Comment by wtallis
5 hours ago
This is a chip they've had lying around for a while. It's the same architecture as used in the Arc B580 that launched at the end of 2024; this is just a slightly larger sibling. Intel clearly knew that their larger part wouldn't make for a competitive gaming GPU (hence the lack of a consumer counterpart to these cards), but must have decided that a relatively cheap workstation card with 32GB might be able to make some money.
Still seems crooked to sell a GPU that is already lost their driver team and will get no new meaningful updates.
Does it need a huge driver team pushing out big updates in order to be suitable for the kind of Pro use cases it's targeted at? They're explicitly not going after the gaming market so they don't need to be on the treadmill of constant driver updates delivering workarounds and optimizations for the latest game releases.
They're still going to be employing some developers for driver maintenance for the sake of their iGPUs, and that might be enough for these cards.