New Intel management views Falcon Shores as a test product that may not live up to expectations

Following the resignation of Pat Gelsinger, David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus will serve as interim CEOs of Intel. Despite their temporary status, their vision of ways out of the crisis is important for the company.

David Zinsner and Michelle Holthaus agree that GPUs are the future, and AI technology is still in its infancy, writes the HPCwire resource. Their point of view is fundamentally different from the position of Gelsinger, who relied on the CPU. Now the acting CEO is revising the company’s plans, as well as the existing portfolio of data center solutions. In their opinion, Intel has only three promising products for data centers and AI: Xeon Diamond Rapids and Clearwater Forest chips, as well as Falcon Shores accelerators.

Holthaus spoke at the annual Barclays global technology conference, where, answering a question about how her strategy would differ from Gelsinger’s plans, she said that we should not expect a complete change in strategy, only a “renewed focus” on improving the competitiveness of Intel products, the resource writes. EE Times.

Holthaus also said that now is the time to consider how the existing intellectual property portfolio can be used across the company’s entire product portfolio. She acknowledged that the company faces big challenges in the data center solutions market. It was expected that Granite Rapids would strengthen Intel’s position in the server market, but now it is pinning its hopes on Diamond Rapids, which will be produced using Intel’s 18A (1.8 nm) process technology.

Image Source: Intel

«For us, 2025 is the year… stabilizing the share loss of that market segment [and] really laser-focusing on building the right products to regain share. We have a lot of work to do in this direction,” Holthaus said. She noted that the market for data center solutions has changed dramatically, referring to the desire of cloud service providers to create their own custom processors and AI accelerators.

Intel is set to improve its performance in the data center processor market with its recently announced x86 ecosystem advisory group, which will allow customers to influence future architectural features. Along the way, the company abandoned the X86S initiative to create a lightweight version of the ISA. Holthaus said she feels confident about the future of the Intel Xeon, but noted that AMD has performed better in customer service in recent years.

The co-CEO said she views Falcon Shores as a test product. “Will this be great? No, she said. “But this is a good first step in building the platform, learning the lessons, understanding how all this software will work and how the ecosystem will respond so that we can get better very quickly.” Earlier it became known that Falcon Shores will be replaced by the Jaguar Shores AI accelerator.

Image Source: Intel

Holthaus emphasized that she sees great opportunity in AI inference, which places different hardware requirements than training. Overall, Holthaus noted that Intel did not invest enough in its products and did not act quickly enough, and also acknowledged that the company faces problems with product supply in the short term. She also acknowledged that Intel needs a versatile GPU to compete long-term in the nascent AI market.

The top manager said that the company will not spend time and money on creating AI accelerators for data centers from scratch. Instead, low-volume products will allow Intel to learn and improve, she said. “I look at Gaudi as a first step. There are some really good things we’re looking into at Gaudi, especially at the software and platform level,” Holthaus said. “But Gaudi will not allow us to go to the masses; it is not a GPU that [could] be easily deployed in systems around the world.”

The company also announced that it has completed the phase of staff reductions and does not yet intend to resume them. “We’re done with the big staff reductions we had to make, they’re mostly done,” Zinsner said. “However, we will continually review where we spend money to ensure we are getting the right return.”