Tech Tonic | Where does Intel go from here?

When nothing is going your way, absolutely nothing is going your way. Life’s unwritten traditions don’t have a bearing even if you are Intel, a Silicon Valley icon and a tech giant. A microcosm of Intel’s last few years—a spurned chance to acquire 15% stake in OpenAI back in 2017; the AI company was looking for investment, to the tune of $1 billion. Contrast this with Microsoft which has over time, invested $14 billion in OpenAI, and reaped rewards which propelled it to the pack at the forefront of the AI race.
Did Intel underestimate OpenAI’s potential (now valued at around $85 billion), or didn’t foresee an AI era was upon us? Either or both, whatever the case may be, almost unforgivable mistakes from a business perspective. Whoever replaces outgoing CEO Pat Gelsinger (this has been a frenetic week for Intel), will have a lot of fixing to embark on. Intel hasn’t been able to get a tune out of its recent generations of chips, at least to the extent Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, AMD and even Google have.
Financials make for dim reading, and customer outlook isn’t very positive even though no PC makers have as yet announced anything akin to Apple closing the Intel chapter for their Macs, a few years ago. That moment in time, proved pivotal as a direction definer, despite the chipmaker’s brave face.
That strategy continues to date. A day after the announcement of Pat Gelsinger’s exit as CEO of the company, the company announced the new Arc graphics chips. A discreet graphics solution from the company, that only recently, made clear that there won’t be many such updates in the future. Does that tack change, with Gelsinger gone? Intel is claiming that’s its new graphics have a performance advantage over Nvidia’s comparative chip, but the caveat is the Arc B580 gains some of that when paired with a pricey Core i9-14900K CPU.
Also Read: Tech Tonic | An elusive social media mirage, and an equally unbothered Elon Musk
Nvidia’s chips don’t need such a foundation, before embarking on performance dominance. AMD too has upped their game with the latest generation chips, and Apple as well as Google and Microsoft are betting big on their own hardware pursuits. The landscape is only getting tougher for Intel.
The bigger worry, which they must fix on priority (if at all that can be fixed, in benchmarks and in perception) is that their PC chips have fallen down the pecking order. I keep repeating this, Apple didn’t take the decision to replace Intel’s chips across the entire Mac portfolio, lightly. It has now been four generations of Apple’s own silicon efforts, and every year, the M-series chips set a performance per watt benchmark. That must have hurt.
Intel’s worries don’t end there. Qualcomm’s first generation chips for PCs, which made a rather solid first showing with the Snapdragon X chips—these have, albeit unintentionally, become the experiential baseline for the ‘AI PC’ or Copilot+ PC era for the Microsoft Windows 11 ecosystem. For first generation chips, Qualcomm has done something Apple-esque. Ideally, this shouldn’t have been a worry for Intel.
Yet, it is. For years now, Intel’s chip generations have been in a bizarre situation. They aren’t failures, but they aren’t exactly competing either. The 13th and 14th generation Core processors, had quality issues too—elevated operating voltage led to instability, often unfixable hardware-wise.
Could it be because Intel prioritized business, spreadsheets and financials, over engineering? That may well have been the subtle internal shift, which translated into the slide we witness now.
In the next year, Intel’s course correction will not come easy. The lapses over the years (in cricketing terms, will be called howlers) will resonate at a louder pitch than ever before—partly as a warning, and in equal measure as a threat. Turning down Apple’s invitation to make chips for iPhones in the early days (Intel thought the phone market was unprofitable), trying to create a niche within a niche with Atom PC chips (remember those netbooks?) and a less than ideal attempt at making 5G modems for portables, simply make one wonder—what were Intel’s well paid (one would assume that’d be the case) advisors really doing?
A litany of blunders dot Intel’s recent history. No surprise it finds itself in a predicament that wouldn’t be easy to iron out.
Vishal Mathur is the technology editor for HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice-versa. The views expressed are personal.