- Participants debated why Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA have not released consumer GPUs with very large VRAM (e.g., 96 GB) at competitive prices, arguing that such cards would sell rapidly if they ran PyTorch or llama.cpp smoothly.  
- It was pointed out that Intel already ships the Data-Center GPU Max 1550 with 128 GB HBM2e, but availability is poor and the product is positioned for the datacenter, not consumers.  
- The conversation highlighted the tension between consumer demand for high-VRAM cards and vendors’ desire to protect lucrative datacenter product lines.  
- Technical objections were raised: large memory buses require physically large dies, which hurt yield and raise costs; lowering bandwidth to use more, smaller chips was proposed but dismissed as undercutting the GPU value proposition.  
- Intel’s broader manufacturing struggles (“physical has been fucked for the past five years”) were cited as a root cause of persistent shortages and uncompetitive pricing.  
- The group lamented missed opportunities such as Optane DIMMs that could have offered high-capacity, non-volatile memory without constant refresh power, but Intel’s process issues prevented commercialization.