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I'm still convinced by Intel's and Pat's XPU strategy. Having a well rounded portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, and FPGAs that all work flawlessly, alongside a comprehensive software environment to make cross-platform development easier (their OneAPI stack) is a dream for any OEM/ODM; provided it works.

Their issue at the moment isn't strategy. It's execution. Axing their GPU division would only hurt their current plan, and do nothing to fix the the systematic problem that they're missing deadline's and shipping incomplete products. From the outside looking in, it seems like there's some fat that needs trimming and people aren't pulling their weight. If they can scale back to efficient team and org sizes, cut the side projects, and focus on excellent software and hardware validation, I can see them pulling this off and Pat being lauded as a hero.

People I know who develop high performance systems are so indifferent to OpenCL it's hard for me to picture what could make people develop for OpenCL.

There is such a long term history of failure here that somebody has to make a very strong case that the next time is going to be different and I've never seen anyone at Intel try that or even recognize that history of failure.

Execution is about engineers. Intel can't retain their engineers. Without good engineers you can't compete. So you downsize and try compete only on one thing -- better x86. Pat Gs return as CEO does help with engineer retention though.
Part of strategy is knowing what your organization is capable of, and not burning time and money trying to do something you can't execute effectively.

I mean, "make the fastest CPUs and GPUs and charge a premium" would be a great strategy if they could deliver. But in a world where they're struggling to keep up on the CPU side, pouring resources into GPUs could lose them both markets.

You may well be right but if each of the individual components of that portfolio is worse than the competition then it will be an uphill struggle.
XPU is too generic a term and harmful looking at it from a business perspective.
> provided it works

Ay, there's the rub!

isnt that amd rn
>Started in 2016 the dGPU group snatched showboater Raja Koduri away from AMD

We are in 2022 I still dont understand why Raja is popular. One of the reason why I have been extremely sceptical of Intel's GPU since the very beginning. To the point I got a lot of bashing on Anandtech and HN.

And I have been mentioning drivers as the major concern since 2016. Citing PowerVR Kyro on Desktop as an example. Even pointing that out on Twitter. With one of the Intel Engineers on the GPU team replied something as "GPU Drivers is a solved problem".

I do love to be wrong. But it is increasingly looking like another item to be added to my book of prediction that came true.

I'm with you here. At AMD, Koduri released GPU after GPU that was slow, terribly hot and inefficient, plagued by driver problems, and overpriced. He left on terrible terms for a number of reasons, but one of them was his complaint that Radeon was underfunded and deprioritized, so he couldn't compete with Nvidia. Here we are, six years of practically unlimited funding and support from a company with a greater R&D budget than AMD's entire 2016 gross...

and he's done the exact same thing.

Honestly, I'm in the same boat as you, until I realized I don't know anything he's done before he became head of Radeon Group. According to his Wikipedia entry:

> He became the director of advanced technology development at ATI Technologies in 2001.[3] Following Advanced Micro Devices's 2006 acquisition of ATI, he served as chief technology officer for graphics at AMD until 2009. At S3 and ATI he made key contributions to several generations of GPU architectures that evolved from DirectX Ver 3 till Ver 11.[4] He then went to Apple Inc., where he worked with graphics hardware, which allowed Apple to transition to high-resolution Retina displays for its Mac computers.[5]

So he has a history of launching some really good products but I'd say it's been at least a decade since he's been involved in anything industry leading.

To be fair, in the consumer space, he seemed to be holding them back. In the data centre acceleration space, they're still essentially using a descendant of the Vega uArch.
And ironically after he left AMD started improving on the drivers
> Since Q1’21 when Intel started reporting on its dGPU group, known as AXG or accelerated graphics, the company has lost a staggering $2.1 billion and has very little to show for it.

You know, except for a competitive desktop GPU. I'm actually impressed that it didn't take much longer and much more money to catch up with AMD and NVIDIA, given that those two were in business when 3dfx was still around.

I don't know why your painting Intel as some new entry GPU beginner here, but FYI, Intel had been making and selling integrated GPUs for over 20 years now, to the point they pretty much dominate the GPU market share in sheer numbers (most desktops and laptops, even older Macs, sold in the last 10-15 years are most likely gonna have an Intel chip with integrated graphics, regardless if it's used or not in favor of a discrete GPU).

Sure, their iGPU offerings were never competitive for gaming or complex tasks, but given it came for "free" with your CPU, it was good enough for most businesses and consumers and was a also a major boon during the GPU shortage where gamers who build systems with AMD chips were left unable to use their PC while those who went Intel could at least use their PC for some productivity and entertainment until they could buy a dGPU.

So it's not like they had to start absolutely from scratch here. In fact, Intel's latest integrated GPU architecture, Xe, was so good, it was beating the integrated Vega graphics AMD was shipping till the 6xxx series with RDNA2 in 2022, while also killing the demand for Nvidia's low end dGPUs for desktops (GT 1050) and mobile (MX350). Xe was also the first GPU on the market with AV1 decode support.

So given this, Intel is definitely not a failure in the GPU space, they're definitely doing some things right but they just can't box in the ring with "Ali" yet. Anyone thinking they can leapfrog Radeon and Nvidia at their first attempt would be foolish. Intel should take on the losses on the GPU division for a few more years and push through.

I have not seen any desktop GPU that is competitive with Nvidia or AMD yet. What surprises me is how naive Intel seems to be. It is extremely hard to enter the GPU market right now, so it should expect a lot of years of losses. Hopefully they will continue and fix their drivers and hardware problems so we can have more competition. For Alchemist, if they do not price it extremely aggressively ( like 200$ for a A770 ) they will not get much marketshare, I am afraid.
I have to believe that Intel's GPU division will be fine just because I refuse to believe that any executive over at Intel is short sighted enough to believe that Intel was going to leap frog AMD and Nvidia or even make a profit within the next 3-5 years. It took AMD years to get it right with Ryzen and AMD still hasn't had a "Ryzen moment" with their GPU. The fact that Intel's GPU can even compete with AMD and Nvidia is a feat of engineering magic. Intel should just take the L and make it a loss leader and grind it out for the long haul.
I would say RDNA/RDNA2 has delivered Ryzen-level improvements. It didn't result in Ryzen-level fanfare because Nvidia improves their GPUs every product cycle instead of sitting still like Intel was doing with processors. I don't think Intel has the leadership or, after their Boeingization (getting rid of senior engineers) the engineering ability to compete with Nvidia.
AMD has beat NVIDIA in terms of performance and/or perf/watt more than NVIDIA has beaten AMD. Just because NVIDIA has larger market share does not mean they were/are winning. If you need to go back and look at history, look at history. The majority of the time AMD beat the snot out of NVIDIA. The lead only stopped because of a certain prior CEO doing some really dumb stuff. The GPUs you see today (6900xt/6950xt) are the first of a generation of recovery. They are the 'Ryzen 1xxx' equivalents.

Note I'm not an AMD fanboy, but I've 3D in my lifetime was popularized by 3DFX, so I remember the entire saga.

Before delivering good products that customers buy, they need decent products that customers take seriously. Current ARC graphics cards are, reportedly, not even taken seriously by their manufacturers.
"Of the groups Gelsinger got rid of was Optane (started in 2017, never made a profit), sold McAfee (bought in 2010, never made a profit), and shut down the drone group (started in 2015, never made a profit). Last year, Intel sold off its NAND business to Hynix, giving up its only Chinese fab, and sold off its money-losing sports group; and this year, the company shut down its Russian operations. Since Gelsinger’s return, Intel has dumped six businesses, saving $1.5 billion in operating costs and loses."

None of these groups are remotely as close to Intel's core (pun intended) business, as this one. It is certainly true that this division needs to produce better results, but that's true of the company as well. Chopping this one, unless there is some plan for a replacement strategy in the GPU space, would be a bad sign, as it would suggest a company circling the drain/milking the existing winners, unable to make any new winners.

The drones were great, and expensive. I don't get how they couldn't make a profit. They only had one model too, it took DJI another 4 years before it had an acceptable rival in the industrial class. It was a simple drone too, it couldn't have been that heavy of a burden on their financials, why not just keep it around for a couple years longer, the drone industry is clearly still maturing.
Short term is may seem like a smart move to cut AXG but long term if it’s a must have.

All three AMD, nvidia and Apple are unifying general purpose compute with graphics. That is the direction the world is going. Unless intel had a new arch trick up their sleeves they will be soon made redundant

And actually not just graphics but the world is moving towards these highly unified solutions in general, the hardware world is going "full stack" and companies need to be able to offer top-to-bottom solutions that solve the whole problem without relying on someone else's silicon.

Same reason NVIDIA wanted to buy ARM. Intel and NVIDIA are in trouble unless they can make that leap.

Long-term it's the same reason AMD bought ATI too, that vision just took a long time to come to fruition. Remember, they "acquired" their way to success as well, RTG wasn't something that AMD indigeneously developed themselves either... just like AMD bought Xilinx and Intel bought Altera.

Yes, the insight being that “graphics” is actually mostly just highly parallel compute. So if you don’t have a graphics solution then you’re unlikely to have a competitive compute solution either. It’s not quite there yet, but I think it will be soon.
since everyone is on the hybrid computing bandwagon, might as well bring the axg on core and make a xeon with axg on the same package. that's what apple is doing, might as well give that a try.
Intel quit making ARM cpus right before smartphones took off. They sold off their LTE modem division essentially giving Qualcomm a monopoly. Now they might give up on GPUs.

Intel is way too quick to give up. Imagine if they had continued to make ARM CPUs. Apple may have never pursued making their own chips. Intel CPU's + modems could be competing with Qualcomm for every mobile device sold today.

I think it was more hubris that caused them to stop making ARM chips as opposed to "giving up". They were still in the "x86 everywhere" mindset back then. Remember when they were trying to get x86 into phones & tablets?
None of the other items Intel has let go of are an existential must have. GPUs are a must have in any computer big or small. Raw number crunching is core to the very profitable HPC market. Players like Nvidia have fully custom interlinks that threaten to dry up even the CPU sales Intel still gets in this market. GPU is a focus on mobile where expectations have been much raised.

This group is supposedly 6 years old. But reciprocally, the other players have been pouring money in over decades. GPUs are fantastically complicated systems. Getting started here is enormously challenging, with vast demands. Just shipping is a huge accomplishment. Time to grow into it & adjust is necessary. It's such a huge challenge, and I really hope AXG is given the time, resources, iterations, & access to fabs it'll take to get up to speed.

Intel famously used to lie on their OpenGL drivers, asserting features were supported, but were actually software rendered.

Larrabe was shown at GDCE 2009 as if going to render the competition useless, then faded away.

Their GPU debugger marketing sessions used to be focused on how to optimise games for integrated GPUs.

I really don't get how they keep missing the mark versus AMD and NVidia in both GPU design and developer tooling.

>None of the other items Intel has let go of are an existential must have.

Except mobile ARM chips and mobile LTE modems, both of which Intel sold off, and those are some of the most desirable things to make right now. Just ask Quallcomm.

Intel should double down on its core business which is selling x86 chips for Windows PCs. If it loses to AMD+TSMC here, there's nowhere left to hide. IFS is very long term and a new business opportunity in a market where Intel is not the leader. x86 for Windows is their bread and butter. They need to throw everything else out and downsize to just excelling at what they've always done. My guess is AXG is a separate division than the division that makes the graphics for their core microprocessors.
I'm not sure how you can give up the GPU market when Intel aspires to be a performance leader and must have some plan to get back into mobile. They have a GPU with bad drivers right now, but instead of axing the division, it would seem more appropriate to get some folks who know software. The duopoly of NVIDIA and AMD are a lot more vulnerable than other players in other markets Intel could expand into.
Intel somehow has the laptop makers absolutely flogging Intel CPUs, to the extent of actually concealing AMD builds from the online picker unless you specifically identify them by model number.
Aren't mobile devices usually iGPU only? I can't think of a single mobile device with a discrete GPU. Maybe some convertible tablets?
I really don't understand how Intels drivers for Alchemist are so flawed, they have integrated GPUs that run esports titles at 100+fps.

It seemed to me scaling the existing architecture to have more processing and bandwidth should have yielded a very competitive GPU while reusing their existing talent pool.

Instead we end up with a very buggy, very specialized (needs resizable bar?, DX12 works well but not other runtimes?) that aren't required today for Intel graphics.

DX12 works well cause it was designed to make driver development easier. Last gen APIs required specific optimizations in drivers for every single game in order for it to run well. And as far as I heard the problem isn't in drivers, problem is in hardware scheduler that have some kind of limitations that become more apparent with scale. It might be impossible to fix this without retape.
>The drumroll never stopped, even to the point of talking about code improvements in a Linux driver—Linux? That’s Intel’s first choice?

This phrase does it, this guy has no clue whatsoever. Baffling.

Intel missed a huge opportunity by killing Larrabee and the Xeon Phi. They aren't going to be able to beat CUDA with the "oneAPI" software layer they are trying to offer: an outgrowth of OpenCL is not going to be popular with people who care about the performance of their devices. The only programming API that Intel has and CUDA can't beat is x86 assembly.

In my opinion, when they wanted to get back into graphics, they should have brought back Xeon Phi, maybe doubled the vector width (and added some special units), and hired some engineers from HFT firms to figure out how to make it pretend to be a fast GPU.

To be successful as a new entrant against powerful incumbent players you need to have some sort of competitive angle / advantage. Intel used to have a fabrication lead but chose not to make dGPUs whilst they had that and allowed Nvidia and AMD to own the market.

Really struggling to see this leading to a successful outcome - even if they produce a reasonable product it’s likely to be third placed which is not a comfortable place to be.

If I were Pat Gelsinger, I would keep PC Client, DataCenter and FPGA(Altera). Get rid of everything else.
It’s clear Raja Koduri is the wrong choice.
Intel is now facing a much stronger AMD and Nvidia, plus six start-ups

Who are the six startups? It mentions four are in China, and two in the US.

> Four new companies have started up in China, and two new ones announced in the US.

Err... what? Who's got the $billions to compete with NVIDIA and AMD?

If Intel couldn't do it with $3.5B invested and existing silicon design experience and a bunch of fabs... who can!?

What the heck about GPU development costs $2 billion? That seems obscenely expensive. Anyone who has detailed knowledge of the industry care to weigh in on what they might actually spending that money on?
Intel can make money from deep learning accelerators even if they fail to get the gaming market this generation.
Apple Silicon has absolutely proven that an integrated gpGPU is a must on modern consumer chips.

Intel has to slog through this. Forget about CUDA support - Apple is going to kill that monopoly for them.