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’)
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.
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.?
