Originally published on LinkedIn. Reformatted for Medium / zahradnik.io.
Intel is the latest big player to join the dedicated GPU market. I’ve been observing them for a while, and I seriously considered owning an Intel Arc GPU ever since I saw Linus Torvalds asking for one on Linus Tech Tips.
Intel GPUs have drivers that still need some love. On the other hand, I’m fairly sure Intel is aggressively pushing prices down.
€350 for their most powerful consumer GPU with 12 GB of GDDR memory is wild. That’s squarely in the territory of the cheapest AMD Radeons — and at that price, I can tolerate quite a lot.
I could have written a post about virtualizing Windows and using the Intel GPU for passthrough, while my main Radeon runs Linux.
I could have written a post about maxing out an older AM4 platform into the territory of professional workstations — even though it was never designed for that use case.
I could have written a post about LLM inference experiments, or about testing the maturity of Intel and AMD Linux drivers in the ML space.
But the truth is much simpler.
This build is my toy.
My inner child just wants to tinker.
I want an Intel GPU to experience the early quirks — and later, the driver maturation. And the use cases I mentioned above? Yes, I’ll do all of them. But not primarily to solve a problem.
It’s curiosity.
It’s playfulness.
It’s the joy of understanding things by touching them.
That’s what keeps me going.
So next time you read something deeply technical from me, feel free to imagine a child happily playing — just with slightly more expensive toys.
Happy tinkering.
