> AMD have been slacking on low-end graphics card releases this gen
That's blatant misinformation, this A580 seems on par with RX 7600, same price, AMD has lower TDP, it was released May 2023, and the journalist dare to say AMD has been slacking off?! What Intel doing for releasing same GPU as competition 1 year later?!
Releasing a competitive GPU as a first-gen product and only being a year late is impressive as hell.
Let me go through why it's hard to release GPUs at the right time as someone who's done this at a different company. Development probably started 3-5 years ago, before COVID. They would have estimated what AMD/Nvidia's performance would be that far out and what TSMC's process would look like, then sketched out something that might meet a reasonable performance/cost target, with random guesses at a bunch of important and completely unknown factors like driver quality. Then COVID hit and the entire manufacturing world descended into utter chaos for the better part of 2 years. This is probably a large factor behind why Intel didn't manage their initial 2020/2021 estimates, with another part being that management at any company has no idea how to estimate silicon timelines. On top of that, the 10, 20, and 30 series all had completely different performance increases, probably generating a few revisions of that performance target on their own. Every time they revise the design to keep it competitive though, firmware is screaming at them about stability, and software is screaming at them about timelines, and leadership is screaming about costs.
But somehow despite all of that, they manage a relatively timely release and it's competitive in the low end after a few months of driver improvements. Unfortunately there's another problem. These things are fabbed at TSMC, not Intel. Intel doesn't have that many wafers at TSMC compared to Nvidia/AMD and meaningfully increasing that is expensive. So instead they make the rational decision to release the higher-margin stuff first and let the drivers bake some more. Everything else can get price-adjusted (and minimally design-adjusted) before it releases to make it competitive, which is why the article doesn't have actual pricing.
Yeah if I look up Intel's GPUs in the open-source Blender benchmark for 3D performance [1], the leading Intel Arc A770 GPU is slower than ... the NVidia GeForce RTX 2070?! Which came out in 2019 [2], so Intel's latest GPUs are slower than NVidia's chips that are 2 generations and 4 years old.
The Arc A770 came out in the time of the 30x0 series, so it would be more fair to say that it is slower than a higher end card one generation older than it. That isn't an uncommon occurrence. For instance, the 2070s are often faster than the 3060s, and the A770 was supposed to be roughly aiming for 3060 performance.
Overall, I'd call it close enough in performance that I'd be interested in giving it a try. On the work side, I worry more about being bitten by lack of CUDA (although I like the look of SYCL that Intel/Kronos push as an alternative), and on the gaming side, I worry more about how if DX10/DX11 titles will ever really get sorted out. Still, when I get a desktop that supports Resizable BAR, I will likely put an Intel GPU in that machine to give it a try.
That's blatant misinformation, this A580 seems on par with RX 7600, same price, AMD has lower TDP, it was released May 2023, and the journalist dare to say AMD has been slacking off?! What Intel doing for releasing same GPU as competition 1 year later?!