Intel Commits To Future GPU Releases With Latest Hire, But What About Gaming?

Rumors of the demise of Intel's GPU business have been greatly exaggerated. Even before the launch of the first Alchemist-based Intel Arc GPUs, naysayers were insisting that Intel would kill the brand, kill the project, or cut the whole team. Intel has done some restructuring, to be sure, but the company's GPUs are not going anywhere. And that's clearer than ever now, thanks to recent comments from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

Speaking at the Second Annual AI Summit, Tan made an unambiguous commitment to future GPU products, stating "yes" to the question "does Intel build GPUs in the future?" Now, because this was the AI Summit and the market is what it is right now, that sounds a lot like "yes, we will have another go at building massive parallel processors for AI compute," but notably, he went on to say:

And I just hired the Chief GPU architect. And then so he's very good. I'm very delighted he joined me. And it takes some persuasions. And then I told him that not just CPU, GPU is also very important, different or different application workloads. And so you have to really optimize. So I'm not hung up with just Xeon [x86] and also embrace RISC-V and you got to be more flexible.
— SeekingAlpha transcript, Second Annual AI Summit

Who's this Chief GPU Architect fellow? Why, it's none other than Eric Demers, a name who will be familiar to those who have been around this industry for a few decades like we have. Demers was one of the men responsible for the legendary Radeon 9700 Pro, the first graphics card ATI Technologies ever released that really put NVIDIA on the back foot. He continued to produce solid hardware with ATI as they joined AMD, then left three years after Qualcomm purchased Imageon from ATI to go work on Adreno graphics for Qualcomm. (Did you ever notice 'Adreno' is an anagram of 'Radeon'? That's no coincidence.)


So now Demers is at Intel, a common stop for tech guys who made their name in the PC world. Almost assuredly, he will indeed be working on the aforementioned AI accelerator technology, as Intel doesn't really have a strong position there right now. That's slightly a shame, only because we would love to see him leverage his considerable expertise in graphics toward products for gamers. Of course, NVIDIA still sells GPUs for gamers which are directly based on its AI compute architectures, so hope springs eternal, we suppose.

Perhaps the more interesting part of the statements are where Tan commits to building Intel GPUs at Intel's own foundry, which would be a first. A significant portion of the interview is about Intel's foundry business, where Tan says the company is "laser-focused on 14A" and that, despite that it won't be in risk production until 2028, the company plans to have its PDK available for external customers this month. Indeed, the "Does Intel build GPUs in the future?" question comes immediately after Tan talking at length about his company's process improvements, and the interviewer then says this:

So Intel is going to build CPUs, they're going to build GPUs. They're going to have their own foundry to build those CPUs and GPUs, and you're going to have a foundry that's going to be made at scale available to other manufacturers, and you will make sure that you partner with the other GPU providers.
— SeekingAlpha transcript, Second Annual AI Summit

Lip-Bu Tan immediately says "That's right." So, case closed. The only question at this point is whether any of those GPU dies trickle down to mere mortal gamers or not. Serial Intel leaker Jaykihn says that the Arc Pro B70 is coming soon, and we believe him, but that's going to be a massive 32GB graphics card with a price that likely isn't justified by its gaming performance. Hopefully this RAM crisis abates sooner than expected so we can see some real disruption in the GPU space.