Intel is going to limit its plans for graphics cards again. A generation is skipped, the successor is postponed, and one architecture is discontinued.
Hidden away in a blog post about a streamlined product line, Intel says it will cut its previous graphics card schedule and release fewer products or later than originally planned. These are GPUs and graphics cards for HPC (high-performance computing).
Without explicitly mentioning it by name, Rialto Bridge generation is deleted. That was the successor to Ponte Vecchio, a GPU for the data centre market (intended for HPC) that was due to appear mid-year. The next generation, the Falcon Shores XPU, was planned for 2024 but moved to 2025. Falcon Shores is a combination of x86 CPU cores and Xe GPU cores.
A two-year rhythm better meets customer expectations and gives them time to develop their ecosystem around that graphics hardware.
At the same time, Intel also says it will discontinue the Lancaster Sound GPU architecture, allowing it to focus more on the Melville Sound architecture. Regarding the first, Intel says it would only offer better performance, whereas Melville Sound, according to the chipmaker, makes a big architectural leap compared to current generations.
Intel is still the dominant player in the chip market, but the company is less strong than market leader Nvidia regarding GPUs. In recent decades, Intel has mainly focused on integrated graphics. That gave chips from Intel standard graphics processing power built into the CPU, but it didn’t come close in performance to the top cards from Nvidia or AMD’s Radeon lineup. So the company has some catching up to do.
At the same time, Intel, like almost every company, is also in turbulent water due to the current economic situation. It was recently announced that it would cut employee premiums and want to save ten billion dollars by 2025. At the same time, the company is busy building new chip factories in the US and Europe, which also cost billions of dollars to set up.
