For me it’s doubly amazing that Intel does not exist in those discussions about alternatives that are already rare. They should write a book about how to blow up a successfully semiconductor company from the inside.
FWIW, Intel has OpenVINO acceleration on their ARC GPU lineup. Their $300 Arc A770 outperforms the M1 Ultra by ~10% in OpenCL (which OpenVINO uses): https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
It stands to reason that Intel is making highly price-competitive hardware at the moment, but people don't talk about them as much Nvidia because they have a minuscule install base with primitive Windows drivers. I wouldn't count them out if their first showing is this impressive, though.
