I have no idea of the likely price, but (IMO) this is the sort of disruption that Intel needs to aim at if it's going to make some sort of dent in this market. If they could release this for around the price of a 5090, it would be very interesting.
> If they could release this for around the price of a 5090
This is not targeted at consumers. It’s competing with nVidia’s high RAM workstation cards. Think $10K price range, not $1-2K.
The 160GB of LPDDR5X chips alone is expensive enough that they couldn’t release this at the $2K price point unless they felt like giving it away (which they don’t)
They better watch the price because you can get a 128GB AMD Strix Halo mini pc for ~1700-2000 today, and those will be even cheaper a year from now. If they're trying to be competitive then it really needs to be more in that ballpark than the massively overpriced Nvidia range.
In the back of my head floats $200 - $300 for the 64 GiB GDDR7 that you get for spending 7k-10k on an ADA 6000 96 GiB instead of 2k for a 5090 32 GiB. Am I off?
Is LPDDR5X more expensive?
Is there anything preventing them from using heterogeneous memory chips, like 1/4 GDDR7 and 3/4 LPDDR? It could enable new MEO-like architectures with finer-grained performance tuning for long contexts.
Rumor has it (according to MLID, so no one knows whether it's accurate) that AMD is also looking to use regular LPDDR memory for some of it's lower end next gen GPUs to not have to contend with nvidia over limited and cartelled GDDR7 supply. Maybe they're going to increase parallel bandwidth to compensate it? Or have wholly different tricks up their sleeve.
LPDDR5x really just means LPDDR5 running at higher than the original speed of 6400MT/s. Absent any information about which faster speed they'll be using, this correction doesn't add anything to the discussion. Nobody would expect even Intel to use 6400MT/s for a product that far in the future. Where they'll land on the spectrum from 8533 MT/s to 10700 MT/s is just a matter for speculation at the moment.
Uncle Sam owns a good chunk of Intel now. "Not affordable by civilians" might be precisely the target market: the DoD/national intelligence agencies have money to burn, can fund things long enough to stabilize Intel a little, and in exchange they get first dibs on everything.
160 GB LPDDR5 is ~$1,200 retail so the card could be sold for $2,000. The price will depend on how desperate Intel is. Intel probably can't copy Nvidia's pricing.
It’d be a disaster for Intel if it sold for less than 3k, personally I think they’re aiming for break even at 5k a pop at least, and I wouldn’t be surprised to advertise 2x memory at half nvidia price, which would put it at ~15-20k? and a healthy margin which they need like oxygen now. Of course it’s all for naught if it doesn’t perform compute-wise.
I also think they have to be substantially cheaper than nvidia to have any chance, but the pro 6000 with 96G is already available at 7-8k - so half the price would have to be significantly below 4k.
Huh didn’t know that, nice. Intel’s still in trouble then :) IMHO they’ll try to sell the increased ram as worth the ‘premium’ (or, worth the ‘reduced not-nvidia penalty’)
I agree with you, based on standard business logic, but the question is whether Intel would be willing to sell a generation at break-even to disrupt, achieve a larger (and somewhat 'sticky') install base, developer engagement, a larger mind-share, etc.?
4x 5090s gets you way faster inference than I suspect this will, or the 6000 pro if you needed datacentre format at expense of raw speed.
Given either of those setups is ~8k this will have to come in for less than that.