Intel
INTC,
has put the technology world on notice that it intends to provide the most complete solutions for AI computing products. It asserted this clearly and emphatically during the company’s “AI Everywhere” event held in New York City on Thursday, rolling out a bevy of new products, demos, and partnerships as supporting evidence. But is this true? And how might Intel fare against its rivals in 2024?
If there was any real doubt as to the focused audience for the Intel “AI Everywhere” event, you need only look at the location it was held: the Nasdaq building in New York City, on the front step of Wall Street and ever-vigilant investors and fund managers. Intel clearly is tired of seeing shares of Nvidia
NVDA,
(and even AMD
AMD,
) elevate, leaving Intel behind due to a sense that it has “missed” the AI revolution.
I was working as a product director for the graphics and AI division at Intel while Thursday’s event was being planned, and it was clear internally, as now it is externally, that this event isn’t about any one product or business unit: it’s about positioning Intel as a leader in AI.
There has been a lot of competition for attention around the AI computing landscape in recent weeks. Earlier this month AMD announced its MI300 products and talked about the AI PC; meanwhile, Nvidia announced new products and performance milestones with its H200 chip, and Microsoft
MSFT,
and Amazon.com
AMZN,
both announced new AI chips.
All this meant that Intel needed to make a significant splash with its own event. First and predominantly the event focused on the Intel Core Ultra family of processors for laptops, previously codenamed Meteor Lake. These chips are unique for Intel in a few ways. They are the first for the consumer segment to move to a disaggregated design, meaning it is a bigger CPU built from smaller, discrete chips, rather than manufactured as a single, larger piece of silicon. This offers financial and operational advantages and means Intel can build different chip configurations more easily. AMD has been using this type of design for some time and has shown that it can provide advantages in profitability and execution.
Next, there is new IP on these chips that bring big boosts to graphics performance for gaming and media applications as well as Intel’s first NPU, or neural processing unit, integrated right on chip. The NPU is what makes this part the first for the “AI PC” segment, as Intel claims.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is putting a lot of weight behind this AI PC shift, equating it to other computing milestones like when laptops first added Wi-Fi as a feature. This led to huge changes in how we compute, where we compute, and how future PCs were designed. Gelsinger sees the AI PC doing the same; new ways to engage with your data and applications could dramatically change form factors, feature sets, performance requirements, and more. Maybe you won’t need a keyboard on your laptop at all with an AI-enabled platform with the right cameras and microphones and sensors to understand everything you intend to do. This might sound like science fiction, but it’s coming.
“The biggest strength Intel has going for it is the scale it can provide.”
If you believe that the AI PC will be a significant shift in computing, as I tend to, then the question is how will Intel benefit? By far the biggest strength Intel has going for it is the scale it can provide, shipping millions and millions of Intel Core Ultra processors in 2024 and 2025 without breaking a sweat. Partners including Lenovo Group
992,
Dell Technologies
DELL,
and HP
HPQ,
are going to use this next iteration of Intel’s best chips, like they always do, and as a result Intel will have a market share advantage for NPUs and AI-enabled machines for the foreseeable future.
AMD has been shipping NPU-enabled AI PCs for months now, part of the company’s previous generation of Ryzen mobile chips but being first only matters if you make it count for something. That could be marketing wins or exclusive partnerships or even thought leadership with the technical and financial communities. It doesn’t seem like AMD has made much headway to accomplish that yet.
Qualcomm
QCOM,
is expected to launch its Snapdragon X-series of chips for laptops coming out in mid-2024, and it will have three-to-five times as much AI compute capability as Intel’s new offering. While not first to market, Qualcomm will have the most performance in an AI PC in 2024.
Winners and everyone else
So, which competitor wins: The first mover? The one with the most performant products? The company that sells the most? Market share leadership will only help Intel if it can enable a higher average selling price of its chips to OEMs or if it can grow the total market size for new laptops because of the excitement of AI integration and new user experiences. Both of those are going to be tough thresholds for Intel to cross and the company will have continued pressure from the likes of AMD and Qualcomm in the consumer chip race in the era of the “AI PC.”
Intel wants to be to AI computing on the PC what Nvidia and its GeForce line of graphics chips are to PC gaming: the default standard from which all applications are targeted and built, ensuring the best user experience.
While graphics chips from AMD and Intel offer good performance and features, because Nvidia has the dominant position in the market in terms of sheer volume, and that is heavily invests in the software part of gaming, game developers are always sure to do the most enablement work targeting those GPUs. If Intel can make sure that every AI application developer, every AI framework is being built with an Intel Core Ultra processor on the desk, then it can turn that into consumer trust and long-term sales revenue.
Finally, Intel surprised us with a sneak preview of the upcoming Gaudi 3 chip, a dedicated AI accelerator that targets the same segment as Nvidia GPUs. The Gaudi architecture isn’t a GPU, it is a family of processor acquired by Intel several years ago, but it offers some compelling examples of performance and performance per watt efficiency leadership. This isn’t a universal statement across a wide range of AI workloads, but as the product line iterates with continuous improvements to the Intel AI software stack, I do expect Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 design wins to tick up.
Do Intel’s claims of AI leadership hold water? In the consumer space the Intel Core Ultra processor will easily be the most adopted AI-enabled processor in laptops in 2024. But it will not be the best-performing option for AI computing and may in fact be in third place, behind both Qualcomm and AMD. Intel needs a clear plan to activate this market share leadership into design wins, software use cases, and financial benefit to a company that is struggling to rebound its margins and revenue.
Ryan Shrout is the President of Signal65 and founder at Shrout Research. Follow him on X @ryanshrout. Shrout has provided consulting services for AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, Arm Holdings, Micron Technology, Nvidia and others. Shrout holds shares of Intel.
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