this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Arc is realistically a bigger threat to AMD than it is to Nvidia. The second half of the 2020's will be AMD and Intel competing over second place for desktop dGPUs.
For mobile, Arc iGPUs, while obviously not matching dedicated GPUs, can realistically offer good enough performance to some people who want to do light gaming, then stepping up to a low end dGPU just to make sure Minecraft, Fortnight, etc. can at least run may not be worth the extra cost.
Either way, I think Intel's heavy focus on putting Arc in all of their Core Ultra CPUs and heavily focusing on iGPU can be a potentially bigger disruptor than their desktop dGPUs, at least in the nearterm.
Not to mention the inclusion of XMX cores in Arrow Lake and presumably beyond could provide XeSS video upscaling similar to what DLSS is doing, all without a dGPU
Arc is no threat whatsoever to Nvidia, not unless Intel manage to scale up the architecture to enterprise-grade levels and develop something akin to the CUDA API.
They have a better chance of doing it than AMD do.
Intel's competitor to CUDA is oneAPI and SYCL. Intel poses no threat to Nvidia GPUs in datacenter in the near term, but that doesn't mean Intel won't still secure contracts.
Intel's biggest threat to Nvidia is against Nvidia's laptop dGPU volume segment. Arc offers synergies with Intel CPUs, a single vendor for both CPU and GPU for OEMs, and likely bundled discounts for them as well. A renewed focus on improving iGPUs also threatens some of Nvidia's low end dGPUs in laptops - customers don't have to choose between very poor performance iGPU or stepping up to a dGPU, and now iGPUs will start to become good enough that some customers will just opt to not buy a low end mobile dGPU in coming years.
Not to mention that Intel could have consumer AI tech in nearly -every- laptop sold in 5 years with just an intel iGPU. Not to mention mini-PCs etc etc, especially if LNL pans out well. Thats a scale of deployability that Nvidia simply cannot compete with.
AMD has had iGPUs in laptops for a long time now, and the better CPUs for more than a couple of the past few years, yet laptops are still sold with Nvidia dGPUs even when they have decent AMD iGPUs.
It might kill the lowest of the lowest end of laptop dGPUs, but I think Nvidia's pricing is doing that faster than Intel's success with Arc.
The issue with AMD laptops is availability and the mixing of generations under similar SKU numbers. There's only a handful of Zen4 laptops in the wild, and they're mixed in with Zen2 and Zen3 parts, leading to a confusing experience for the average buyer. So, people will either go for an Intel laptop, or find an Nvidia dGPU laptop for the 'upgrade'.