Man I hope Battlemage is an actually profitable launch, or at least not a massive loss. Otherwise who knows if the next CEO will axe their GPU line. People liked to fearmonger them killing Arc before, with with a new change in management I can actually see that happening.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Its a lower midrange only launch like it appears to be, it will be extremely unprofitable. AMD may even eat large chunks of this market with the Strix Halo APU, which could be similar to the B570 with no need for a discrete GPU.
Theres actually a big and growing demand for ANY high VRAM GPU for the LLM crowd (that AMD is ignoring for inexplicable reasons beyond Strix Halo) but it appears Intel can't even compete there. No 256 bit APU, their GPU is 192 bit so capped at like 24GB...
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Losing 16 billion dollars totally has nothing to do with this at all. Its time for Pat to pursue some creative hobbies at home, enjoy his retirement, and be with his family. There are no American troops in Baghdad, everything is fine, Intel is fine, and will soon be back to doing great things. Just ask Userbenchmark, Intel products are the best in class and highly sought after. nVidia has no real advantage in the AI race, and Intel is just dominating.
That 16 billion is just a brief hiccup, company is totally about to do great.
Maybe now they can forget all the expensive chipmaking and get back to their core business of stock buybacks.
That's probably the real reason. He was going to invest all that money instead of doing more stock buybacks. What an idiot!
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This simultaneously made me laugh and sad. Sad because I have heavy investments in Intel.
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So what IS their strategy now?
Some of Pat's initiatives were good (stay the course with Xe and fabs, which take a long time to pan out), but they kept delaying everything!
Yet Intel is kind of screwed without good graphics or ML IP.
If they spin off the fabs, I feel like they are really screwed, as they will be left with nothing but shrinking businesses and no multi year efforts to get out of it.
Like... Even theoretically, I dont know what I would do to right Intel as CEO unless they can fix whatever is causing consistent delays, and clearly thats not happening. What is their path?
If they spin off the fabs, I feel like they are really screwed
One of the stipulations of the $8B in CHIPS Act funding that they just recieved last month was that they not separate their fabrication business from the parent company. That's unlikely to happen now unless it gets separated at a bankruptcy auction.
unless they can fix whatever is causing consistent delays
Yup, that's their #1 goal right now. If I were CEO, I'd cut/sell any part of the business that doesn't directly support CPU and GPU sales, which is basically what Intel is doing. My priorities would be:
- rescue server CPU business - this is their main money printing machine, and while they may lose to ARM in the future, they need a cash cow in the medium term
- get a competent server-oriented GPU product out - they're late to the game, but they can bundle them w/ their server CPU contracts to get some market share; overwhelm these corporate customers with first class driver support
- get something to compete w/ Apple's M1 - this means super low-power CPU that can scale to gaming workloads, and capable-enough graphics (something a bit better than AMD's APUs); sell this near cost to keep a foot in the door in the mobile space
- sell domestic fab capacity - now is the time to get Sony and Microsoft on board with their next gen consoles, and it might not be too late for Nintendo
I would essentially ignore desktop workloads and solve workstation workloads w/ server chips. To me, those sound like the highest margin businesses that they could potentially still capture, and at least 1 & 2 are a bit less sensitive to being behind on their fab process (corporate contracts respond pretty well to bundle discounts).
This probably wouldn't work though, especially since I'm an outside observer with zero industry experience. But I think a good CEO would do something along those lines, which seems to be what Pat Gelsinger was going for as well.
If I were CEO, I’d cut/sell any part of the business that doesn’t directly support CPU and GPU sales, which is basically what Intel is doing.
That's pretty much what they did. They sold off most of the "other" stuff, like their modem division, shut down their SSD division, sold part of Mobileye shares in the IPO, and reportedly Intel is looking to sell part of Altera, their FPGA division.
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They tried all this:
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Not sure about this, but it appears AMD is simply out designing them. Some concepts like the many-little-core SKUs seem promising, but ultimately the EPYC MCM design is fundamentally very good here. And... Delays. Delays are killing them here.
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This was Xe-HPC, the Falcon Shores APU, the Falcon Shores GPU, Gaudi... They're so late to everything it didn't work and it appears they've basically given up on the whole line besides consumer inference products, which is also kinda meager atm. And even AMD is mightily struggling here, with hardware that is straight up bigger/faster than Nvidia.
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An M Pro esque chip was also in the plans, but seemingly canceled? Or way behind AMD, at least. And OEMs have repeatedly rejected their GPU heavy designs like Broadwell eDRAM and the AMD collab chip, as they're kinda idiots and Intel is at their mercy. And the laptop chips they are selling now are basically their best shot at an "M" chip and arguably one of their most decent products.
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They tried, and no one bit. Who can blame them, given Intel's history of delays?
Its all the delays! Its destroying them.
I mean I'd guess I'd press on with Xe if I were CEO, but if they can't launch anything on time what does it matter?
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