In the past few years of Intel's slow progress in advanced semiconductor processes, AMD from the same x86 CPU camp, as well as a number of competitors from the Arm camp, have put Intel under considerable pressure in both the consumer Core CPU and enterprise Xeon CPU markets.
Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who took office this year, is working to change that.
In March, Pat Kissinger announced the Intel IDM 2.0 strategy;
In April, Intel launched the 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor;
In June, at the Six Five Summit, Intel's new infrastructure processor, the IPU, was launched;
In July, Pat unveiled Intel's most detailed process and packaging technology roadmap ever, and said Intel would return to process leadership in 2025.
In August, Intel Architecture Day unveiled details of Alder Lake, the first high-performance hybrid architecture, a new high-performance standalone GPU architecture, a new IPU architecture, and a data center GPU architecture.
This week, at the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit, Intel unveiled the Alder Lake 12th generation Core processor, the architecture of the biggest transformation in a decade, the performance of a significant increase. At the same time, Intel emphasizes software first and further strengthens the developer ecosystem.
The goal of Pat Kissinger's series of actions after taking office is to release a clear message to the outside world - Intel is back!
Is Intel really back?
How do you view competition?
Compared with Intel's series of strategies and new product releases this year, the outside world is more concerned about how Intel responds to the competition in the current market. Intel has maintained leadership in the desktop and high-performance CPU markets for a long time, but the setback of the 10nm process has given AMD the opportunity to win the desktop CPU market with TSMC's advanced semiconductor technology, and the self-developed M1 chip released by Apple, a large customer, has brought a lot of pressure to Intel.
While the consumer CPU market is facing competition, Intel has also ushered in new competitors in the lucrative high-performance computing CPU market. Cloud computing and AI and other needs have allowed Amazon and Alibaba to develop arm-based server CPUs. Intel is a contender in the CPU field it does best.
Rui Wang, Senior Vice President of Intel Corporation and Chairman of Intel China
In response to such a situation, Wang Rui, who was promoted to senior vice president of Intel Corporation and chairman of Intel China in September this year, frankly said in a conversation with Lei Feng during the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit: "In the past few years, Intel's implementation has been slower, and it cannot provide our customers with the differentiation they need. So in a way, the customer makes that choice. ”
She also said, "It is not a bad thing to have competition in the market, especially from a global perspective." When we have the leading chips, we have the confidence to re-negotiate with our partners, collaborate, and see if we can win back their business.
Just as it is very difficult for technology giants to make up their minds to develop their own chips, it is difficult to turn back after tasting the sweetness of self-developed chips. A good example is Microsoft and Apple, two companies, one is a representative of open systems, one is a representative of closed systems, and at first closed systems wins, then open systems wins, and then back to closed systems.
The best way to win back these customers is to launch chips that are stronger than their self-developed chips, or to find new ways to cooperate. At this time, advanced semiconductor processes have become very important.
The basis for winning back customers – process leadership
Advanced processes are the foundation for the semiconductor industry to continue to move forward, and Intel has maintained its leadership over the past few decades with advanced semiconductor processes. However, since 2015, Moore's Law has begun to slow down, and the rhetoric of Moore's Law invalidation is also endless.
At the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit, Kissinger said, "Moore's Law is still valid, and we will maintain Moore's Law for the next decade, even faster than Moore's Law." Kissinger is not shouting slogans, according to his previously announced route, Intel will iterate five generations of the process in the next four years.
During the period when Moore's Law lasts, the semiconductor process iterates every 18 months to two years. Intel is going to catch up with current industry leaders faster than Moore's Law.
"We're running a marathon at sprint speed." Rui Wang describes Intel's current state and expresses its determination to return to process leadership.
She also explained that Moore's Law is not a physical law, it is an economic law. If you look at it from a very primitive, primitive perspective, there is indeed a post-Moore's Law. But the essence of Moore's Law is to provide economic value, so as long as there is a technological breakthrough, find a solution, and continue to provide economic value, Moore's Law can be maintained.
For Intel, execution is key to regaining process leadership.
"In the past few years, we have had some setbacks in execution, and we have fallen a few heels," Wang Rui said: "Intel has used to use years and years, generation after generation of products launched on time and again to prove that Intel is most famous for its execution, and our biggest competitor is ourselves." ”
Once Intel regains leadership in advanced processes, it has the technical base to win back customers, while also having new cooperation with customers who develop their own chips. The core change of Intel IDM 2.0 is that it will provide customers with chip foundry services. "Not only can we provide our customers with advanced processes, but our advanced packaging technology can also help our customers under the same process." Wang Rui pointed out.
A more open ecosystem is the strongest competitiveness
The leadership of advanced process technology is Intel's most basic and core competitiveness, but the ecology based on advanced processes and hardware is the whole of its competitiveness.
"Intel is well aware of its strengths and the competition it faces in the market, and our ecosystem played an important role before the release of Sapphire Rapids, a new generation of more competitive high-performance CPUs. To create a new high-performance computing data center ecosystem, the investment in the entire architecture is very large, and this is a long-term investment. ”
Relying on the advantages of ecology, Intel is also providing more cost-effective CPUs through architectural innovation before advanced processes return to the leading position.
Sunil Kaimal, vice president of Intel's Client Computing Division, said at the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit: "The 12th generation Intel Core processor Alder Lake, based on Intel 7's process technology, adopts a high-performance hybrid architecture, including performance cores and energy efficiency cores, bringing great cross-generation performance improvements. This is the biggest shift in the x86 architecture in the last decade. At the same time, our deep partnership with Microsoft, the close collaboration between the two sides, can intelligently and fully utilize the advantages of the latest generation of Core processor performance cores and energy efficiency cores, and achieve higher performance and efficiency in real-world scenarios. ”
The 12th-generation Core Core i9-12900K in the Geekbench 5 library with the Windows 11 platform shows that the CPU single-thread score is 1834 and the multi-thread score is 17370, which is 11% and 5.6% higher than AMD's latest generation of 16-core flagship CPU Ryzen 9 5950X single-core and multi-core performance, respectively, and has a clear advantage over Apple's latest powerful M1 Max multi-core running score of 12559.
More importantly, Intel is also adapting to the customer's demand for computing power under the new demand. Previously, Intel's attitude was that the next generation of CPUs that customers needed was the CPU they provided.
"We have long known that in the complex and diverse digital society, we must be closer to the end user and have a mechanism for common development in order to provide users with differentiated solutions and services." Wang Rui further said, "In order to make up for the inherent shortcomings that are still some distance away from end users, we are closely integrated with our partners. ”
This is closely reflected in Intel's software priorities and greater focus on building the developer community.
Software is the closest product to developers and customers, for most of the developers and customers, they do not care about the underlying hardware architecture, and the scheduling method of hardware, what can make them pay is easy enough, stable software and higher cost performance.
Intel has introduced oneAPI, a unified development platform across hardware architectures (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC), and is constantly improving its performance, including the newly announced oneAPI 2022 adding 900 new features, as well as the introduction of a complete Intel developer catalog to reduce the difficulty of developers to use and play Intel hardware, and reduce the threshold of innovation for developers.
Equally important is Intel's ecosystem built with a more open mind. What Pat Kissinger proposes is to provide developers with an open, selective, and trusted open source ecosystem. This is both Intel's goal and Intel's challenge.
"It is not easy to build an open source community, even if a company with strong strength like Intel and Ali, it is difficult to create the entire ecosystem by only one company, and we must work together with many partners." Wang Rui said, "Intel is running a marathon with many partners. ”
Write at the end
"Looking back at Intel's history, they didn't make major mistakes." This is what a senior expert on domestic CPU said to Lei Feng before.
Intel's success for a long time, advanced processes are the foundation, but intel's backwardness in this field in the past few years has become the key to the fierce competition it has recently faced. Of course, Intel is also facing new challenges in the digital age of customer demand for computing power differentiation.
This is also the logic behind Pat Kissinger's return to process leadership plans and emphasis on software priorities after taking office, but also restoring the logic behind Intel On (formerly known as IDF), a summit for developers.
When will Pat Kissinger, who came from a technical background and worked for Intel for many years, return the true king of Intel?