Undercut the big boys with affordable on-prem AI.
Intel should have appointed people form the HN comment section as their CEO, as they clearly know more about running a giant chip design and fabrication company than the guy who worked there for 10+ years.
It is something that is easy to miss if you are just looking at typical business strategy and finances. A high memory consumer GPU would undercut their server GPUs, which are presumably higher margin intended golden geese. It's easy to see them chasing server markets and "gamers" being an afterthought.
However there is huge demand right now for a modern, even a crappy modern, GPU with gobs of memory. Make the card and the open source AI tooling for it will start sprouting in days after it's release.
It's an extremely powerful position to have every at-home AI geek's setup to be bound to using intel cards and intel focused tooling. Nvidia and AMD won't do it because they want to protect their server cards.
So, incredibly small market share while your competitors already have the first-mover advantage and nailed down the ecosystem? With no data backing it up, I think, graphics cards for local LLM needs is not really on demand. Even for gaming it’s probably more attractive, but then again, that’s not even where the real money is.
AMD has tried this for many of its technologies and I don't think it is working. Granted, they suck at open sourcing, but a shitload of it was open sourced. See TinyGrad voyage into the Red Box driver (streams on youtube).
We can't see the future, but neither can CEOs, no matter how well paid and respected they are.
After all the current CEO is being ousted, so obviously he didn't do the right things despite being a CEO.
I have my thoughts on the matter and cautiously welcomed their move to GPUs ( though admittedly on the basis that we -- consumers -- need more than amd/nvidia duopoly in that space; so I am not exactly unbiased ).
That's just speculation. There's no guarantee that would have happened. Nobody has a crystal ball to guarantee that as the outcome.
It's like saying if someone would have killed Hitler as a baby, that would have prevented WW2.
The market for that is just not that large, it wouldn't move the needle on Intels revenue, but then again it could get the enthusiasts onboard and get Intels CUDA alternative moving.
But then you move up, and the incumbents have to choose to keep ceding more of their lower end or lower their margins. And it is very hard and costly for a company succeeding at the high end to do the later.
That would have been a fantastic sign Intel was getting more nimble and strategic.
And been a good fit with a come back in the low end of fabs too.
Some are probably multi millionaires smurfing (and I dont mean cryptobros).
Do you even have a Putnam award?
