Having a third-party break into NVIDIA and AMD’s GPU duopoly was the reason many people were excited about Intel’s entry into the GPU market. Even as the company launched a second generation of Arc cards recently, the future still looks a bit unclear, and Intel just decided to give us just a little bit of reassurance.
Intel’s new co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus took a bit of time during the company’s CES 2025 keynote to talk about the future of Intel in the discrete GPU space, going on to reassure users that “we are very committed to the discrete graphics market and will continue to make strategic investments in this direction.” Previous Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who recently got ousted, was notably unenthusiastic about the company’s future in the GPU space during a recent earnings call, suggesting that the company was looking to scale back its ambitions as far as discrete GPUs go and invest more in integrated graphics.
During that earnings call, we also had absolutely no mention of Intel’s upcoming GPUs, which was worrying. Those GPUs launched as the second-gen B-series Intel Arc cards, and those are actually turning out to be pretty successful sales-wise, so that could be part of the reason why Intel is feeling more confident (at least publicly) about its cards. It could also be that the new interim co-CEOs believe more in Intel’s potential in this segment than the previous CEO did. Or the company could still be planning to eventually retreat without being too obvious about it.
We have no idea yet about what the company will be doing for its third-gen cards, but it’s still early days—the second-gen just launched. Hopefully, Intel will continue competing here. More competition is always good, and a third-party in the GPU space has been sorely needed for a long time.
Source: The Verge