Intel CTO Greg Lavender said in an interview with Reuters that the company intends to generate up to $1 billion in cumulative software sales by the end of 2027, offering customers various types of subscriptions. Intel is also making efforts to advance open source software in the AI field.
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Among other things, Intel is going to offer software developers a subscription to its cloud services. It is possible that Intel will cross the $1 billion mark in cumulative revenue from software sales before the end of 2027, as Lavender explained. Already in 2021, the company earned more than $100 million in software sales, as explained by the current Intel CTO, who then came after Patrick Gelsinger from VMware. Since then, Intel has already managed to absorb three software companies.
Compared to the company’s total revenue of $54 billion for 2023, that $1 billion spread over several years doesn’t seem like much, but for a relatively new source of revenue it’s a pretty ambitious target. Intel considers software development in the field of artificial intelligence, performance optimization and information security to be a priority. All three areas within the company are supported by investment resources.
As Intel’s technical director noted in passing, the company is seeing high demand for its Gaudi 3 family of accelerators and hopes to eventually become the second supplier of relevant components to the market after Nvidia. The latter, we recall, occupied about 83% of the computing accelerator market at the end of last year, so Intel and other competitors have to fight for its small share. Intel is relying on open source software that can run on any platform with any accelerator, while the Nvidia ecosystem is closed to the CUDA environment, which is closed to third-party accelerator developers.
Intel is a member of the UXL Foundation consortium along with Qualcomm, Samsung and Arm, promoting the use of open source software to speed up computing. She also joined OpenAI’s Triton initiative to create an open-source development environment that would improve the efficiency of interaction between heterogeneous computing accelerators in artificial intelligence systems. This initiative is also supported by AMD and Meta✴. Intel compute accelerators can run in the Triton environment both in the current generation and in the future. According to Intel’s technical director, the distribution of Triton will equalize the chances of success for all market participants.