back to article Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

Intel capped off a tumultuous year with a reality check for its product roadmaps. Plans to commercialize the American giant's next-gen GPU architecture, codenamed Falcon Shores, have been scrapped, while its next generation of many-cored CPUs has been delayed until 2026, interim co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus revealed …

  1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

    Delays and share loss are going to keep on being as predictable as layoffs at IBM for the foreseeable future due to the steady encroachment of Arm and RISC-V nodes on their server share while AMD continues to outperform and undercut the X64 market share from the other front.

    1. ReggieRegReg

      Do they still have a server share? Is there a single customer not actively trying to ditch POWER at the first opportunity?

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        That was talking about Intel's server share, not IBM's.

    2. theblackhand

      "Delays and share loss" is just a nice way of saying that Intel continues to be unable to make a competitive CPU product since moving on from it's 14nm line launched in Q4 2014.

      That's 5 generations of bleeding edge fabs that have failed to deliver competitive products.

      Sure, Intel managed to add makeup and new names to 14nm to hide the fab failures for a few generations but the moneys going to run out for gen-next.

  2. Pelican Express

    crypto ASIC ?

    Not a single world on Intel line of business about the crypto ASICs ?

    There are still people doing crypto mining, right?

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: crypto ASIC ?

      "There are still people doing crypto mining, right?"

      That is just so last year.

  3. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Trollface

    Sleepy Shores

    Oh no! Halthaus stopped the project.

    This is what happens when you become complacent. You saw that you're approaching the end of the line of what you can wring out of your core product. Competing technologies arose and techniques changed. And yet, even with all these MBAs sitting around, you could not come up with another product that people would actually want to buy? Kind of like at the place where Apple found themselves in the early 1990s. Nokia (in the old days) and 3M spring to mind as examples of companies that were able to adjust their business models radically. Apple survived with some cash from Microsoft; maybe AMD can come to Intel's rescue? Not sure if a bunch of accountants can devise a plan for new products to attract tech customers though. The tech graveyard is filled with once super successful companies that just wilted and died: Lotus, Borland, WordPerfect, DEC, Novell, ...

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: Sleepy Shores

      Indeed.

      Beancounters are not the ones to think of successful new products.

      Meanwhile, "The board remains intensely focused ". Gosh, what a surprise. That bunch of suits needs to find someone that will give them their next quarter of share returns.

      They don't give a flying one about the tens of thousands of people who are trying to work at their company . . .

    2. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Re: Sleepy Shores

      "Can't" is not tested. What we see here is "actively decided not to". Getting back into first place with a top quality product would have required a large amount of money for a long time. Invest that money with the leading competitors and the return comes quicker with less risk. Given the lack of available resources then only sensible thing for Intel to do is aim lower. That has been a viable long term strategy in the past. Mass produced cheap gave a bigger return than niche market excellent because of economies of scale. That return funded the next generation of faster and less cheap for a smaller market.

      I do not know if this strategy can still work or if Intel can implement it but investors are giving them the option to jump back in the lead with money.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Sleepy Shores

        It's not "actively decided not to" - it's "can't get the investors to cough up another $20bn to finance another roll of the dice".

        Investing huge amounts of money into new fabs that don't deliver expected profits means getting the next round of investment is difficult and Intel have failed at 10/10+/7 and it appears 5 and 4 are not the answer based on the seemingly empty road map for 2025. Fingers crossed for 18A...

        The premise is that this is an engineering problem rather than an accounting problem. The truth is that it's an accounting problem until the engineers have a viable underlying process to build products on. Until then, investors look elsewhere.

        Or maybe Intels future hopes lay in a Chinese invasion taking out their competition?

    3. Mage Silver badge
      Alert

      Re: Sleepy Shores

      Nokia. Paper, wellies, TVs, Setboxes, mobile and now Infrastructure (hoovered up Motorola & Siemens divisions of that).

      Intel would never have been significant except IBM chose the 8088* for the PC. IBM gone from that and many of the PC makers now make more from tablets, chromebooks and phones. Itanium was a failed 64 bit idea from HP and Intel had to use AMD's x64. They had an ARM licence and the i960 RISC had promise. They got a load of ARM stuff from DEC, but sold most of it to Marvell. They bought Altera, but seem to have messed that up. Optane never materialised, Lost the plot buying McAfee.

      The shoots of Doom was Smartphones and other stuff swtiching from 486 to ARM. Atom Netbooks & Tablets abysmal.

      Apple: 68000, Power PC, x86 32 bit, x64, ARM.

      The recent Intel CPU voltage fiasco.

      (* And the 186, 286 poor, first 386 had bugs and you needed the revised stepping for the 386, the first serious 16 bit CPU from intel)

      1. ReggieRegReg

        Re: Sleepy Shores

        Correct - Intel have been one big fustercluck who simply used their unearned position to bully their way to market dominance - yes there were some class-leading IA64 Intel products along the way (mostly due to fab advantages) but I have steadfastly bought AMD - even in the dark days of Bulldozer etc - out of principle! AMD did RISC core decoding x86 before Intel too - although thinking back it could have been Cyrix who did it first (with IBM's help) even so - it wasn't Intel!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Itanium was a failed 64 bit idea from HP

        Actually, Itanium was intel's idea. Back then HP already had a very fine high performance CPU architecture, developed by HP and named PA-RISC. Which powered its UNIX (HP-UX) based HP9000 series of workstations, servers and supercomputers. PA-RISC also ended up as GPU on HP's Visualize series of graphics cards which gave SiliconGraphics (back then the 3D gfx powerhouse) a run for their money.

        And then there was Alpha AXP, another powerful CPU architecture HP got when they assimilated Compaq.

        So there wasn't really a need for another CPU architecture, but for some reason intel was able to talk HP into sacrificing all that for it's new IA64 architecture, probably assuming intel's clout would make it a success.

    4. Robert 22

      Re: Sleepy Shores

      Reminds me a bit of the business examples outlined in the book "The Innovator's Dilemma."

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lotus, Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, ...

    Murdered by Microsoft

    DEC murdered by HP.

    1. ReggieRegReg

      Re: Lotus, Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, ...

      All had seen better days - couldn't keep up. And I'm no Microshaft apologist.

  5. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    "You saw that you're approaching the end of the line

    of what you can wring out of your core product. "

    when you look into the deep history of Intel you find sooo much of it was a)Got a contract to make someone else's processor b)Contract fell through c)Intel releases a chip anyway.

    That's basically the 8085.

    Even it's peripheral chips had substantial processors built into them.

    What would happen to Intel sales if people didn't feel they had to run Windows on Intel processors?

    What would happen if someone came to Microsoft and said "We will design a processor optimised to execute Windows*, and we'll give you a chunk of the profits to do so" ?

    *Everything else, not so much.

    1. sw guy

      Re: "You saw that you're approaching the end of the line

      If I remember correctly, it was not the 8085, but the 4004.

      (and then 4004 → 8008 → 8080 → 8085 …)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "You saw that you're approaching the end of the line

        British company CTC designed a product that intel manufactured and marketed as the 8008 . It wasn't their design.

        1. ReggieRegReg

          Re: "You saw that you're approaching the end of the line

          If only a small British company could come up with something as amazing as Arm - a world-beating super project - Nah, they'd probably throw it all away for tuppence at the first sign of a profit - no, wait...

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: "You saw that you're approaching the end of the line

      "What would happen to Intel sales if people didn't feel they had to run Windows on Intel processors?"

      A lot, but how would we get from where we are to there? AMD64, including both Intel and AMD parts, is in use because it is fast and cheap. Most other ISAs don't achieve similar levels, with ARM as the primary other example. Maybe RISC-V or Loongson or something else will be similarly fast and cheap some years from now, but it isn't today, so people today buy one of those two. Even ARM is still missing some sectors of the market; they've got chips covering the low end up to laptops and they've got massive tons-of-cores chips for servers, but they don't have something for desktops or laptops requiring more performance than average. Well they kind of do, but only Apple has them and you don't get to run much on them. So AMD64 it is and will be until that sector gets filled in. That goes for Linux and BSD too.

      "What would happen if someone came to Microsoft and said "We will design a processor optimised to execute Windows*, and we'll give you a chunk of the profits to do so" ?"

      Microsoft would be happy. They'd say "yes please" and sign that agreement. Then they'd leave the meeting and not think about those people for several years while the processor designers spend their own money trying to make a new ISA from scratch. If, by some miracle, those people succeeded, Microsoft would recompile Windows for the thing and, since by definition it would run well if they designed the processor specifically for it, they'd have another product line to sell. They would probably need to write X64 emulation for that new ISA again, which they would do because they already saw what not having it does to an operating system (everybody hates Windows RT) and what having it does for one (Windows on ARM still going strong and gaining more acceptance).

  6. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Just when it actually looked like they may have a winner on their hands for budget GPUs.

    Seeing as nvidia has completely lost its marbles (the 5090 prices in Aus are, as expected, around 5 grand, plus the cost of my private power plant to run it). And AMD seems to now quite know what they want to do with theirs: catch up to nvidia or compete in the mid consumer market.

    1. Like a badger

      Agreed. By announcing they're not releasing the next gen GPU, they're killing consumer confidence in Intel GPUs. We know how this goes, with declining GPU income and no future release driver support for existing products will shrivel. They might as well have canned Jaguar Shores, because by the time they get round to launch Intel will be for all intents and purposes a new entrant in the market, just as they were back in 2022. So come Jaguar Shores, they'll have an interesting product, but starting from scratch. The big two won't have stood still, so it won't be an easy market, and sales will be small, but probably growing. After 9-12 months, Intel's then CEO will say "hey guys, Jaguar Shores isn't meeting our return criteria and we're not seeing the market share we think we deserve, so we're canning it, and going back to the drawing board".

      Fair enough, it's their commercial call, and it's lean times at Intel right now, but even if they release Jaguar Shores that's potentially going to be in time for the bursting of the AI bubble and a collapse in the GPU market?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I missed it if the consumer GPU follow-on to just launched Battlemage was cancelled as well, as I thought Falcon Shores was the AI chip.

        Maybe Intel has decided the AI bubble did just burst?

        1. FrankAlphaXII

          Correct, Falcon Shores is/was the AI GPU. The successor to Battlemage is supposed to be Celestial and after that, Druid. We'll see if they happen but that was the plan anyway.

  7. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

    Executive Search

    I wonder if Intel's trouble finding a CEO is due to the board's expectation/job requirement/KPI being, "Get Intel back into the black within a year," and all potential candidates to date saying, "Nope."

    1. cb7

      Re: Executive Search

      I think they're having trouble because there's a dearth of people who understand how to make cutting edge fabs work.

      Intel has been struggling with process node improvements for nearly a decade.

      They've had yield problems with new nodes time and time again. Which new CEO in their right mind would want to drink from that poisoned chalice?

      The only way to fix Intel is to put people in place who can RCA the yield issues and come up with workable solutions.

      I'm not sure anyone's doing that.

      1. Like a badger

        Re: Executive Search

        From long observation, troubled companies rarely put in a new CEO who knows anything about process or product, they'll go for a corporate breadhead to please Wall Street.

  8. Grunchy Silver badge

    I remember when the USA deficit exceeded $350 billion: that’s when you borrow $1 billion each and every day just to keep the lights on in this joint!

    Of course the deficit then quickly exceeded $1 trillion, that’s where we have to borrow $1 billion every 8 hrs.

    Or, $2 trillion, where we gotta borrow $1 billion every 4 hrs.

    (If it costs $6 billion a day to keep the wheels on this bus, how long can you do that before you just declare bankruptcy? Or maybe it doesn’t matter since everyone else in the world is bankrupt?? Shrug?)

    1. Like a badger

      "If it costs $6 billion a day to keep the wheels on this bus, how long can you do that before you just declare bankruptcy? Or maybe it doesn’t matter since everyone else in the world is bankrupt?? Shrug?"

      For a country that isn't the world's reserve currency, yes they go bankrupt, and either descend to become a failed state*, or the IMF get called in to sort out the mess. But when you're the world's reserve currency, then people just accept the debt on the collective assumption it will be honoured (ie leaving your kids and their kids to pay it off). In practice what happens is with so much made-up moolah sloshing round the world, we get inflation and prices go up because the currency becomes worth less.

      Much of Europe is in the same mess, except that we've got sluggish growth and aren't reserve currencies. Although what all this has to do with Intel I'm not really sure.

      * Y'know, sort of place where the president is a lying, thieving kleptocratic bully who doesn't abide by the laws, shouts at everybody, blames everybody else and every other country in the world whilst making things much worse.

    2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Coming soon to the USA

      Trump, the one person in all of humanity to bankrupt a Casino AND the world's largest economy.

      Gotta give those 1%'ers a monster tax cut....

      That event will make 1929 seem like a mere blip on the horizon. He'll blame Biden, Hillary, Obama and all those 'Woke' people for his failure despite hiring the best people in the world. Yeah right.

      On his tombstone will be the words, 'I did nothing wrong'. and 'I know more about everything than anyone'.

      If I had my way, he'd eat this the next time he cheats at golf [see icon]

      That said, I'm 3000 miles away from him and have no plans to travel to the USA while he still breathes air.

      1. Adair Silver badge

        Re: Coming soon to the USA

        Upvoted for balance.

      2. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

        Re: Coming soon to the USA

        The Republicans should come clean and rename themselves the "tax breaks for the rich party". They don't give a rat's patoot about anyone who isn't pulling in at least a million a year...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      All that public sector debt is private sector income; guess who ends up paying if the government decides to slash the debt.

  9. Numen

    Wonder when they'll finish announcing the Xeon 6s?

    After June and September announcements in 2024, there were more configurations to come, but no hint yet. And I've noticed the big server folks haven't really announced serious systems using any Xeon 6s either.

    This cant be good - AMD's Turin is shipping; where's Intel?

  10. Bitsminer Silver badge

    "...our world class design,"

    If you have to say "world class design", it probably isn't.

    1. nautica Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: "...our world class design,"

      One of my favorite sayings is, "If you have to tell people you have class, you don't."

  11. Irongut Silver badge

    co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus

    "Thanks Steve!"

  12. JustAnotherDistro

    "Based on industry feedback, we plan to leverage Falcon shores as an internal test chip only, without bringing it to market."

    It seems to be an industry requirement never to leverage the word "use."

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Board listen, nod heads, mutter "She seems to know all the right words.."

      1. ReggieRegReg

        >I'm going to put you in IT because you said you have a lot of experience with computers.

        I did say that on my CV yes, I have a lot of experience with the whole computer, thing...

        You know, emails, sending emails, receiving emails, deleting emails.

        Erm, I could go on.

        >Do

        The web, using a mouse, mices, using mice... Clicking, double clicking. erm, the computer screen of course, the keyboard, the bit that goes on the floor down there.

        >The hard drive?

        Correct.

        >Well, you certainly know your stuff!

        >Settled. Got a good feeling about you Jen.

        1. ecofeco Silver badge

          Meanwhile low rung peons have to take 2 hour tests and 4 interviews and MUST know the current fashionista tech of the day and already have 10 years experience in it.

  13. ReggieRegReg

    Boo Hoo!

    It took AMD graft and inventiveness to keep Intel's ageing architecture relevant while Intel headed off an Itanium cliff - and Intel repaid them by trying to smash them into atoms. Well BooHoo!

  14. ecofeco Silver badge
    Pirate

    19B in the red?

    Oh for the quaint old days when being $1 billion in debt would wipe out a company.

    Today? 19 billion? La di da. And that's JUST one company!

    Meanwhile, us peons are just being greedy and lazy asking for a living wage. It's no mystery why they can't pay us and inflation is rampant. They're literally burning the money and making US pay for it!

    SUCKERS!!

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: 19B in the red?

      Have you tried blaming:

      Mexicans

      Chinese

      Trans

      Women

      Jews Muslims

      Gingers

      1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

        Re: 19B in the red?

        Don't forget, if all else fails, Blame Canada, the so-called "partner" Drumpf's previous administration signed the free trade agreements with and is now claiming is responsible for all the Americans economic woes.

        Which of course means that in the end, Drumpf is blaming the Drumpf administration for the US economy being in the Xitter ..

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: 19B in the red?

          Fortunately his voter base don't have object permanence

      2. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: 19B in the red?

        Actually I saw this word the other day, I swear, and wish I was making this up:

        "..those damn wokies...", in the exact context of blaming everyone but the psychopathic rich.

  15. gnasher729 Silver badge

    Apples goal for 2025

    Make more profit than Intel loses. 2024 was easy, 2025 will be harder.

    1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

      Re: Apples goal for 2025

      Even though I'm not willing to pay "The Apple Tax" for the brand, props to the company for delivering products that are in demand, perform reasonably well, and are more secure than "mainstream" operating systems are from Microsquishy.

  16. Kev99 Silver badge

    Cash money in the red? Or just AICPA smoke & mirrors accounting red? Probably the latter so they can avoid paying taxes.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like