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.
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.