be a huge plus but that may be asking too much out of their first venture. I’m looking forward to seeing a third vendor in the graphics industry since the loss of 3DFX. Summer 2008 can’t come any faster.
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