> I mean I could be wrong, but Intel has gotta be looking at Nvidia's Hopper or AMD's MI300 DATA oriented architectures and wondering why the Arc team is trying to make $750 gaming computers.
That's the same strategy AMD has tried with ROCm (de-facto pro-only compute ecosystem) and it hasn't worked. Nobody is going to buy a $5000 accelerator card (or even rent AWS time) just to tinker with your ecosystem unless it's already known to be the bees' knees. NVIDIA built their success by making sure their cards were the first thing people reached for when they wanted to build a high-performance application on a compute accelerator.
Further, there's a lot of redundant work and overlapping lines of business here. You have to develop game drivers for the iGPU for anyone to take you seriously, so at that point why not make the dGPU cards and increase the ROI multiplier of your work? Or are you planning on outsourcing the whole shebang and just licensing a hardware SIP core and a driver stack? There's really only two other names with a credible Windows/Linux driver stack... NVIDIA and AMD. Imagination/PowerVR don't have any windows presence, and Intel already tried this back in the early Atom era and it fucking sucked.
Like yea you've actually pointed out the exact reason they won't cut it: Hopper or MI300 is where the HPC and performance-compute segments are going and you can't be credible in that space without an internal solution for the accelerator half. It doesn't have to be GPUs, or they don't need to have graphics pipelines, but once you are doing all the work to develop the GPGPU side, you might as well make a variant with a pixel pipeline and display outputs and sell it to enthusiasts too.
The semiconductor space has a lot of these overlaps in product verticals, and if you choose not to be in them, you're leaving revenue on the table that is relatively "cheap" to access. The same CPU uarchs that work in enterprise work in consumer, and in the grand scheme of things re-using the same uarch for a low-margin product is fine. You'd never pay to develop the product from scratch just for the consumer market, but once you've done the work, you might as well sell it to consumers too. If you're doing consumer, you probably want to be doing laptop too, but those need iGPUs. Which need drivers, and if you're doing drivers you might as well do dGPUs too.
Intel doesn't need to be exactly AMD, but AMD has gone through this and already cut to the bone on everything they didn't need. You can draw a circle around the product verticals they're in and they've pretty much identified the core business requirements for the CPU/GPU markets.
You're right though that Gelsinger is obviously stripping the business down to his own vision of those essentials. I just think right now the evidence indicates that GPUs are still a part of that vision. You can't be competitive in HPC without GPGPU, you can't do laptop without iGPU, they might as well do gaming GPUs too, especially since a lot of the GPGPU research will overlap. The drivers don't, but you have to do them for iGPU anyway for laptops.
The fabs are the rough one though. They're expensive as shit, but all intel's legacy IP uses them, and the only thing the fabs run is Intel's IP. I think he's serious about building the wall between IP and fab at intel, and about bringing in external business, but right now there is no hope of even a GloFo-style spinoff working. It would absolutely take down both halves of the company to even try.
He's definitely got a tough road, Intel's pain is only just beginning and it's going to be a long time to profitability.
That's the same strategy AMD has tried with ROCm (de-facto pro-only compute ecosystem) and it hasn't worked. Nobody is going to buy a $5000 accelerator card (or even rent AWS time) just to tinker with your ecosystem unless it's already known to be the bees' knees. NVIDIA built their success by making sure their cards were the first thing people reached for when they wanted to build a high-performance application on a compute accelerator.
Further, there's a lot of redundant work and overlapping lines of business here. You have to develop game drivers for the iGPU for anyone to take you seriously, so at that point why not make the dGPU cards and increase the ROI multiplier of your work? Or are you planning on outsourcing the whole shebang and just licensing a hardware SIP core and a driver stack? There's really only two other names with a credible Windows/Linux driver stack... NVIDIA and AMD. Imagination/PowerVR don't have any windows presence, and Intel already tried this back in the early Atom era and it fucking sucked.
Like yea you've actually pointed out the exact reason they won't cut it: Hopper or MI300 is where the HPC and performance-compute segments are going and you can't be credible in that space without an internal solution for the accelerator half. It doesn't have to be GPUs, or they don't need to have graphics pipelines, but once you are doing all the work to develop the GPGPU side, you might as well make a variant with a pixel pipeline and display outputs and sell it to enthusiasts too.
The semiconductor space has a lot of these overlaps in product verticals, and if you choose not to be in them, you're leaving revenue on the table that is relatively "cheap" to access. The same CPU uarchs that work in enterprise work in consumer, and in the grand scheme of things re-using the same uarch for a low-margin product is fine. You'd never pay to develop the product from scratch just for the consumer market, but once you've done the work, you might as well sell it to consumers too. If you're doing consumer, you probably want to be doing laptop too, but those need iGPUs. Which need drivers, and if you're doing drivers you might as well do dGPUs too.
Intel doesn't need to be exactly AMD, but AMD has gone through this and already cut to the bone on everything they didn't need. You can draw a circle around the product verticals they're in and they've pretty much identified the core business requirements for the CPU/GPU markets.
You're right though that Gelsinger is obviously stripping the business down to his own vision of those essentials. I just think right now the evidence indicates that GPUs are still a part of that vision. You can't be competitive in HPC without GPGPU, you can't do laptop without iGPU, they might as well do gaming GPUs too, especially since a lot of the GPGPU research will overlap. The drivers don't, but you have to do them for iGPU anyway for laptops.
The fabs are the rough one though. They're expensive as shit, but all intel's legacy IP uses them, and the only thing the fabs run is Intel's IP. I think he's serious about building the wall between IP and fab at intel, and about bringing in external business, but right now there is no hope of even a GloFo-style spinoff working. It would absolutely take down both halves of the company to even try.
He's definitely got a tough road, Intel's pain is only just beginning and it's going to be a long time to profitability.