back to article Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter

Any hope Intel may have had of challenging rivals Nvidia and AMD for a slice of the AI accelerator market dissolved on Thursday as yet another GPU architecture was scrapped. Falcon Shores, which was due out this year and was expected to combine the best of Intel's Xe Graphics capabilities with Gaudi's AI grunt, will never …

  1. cookiecutter

    Dead company

    Intel have been a text book example of the decline of western tech. The priority of MBAs over techies. The products are old And tired. The quality is awful. How are tsmc so far ahead? Stock buybacks over invention.

    Time to put it out of our misery and let a new company take over. I remember when you'd buy Intel first over anything else. These days I avoid them first

    1. fg_swe Silver badge

      Ampere

      I switched to ARM for my web server CPU and it works very nicely. All I had to do was a recompile of the web server.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ampere

        You didn't rewrite it in Sappeur first?

        1. fg_swe Silver badge

          Already Is

          https://gauss.di-fg.de/

    2. W@ldo

      Re: Dead company

      Funny you mention stock buybacks....I wish Intel would buyback the stock I still hold from 20+ years ago. The dotcom bust dropped Intel from the low $100s to $20-$30 per share. The dividends are decent, but total investment + dividends is still way negative. Intel lost focus with its various acquisitions, which continued to put pressure on their price per share.

      I know any stock can lose value, but I truly expected Intel to be one of the best stocks to have for growth long term. Lesson learned!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Dead company

        What they need to do is make the ARC GPU drivers and docs as prevalent as NVIDIA. Those GPU are decent little AI performers, but you need to jump through a lot of hoops to get them to be recognized and work optimally. Their cost is low and very attractive for home lab experimentation.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dead company

          Agreed. I think Arc is the best thing Intel has right now. The beancounters will probably axe it at some point though if not they will do something dumb like outsource it...they have form when it comes to kneecapping themselves with outsourced chips...I think quite a few of us here will remember the "Poulsbo" GMA500 fiasco. I think that chip single-handedly wrecked a large number of otherwise promising products...I believe it was a factor that helped accelerate the decline of the Viao laptop division at Sony...there was an entire range of laptops they launched that had that specific chip in and all of them were absolute garbage...it wasn't helped by the piss poor performance of Vista at the time either...what Sony ended up releasing were some of the slowest, crappiest laptops I've ever used...but the form factors were amazing. If not for the shitty Atom CPU / Poulsbo combination...the P11 series might not have died off.

  2. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Intel missed out on AI

    So that's like saying I'm missing out on smoking cigarettes. I don't see that as a bad thing.

    1. Sandtitz Silver badge
      WTF?

      Re: Intel missed out on AI

      Wrong.

      Nvidia didn't miss out on AI - and have had tremendous success selling as many $25,000 GPU cards they can make because of the huge demand. Similarly Nvidia made a lots of money when crypto mining was hip thing a decade ago. (still is?)

      AMD is making money with their own data center GPU's.

      Intel isn't because they missed out.

      Whether there's any point in AI itself is another debate, but Intel would rather be making money than hemorrhaging it. It wouldn't be unhealthy to them at all - akin to smoking cigarettes - to sell more products for profit.

    2. big_D Silver badge

      Re: Intel missed out on AI

      For client computing, sure, at the moment the need for AI isn't that big. There are some enthusiast models and the little bits of OS integration... The market is still very confused.

      In the datacenter, on the other hand, there is a lot of money being invested - Microsoft want to invest $80b this year alone. That is a big market to have no part in, when datacenter is supposed to be one of Intels 2 big revenue areas.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Intel missed out on AI

        Try to find a copy of the 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay ... Here it is at Project Gutenberg:

        https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

        It's tulips and the mid-1630s all over again. Learn history, or be doomed to repeat it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Intel missed out on AI

          The AI bubble might be the first actual example where tulip mania as a reference applies...tulip mania is an example of supply, demand and saturation...not really speculation...I don't think there is a whole heck of a lot of speculation going on in the AI world, but there is a whole lot of supply, demand and now, thanks to Deepseek, saturation at play.

  3. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

    I didn't even bother reading up on the Intel processors when I built my last three boxes. The writing was in from the reviews - AMD was eating their lunch for performance when those boxes were built.

    I don't expect that to change in the future, and it still hasn't as of writing this date.

    Intel is dead. RIP.

    1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

      "Intel Inside" is no longer a positive selling point to anyone except the kind of naive mentality that would still trust Oracle or IBM consulting services to actually deliver even vaguely on time, and on budget.

      Anyone paying attention knows all three companies have been MBA'd into obsolescence.

    2. big_D Silver badge

      They are still walking (limping?)... Possibly to hecklers shouting dead man waking!

  4. jake Silver badge

    "Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter"

    Or perhaps Intel is the only sane one, and has seen past the marketing hype and realized that when it comes to AI, there is no there there.

    The next couple years will tell all.

    1. Ace2 Silver badge

      Re: "Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter"

      The boat is taking on water…

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: "Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter"

      Occam's razor suggests it's just yet another example of Intel not being able to get a new product out there.

    3. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      Re: "Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter"

      Either they've recognised that they're too late to the party, or they're floundering

    4. big_D Silver badge

      Re: "Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter"

      You mean like they did with powerful and energy efficient processors laptops? Or powerful and efficient processors for smartphones?

      How did those Intel powered Android phones fair?

      One of the main reasons for WoA was Intel ignoring Microsoft's and the industry's call for more efficient processors for laptops. It took a long time for Intel to get the message, but, luckily on the client Windows side, a lot of people still treat Intel as the modern day IBM (nobody got fired for buying Intel)... It took Qualcomm many years to get a laptop class processor that was any good, but when they did, it suddenly made Intel sit up and take notice. They are about there with performance, but not efficiency, and AMD are attacking them from the other side.

      AI in the datacenter is just another in a string of missed opportunities.

      Even if datacenter AI is marketing hype, it is a several hundred billion dollar hype at the moment and companies like nVidia are raking it in, they can't manufacturer the chips fast enough; Intel on the other hand can't even get their designs out the door...

  5. VoiceOfTruth

    Intel Graphics

    AKA not very good graphics. Intel graphics on any laptop was not just a deal breaker, it wouldn't even make the short list. I never understood why they trumpeted it, given how poor it was. It might as we

    "combine the best of Intel's Xe Graphics capabilities"

    There's two ways to look at this: 1, it raises Xe up somewhere. 2, it drags down the thing it combines with.

    1. david 12 Silver badge

      Re: Intel Graphics

      Xe graphics was tightly bound to the CPU. It offered good economic value for CPU-bound graphics, very good value for video decompression, relatively low power requirements, and a compact implementation. That's "laptops", but it might also have a place in "racks".

    2. Sandtitz Silver badge

      Re: Intel Graphics

      "AKA not very good graphics. Intel graphics on any laptop was not just a deal breaker, it wouldn't even make the short list."

      Perhaps if you're a gamer and prioritise 3D.

      For most office work and outside of casual gamers, Intel graphics are perfectly fine. They sip less power than Nvidia/AMD offerings which on a laptop is a big plus.

    3. GNU Enjoyer
      Angel

      Re: Intel Graphics

      Old Intel Integrated chipsets are good, as there is a free driver, including native BIOS init (for the thinkpads), meaning you get full-resolution GRUB graphics displaying the GNU boot.

      As for graphical performance, they render the church of Emacs just fine and even renders 3D free software games at playable framerates.

      Too bad newer ones are handcuffed to ensure they cannot be used in freedom (although the BIOS/UEFI loads most of the proprietary software, so when you boot Trisquel graphics works fine).

  6. Howard Sway Silver badge

    Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

    It's impossible and wearying to keep up with what all these stupid names actually mean that they insist on putting on the never ending stream of new chip architectures they keep releasing. If they released chips with boring names like PCSeries, LaptopSeries, ServerSeries or GPUSeries customers would at least have a vague idea what they all were. The imagineering team in the marketing department may however become surplus to requirements, to worldwide rejoicing.

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

      Intel makes heaters disguised as CPUs, so more appropriate would be:

      LivingRoomSeries, BathroomSeries, BedroomSeries, WarehouseSeries etc.

      Depending on what kind of interior you want to heat.

    2. david bates

      Re: Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

      Quite why you would use Jaguar in your name i cannot imagine.

      The console was a flop and the car company seems hell bent on suicide.

      1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        Re: Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

        And the "Jaguar" codename was used by AMD for low power/8th gen gaming console APUs, about ten years ago.

      2. Andrew Scott Bronze badge

        Re: Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

        Well i often wonder what kind of person buys a car called a "Rogue". Is that the way they think of themselves or is it an aspirational thing?

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

        Not to mention that every Intel CPU named after a kind of cat has been shit. Puma anyone?

    3. druck Silver badge

      Re: Granite Shores, Lunar Lake, Gaudi3, Jaguar Shores

      They've use the names of mountains, lakes and forests, given their current situation it's probably time to start on deserts.

  7. nautica Silver badge
    Boffin

    Why do you use so many words, El Reg ?

    From the title--"Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter"

    You would have been "spot on" (highly accurate, and certainly more succinct) to have simply said

    "Intel has missed the boat"

    1. Dostoevsky Bronze badge

      Re: Why do you use so many words, El Reg ?

      You could even drop the present perfect, e.g. "Intel missed the boat..."

  8. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Jaguar

    Jaguar tanked Atari, will it tank Intel?

    1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      Re: Jaguar

      Jaguar was one of AMD's best-selling microarchitectures, on account of being found in both the Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

      Didn't make AMD as much money as you'd think, though...

      1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

        Re: Jaguar

        Maybe it has tick tock pattern...

  9. HuBo Silver badge
    Holmes

    "Don't count [an Intel] comeback out just yet"

    I guess it'll depend on who they get to be CEO really, after that rather abrupt crowbarred axing defenestration of Gelsinger. Speaking of whom, as he's now getting his Gloo engineers to rebuild Kallm in 2 weeks using DeepSeek R1 (presumably on 120-TOPS Lunar Lakes), one has to wonder how that portly model from the PRC handles the theological subject area, which may not be its forte (given the "godless communists" cliché). With R1 censored around Tiananmen Square and Taiwan, one may wonder how well it handles religion and related activities? (eg. its strengths might be elsewhere, in low cost, small size, ability to run on less performant hardware, ...)

    Irrespective, Intel needs a trustworthy tech-oriented CEO imho (much as Gelsinger was).

    1. fg_swe Silver badge

      Strategic Mistake

      Gelsinger was not strong enough to cut the fabs lose from the mothership, despite everybody seeing that their fabs were long behind TSMC.

      A long time ago, fabs were Intel's strength, but these days TSMC looks unbeatable. Intel is too much of a "vertically integrated" operation. Similar to what IBM and HP were, a long time ago.

      In the age of dozen-billion $ fabs, the economic pressure is such that these expensive fabs must be shared by lots of enterprises. TSMC serves Apple, Nvidia, AMD, IBM, Broadcom etc. Intel fabs only serve Intel, which is incredibly weak, economically speaking.

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