With the growth in game playing and media creation on PCs, and increasingly on laptop devices as they improve their processing power to take over many previously desktop-only tasks, it’s critical that chip companies provide the necessary processing power for both general compute and also graphics processing. Indeed, some estimates are that the gaming laptop market stands at about $12 billion and has a 5% growth rate.
While integrated graphics capabilities of CPU chips have been advancing for some time and do well at processing most typical workloads and even lower end game playing, many tasks and workloads like high resolution gaming, media processing, and AI related tasks require a discrete GPU capability to maximize performance.
Intel has been absent from the discrete graphics product market for many years. It’s been dominated by AMD and Nvidia. But recently Intel released its new discrete graphics family of GPU chips under the brand name ARC. This entry into the competitive GPU space seems like it might not go well for Intel, given its lack of market presence and its previous failure to compete effectively and causing it to exit the space. But this time around Intel gave itself a major competitive advantage to make sure it can sell its ARC GPUs, particularly in the hot market for laptop discrete graphics. That advantage is Intel Deep Link technology.
In essence, Deep Link allows its Core CPUs, still the dominant processor in the PC market, to have a direct link to the ARC GPU. That link enables significant performance and power advantages.
Deep Link includes:
-- Power Share which can keep the machine’s integrated graphics running at maximum capacity while also enabling the workloads to seamlessly switch to the discrete graphics processor as needed.
-- Additive AI which enables use of both the integrated and discrete graphics chips to simultaneously run AI inference workloads or dedicate specific tasks to the optimum GPU.
-- Hyper Code to enable extremely fast encoding streams needed in many media tasks. Deep Link only works with Intel GPUs, so any machines equipped with competing GPU chips will not be able to take advantage of Deep Link.
The effect is Intel can now claim its Core/ARC combination significantly outperforms machines that include non-Intel discrete graphics chips, primarily Nvidia GPUs. AMD sells many of its GPUs along with its increasingly popular and competitive Ryzen CPUs, so the effect on AMD market share in laptops will be less.
Still, it’s not clear how AMD plans to offer a competitive differentiation like Deep Link with its systems. AMD’s current position is it just offers superior power/performance over Intel, but will that still hold true as Intel pushes its own new technology? And since Nvidia does not offer a CPU product for PCs, its ability to compete on a “PC platform” approach is limited.
But there is still a major market opportunity for AMD and Nvidia in graphics where Deep Link doesn’t currently provide Intel with any advantage. DeepLink is primarily advantageous in the laptop space where both CPU and GPU are located on the mother board connected by a high-speed internal bus. But desktop PCs often include board level graphics products to maximize performance that are not directly connected to the CPU. Deep Link doesn’t provide any compelling advantage in that space, so Nvidia and AMD based graphics boards will likely remain popular. But Intel believes its next gen ARC chips will provide it with an opening to compete in the discrete graphics board space as well, and board level graphics accelerator products have already been designed with Intel GPUs inside.
By creating its Deep Link capability, Intel has put a compelling feature set into its products – as long as you stay with Intel CPU/GPU combinations. This should increasingly replace the current practice of laptop products that combine an Intel CPU with another vendor’s GPU. Many device makers have already committed to use the Intel CPU/GPU products in their machine, although few seem willing to eliminate the current option of Intel CPU and Other GPU. While Intel still needs to create compelling GPU products, and its latest set of GPU chips seem to perform well, Deep Link gives it a major competitive advantage to capture the discrete graphics processor market share it wants, especially in laptops. “Intel Inside” will soon mean an Intel GPU as well as CPU.
Jack Gold is founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, LLC., an information technology analyst firm based in Northborough, Massachusetts. He has more than 25 years of experience as an analyst and covers the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies. He works with many companies, including Intel. Follow Jack on Twitter and on LinkedIn.