Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a new Intel Arc A770 GPU primarily for gamers will ship Oct. 12 for $329, a clear answer to recent concerns over high prices for Nvidia graphic cards.
“GPU’s have gotten super expensive and don’t need to,” Gelsinger told an in-person crowd at the opening on Tuesday of its Innovation 2022 event in San Jose, California. “We are hearing complaints of high pricing. Here is the Arc A 770.”
He said the A770 will have 65% better ray-tracing capability than the competition, which is likely to be the Nvidia RTX 3060 card. The A770 will include up to 32 Xe cores with 2100 MHz and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. A related A750 graphics card will include 28 Xe cores and 8 gigabytes of memory.
Intel also announced its new 13th generation Core family for desktops and promoted a developer cloud to enable designers to try and test Intel hardware prior to launch, including the much-delayed Sapphire Rapids.
The new Core family will include six processors with up to 24 cores and speeds up to 5.8 GHz for what it claimed world’s best gaming, streaming and recording experience. The new Core desktop K processors and the Z790 chips will be available Oct. 20.
Developers at select customer locations will be to use the Intel Developer Cloud to try out Sapphire Rapids and Ice Lake D processors, Gaudi 2 accelerators, Ponte Vecchio and Flex Series GPUs, among other products.
Flex Series GPUs were described in August with a focus on flexibility in handling data center workloads across media delivery, cloud gaming, AI, metaverse and more.
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Jeff McVeigh, general manager of Intel’s Super Compute Group, said the combination of Flex Series GPUs with software has allowed Numenta working with Stanford University to process MRIs twice as fast versus a competitor’s GPU.
“It will open the door to a lot of these new opportunities,” he told reporters. The Flex 170 is shipping now to customers, the company said in a slide presentation.
Intel also announced a new computer vision software platform called Geti, which is being used to help clinicians train AI to recognize cystic fibrosis and other diseases at Royal Brompton Hospital in UK. Other uses are being used at up to 30 locations for tracking vehicles used on job sites for better worker safety.
Even as Sapphire Rapids, the fourth generation Xeon processor, is now set to be a part of Intel Developer Cloud launching next quarter for some companies to try and test, it was originally scheduled to be available in 2021.
When asked about the delay, McVeigh said Intel prioritizes “the quality of its products and won’t compromise.” He added the company subjects its new products to “rigorous validation and if we find issues, we’ll push out the schedule.”
GPUs like Flex Series are part of a growing market, one that is heavy in GPUs from Nvidia, an Intel competitor and maker of the Hopper H100 Tensor Core GPU for data centers.
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“The market is strong and we have a really strong roadmap,” Intel’s McVeigh added. “Ponte Vecchio is going after the higher end HPC, but each market is growing and we have a rich set of offerings.”
Intel made several other announcements at the opening day of Innovation:
--Server blades with the Intel data center GPU code named Ponte Vecchio are now shipping to Argonne National Lab for the Aurora supercomputer.
--XeSS, a gaming performance accelerator is rolling out through updates and will be available to more than 20 titles.
--Intel Unison will allow seamless connectivity between Android and iOS phones and PCs, starting with file transfer, text messaging, phones calls and notifications. It comes to new laptops later this year.
Samsung and TSMC officials also joined in the keynote via video with CEO Pat Gelsinger to support the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express consortium. The three chipmakers are joined by 80 other companies.
A preview of a pluggable co-packaging phototonics system was also provided. It is a glass-based solution with a pluggable connector to lower manufacturing costs.
Moore's Law is dead, or not
In his keynote, Gelsinger also took on comments Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made last week saying Moore's Law is dead, in Huang's defense of higher prices for graphics cards that have come as a result of the high cost of wafers that are made into chips.
"Is Moore's law dead?" Gelsinger asked onstage. "The answer is no!" A slide appeared behind him: "Moore's law is alive and well."
Gelsinger went on to say that with advanced packaging technology and other techniques, the number of transistors on a chip now have reached 1 billion and will reach 1 trillion by the end of the decade. "We are on schedule with five nodes in four years. Normally it takes two years. We are torridly moving to the future...We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted and we will continue to be the stewards of Moore's Law into the future. Alive and well."