Intel has taken huge pains to stop a repeat of the driving force woes that plagued its first-generation “Alchemist” GPUs inside its second-generation “Battlemage” playing cards, Intel fellow Tom Petersen informed The Full Nerd podcast on Tuesday morning.
“It’s a complex problem, but we have invested gi-namic resources into addressing it,” Petersen, often known as “TAP,” informed The Full Nerd crew, hosted by PCWorld regulars, as Intel launched the Intel “Battlemage” or B580 playing cards. “It’s like enormous, and gigantic.”
The story Intel’s first A770 and A750 playing cards have been anticipated to inform was one in all a literal third-party competitor whose presence would drive down the costs of graphics playing cards at a time the place AMD and particularly Nvidia have been pushing them greater and better. However the launch of Arc arrived a yr later than anticipated, and the A770 and A750 adopted the debut of the A380 in China that was accompanied by terrible software program glitches. Our A770/A750 evaluate was additionally affected by a number of software program points, even when some weren’t essentially deal breakers.
Nonetheless, when PCWorld finally ends up writing a narrative titled “Are Intel Arc GPUs still buggy?” a number of months later, there have been substantive issues.
Our followup article confirmed how the driving force expertise improved, nonetheless, and Petersen mentioned that Intel’s ongoing driver stack continues that development.
“Think of it as we’ve done more than 50 driver releases since we launched Alchemist,” Petersen mentioned Tuesday. “That’s 50. And those driver releases have all gone through massive [quality assurance] cycles.”
“We’ve increased our game coverage by 2.5X — so, you know, hundreds and hundreds of games are run every week looking for validation regressions,” Petersen added. “So it’s only through testing and architecture and hard work that we can get our driver quality where it needs to be. But I feel very comfortable that we are over that hump.”
Petersen mentioned that he expects “hundreds of thousands” of individuals to purchase the Battlemage playing cards.
“This is really going to be either earth-shattering for me as we get out, and there’s like hundreds of millions, or hundreds of thousands of people that buy this card, and I’m going to be delighted when they say this is rock solid, or it’s just going to shatter me… I don’t expect the second one, it’s a nice thing.”
Not the striongest endorsement, possibly. However with Intel’s market share within the discrete graphics market primarily at zero, it has nowhere to go however up.
