Raja Koduri says delivering higher performance at lower power is his top priority
At Intel ConnectiON conference in Mumbai, Raja Koduri took part in a roundtable with Indian journalists.
Intel Arc desktop GPUs have only started to appear around June this year. The company decided to launch their products progressively with focus on certain markets and certain GPU variants. It was not until October this year until we finally got to see Arc A750/A770 GPUs in action.
Those cards are now available globally. Intel is yet to launch its fourth Arc GPU called A580, possibly by the end of this year. This will be the company’s last push for the affordable mid-range segment and the first ACM-G10 model to hit the sub-200W TDP range.
According to Raja Koduri, Intel is on track with their Battlemage and Celestial architectures for next-gen gaming series. However, he is not ready to talk about dates. What Koduri was ready to talk about are the trends for graphics cards power consumption and what Intel believes is a sweet spot for graphics cards.
Gadgets360: We’re seeing modern GPUs consuming ridiculous amounts of power, even though manufacturers have moved to more efficient process nodes. 600W and 800W power supplies are becoming the norm now. Will Intel also follow this trend?
Raja Koduri: Performance per Watt, or delivering higher performance at lower power, is my top priority. There will always be someone with some skill who can say “I’m going to give you more juice”, but my focus is lower power. The other issue I find with just increasing power and bragging about benchmarks is that while it’s good from a marketing standpoint, [there is a limited] number of PC users who can just buy such a card and plug it in. It dramatically reduces your overall market, right?
Intel’s GPU chief focus is higher performance at lower power. This was stated after being asked about a new trend of 600-800W GPUs being considered by competitors. The pursuit for higher power is nothing more than just marketing that greatly reduces the available market for such graphics cards.
Gadgets360: That mass-market approach, would that mean that you primarily focus on the mid- and lower-tier SKUs first and then push out high-end ones?
Raja Koduri: High-end has no limit right now. What is the definition of high-end? Is it 600 Watts? Obviously our partners and our customers want some halo SKUs for bragging rights, and we always like to figure out ways to enable that. But my priority at this point is getting that core audience, with one power connector. And that can get you up to 200-225W. If you nail that, and something a little above and a little below, all that falls into the sweet spot.
Koduri believes that the sweet spot for GPUs is 200-225W TDP, currently occupied by Arc A770/A750, Radeon RX 6700 or GeForce RTX 3060 series. This should be achieved with one power connector, but he is not stating which type. Intel A7 GPUs already go pass this goal by featuring two power connectors.
It will be very interesting to see if Intel can deliver competitive products under 225W in the future. AMD RX 7900 and NVIDIA RTX 4080+ GPUs already go past 320W, but both solutions already cost more than 899 dollars. That is something hardly any gamers considers a sweet spot.
Source: Gadgets360 via Tom’s Hardware
