This is a bit of an odd few days for Intel. Mere days after the board ousted its CEO Pat Gelsinger, once heralded as the chip giant’s messiah, they’re today launching two brand new desktop graphics cards. They’re aimed at the more budget-oriented consumer, and might very well be the last discrete graphics cards Intel makes, since this is one of the product lines on the chopping block.
Intel’s next — and possibly last — desktop graphics cards will begin arriving in just 10 days. Right on cue, the company has announced the budget $249 Arc B580 and $219 Arc B570, shipping December 13th and January 16th, respectively, as the “best-in-class performance per dollar” options in the GPU market.
They’re based on the same Xe2 “Battlemage” GPU architecture you’ll find in Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop chips but with more than double the graphics cores, up to 12GB of dedicated video memory, and up to 190W of power compared to their limited laptop forms — enough power to see the B580 slightly beat Nvidia’s $299 RTX 4060 and AMD’s $269 RX 7600, according to Intel’s benchmarks, but sometimes still trading blows.
↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge
As for Gelsinger’s dismissal, it seems the board forced him out after being frustrated with the slow progress the company was making in its turnaround. The fact that a finance person and a marketing person will together be interim CEOs seems to indicate the board is more interested in quick profit than a long-term turnaround, and with companies like Qualcomm being interested in acquiring Intel, the board’s short-term mentality might be winning out, and ousting Gelsinger is just paving the way for selling off parts of Intel until there’s nothing left.
Who knows, I might be reading way too much into all of this, but it feels like expecting an organisation as complex as a high-end processor makers to turn itself around in just a few years is incredibly shortsighted, and you’d think board members at Intel would understand that. If the goal is to maintain Intel as a separate, profitable entity making some of the world’s fastest processors, you’re going to need to give a CEO and leadership team more than just a few years to turn the ship around.
Within a few years we’ll know the board’s true intentions, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Intel being sold for parts over the coming years.
Intel has been missing wave after wave. GPU, Cloud chips, IOT, Mobile and now AI.
Sometimes you see companies jumping on every bandwagon and failing as a result. But intel are the opposite. They were in a perfect position to dominate each and just watched as other took the markets from them.
I’d suggest a big restructuring is coming (job losses). Which tends to also spawn more competitive startups. We will see if Intel hitch to the next bandwagon or fall further behind
That’s exactly the same observation I describe for why Intel has been losing ground to ARM (and AMD now). They were focused hard, on the market as they defined it in the 80s. They sold commodity, high performance CPU hardware, mostly for terrestrial use – desktops and servers, and lost in basically every other category, most especially GPU – that one is indeed baffling. Like, it’s easy enough to understand how a financially bloated executive surrounded by yes men (and women) might not see how the performance commodity play is a dead end, but how could they have missed the entire GPU market? That golden parachute probably makes up for the lack of talent.
It’s the 2 sides of that which bit them. Focusing on performance at the expense of all other concerns like efficiency (at least until the current gen), has killed them in the mobile space – including laptops. And their focus on commodity hardware, has cause a rift between them and anyone who isn’t also trying to make commodity hardware like PCs and servers. Think Steam Decks, consoles, and all the various mobile form factors. Even some top end servers are starting to demand bespoke hardware configurations for AI and the like. They really lost on all fronts. And that business is not one which has natural quick pivots.
All of that is on the market conditions side. They also had steadfastly held on to the fabrication part of their business, and maybe that lead to some of these blinders. They had to justify that decision after all. They do seem to have a longer term play in the works – their current generation has sacrificed top end performance in favor of power efficiency by doing things such as ditching SMT. That’s a pretty good play, but it’s probably made the board (who almost certainly has a group think set of opinions about all of what I described above.) Despite some bad press from the lack of top tier performance from the largely know-nothings on youtube who cover this stuff (I miss Anand Lal Shimpi.) What Intel did with their current generation proves that x86 can compete with ARM in ARM’s strengths – power efficiency. It also proves that Intel really can’t communicate… I have no idea what that thing is even called. The Intel Core not-7? No idea.
Their current play doesn’t solve their commodity problem though. ARM will continue to dominate, no matter how efficient Intel and AMD can make their commodity hardware, because when someone needs a bespoke design (like Apple or Amazon) they can get it with ARM. If I were Intel or AMD, I’d be focusing on that specific problem. AMD has been addressing that to some extend through their custom design business, but it’s not the same as a company being able to just license the IP and go about designing their own silicon. They also have the innovator’s dilemma problem – they have a chip design, and they want to sell it. But what if AMD’s design team was free to just make solid designs without having to push their x86 engine? What if they could have designed an ARM SoC for Nintendo, instead of a Zen SoC? It really feels like these companies get caught up in their own myths, rather than understanding the market conditions dispassionately.
I don’t expect Intel to survive any of this. My guess is the board is just as clueless as any given CEO which all seem to come from somewhere else, but I do think it’s at least possible for them to survive.
AMD has done a fairly good job of missing the GPU. NVIDIA is the only GPU company which is making money off of this.
This goes in cycles. Procs hit Pentium 4 levels of waste then everyone starts over with efficient procs. Specs slowly start creeping up to get easy marketing wins, and then we get Pentium 4s again.
The Pentium M was very efficient back in it’s day, and so were the original Atoms. Intel just couldn’t help themselves and kept loosening the specs.
It wasn’t a bad play since there are only two other competitors in the high end fab space, TSMC and sort of Samsung, and fabs require lots of money to build. It’s a great advantage when it works, but it will cut deep if it doesn’t.
Intel botched several nodes, and they couldn’t get it turned around in time.
Hypothetically, AMD could replace the x86 decoder with an Arm decoder, and go on without much sweat. I think they still have an Arm Infrastructure license.
The x86 server space is too lucrative though. Desktops and laptops get leftovers as a marketing exercise.
This doesn’t look good, and it really doesn’t look good for US fabs capabilities. I would say nationalization of the fabs should be on the table, but the incoming administration will probably find the worst possible outcome, like giving them to the Saudis or TSMC then getting stuck with no capacity when China invades Taiwan.
There are rumors the Intel board passed on a NVIDIA acquisition years ago because Jensen being CEO was a stipulation.
GPU was never Intel’s thing, so not having a discrete GPU made sense. AMD can barely compete with NVIDIA, and they bought an entire graphics company. It’s not clear if Intel could have built a GPU or if an acquired NVIDIA would have had the same impact.
Intel really made a mistake by selling their Arm line to Marvell back in the day. The Xscale chips were pretty good from what I’ve heard.
Flatland_Spider.
They actually had GPUs in the past.
Both on low end (the mobile GMA which later became HD Graphics, which are then moved to Iris and Xe)
And the high end (Xenon Phi).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
This was a bit unique, and more like Sony’s Cell processor, where they had specialized, cut down x86 cores with lots of additional SIMD units (AVX basically)
They also had some others in the past for their ARM offerings.
What they lacked was the desktop GPU, which they entered with Arc. I have the A770 on my NUC, and it is actually quite good for the price and the form factor. However they did not realize the software requirements that came with it.
The “game optimized drivers” from nvidia are basically hot patches for incorrectly coded games. nvidia would take recent releases and optimize their engines to run better on their hardware. It is not like “we just run OpenGL/Vulkan/DirectX APIs”, but more like “we will make sure this particular game runs as best as possible”
Yes, of course, this responsibility should be on the game developers. But “shoulda and woulda” would not fix Intel’s (and AMD’s) problems.
They are finally catching up. But they could have done much more, and apparently the previous CEO’s heart was not in it. (I don’t think it is a coincidence they announced two new GPUs immediately after kicking the CEO, and not doing it in the last two years after the previous release).
Its easy to second guess and point fingers when the ship is in the process of sinking. There are many things one can point out as missed opportunities, and just bad decisions. I am certainly not qualified to speak to which of the many issues have been their downfall. Maybe a little of each, maybe one in particular. Maybe nothing anyone external to the company knows about.
My WAG, is the mobile chip miss was a bad one. They invested just enough to make what everyone knew would be a worse product, then gave up.
With Gelsinger gone, will that mean even more delays to the 18A production node? And what will it mean for the promised intel fabs that intel already got payed for to build by the EU and US governments?
Shareholders? Shortsighted?! NOooo…
Truly, so many issues could be resolved if shareholders weren’t squeezing rocks and wanting endless blood to come out of it – instantly.