Gelsinger retires as Battlemage launches: Will Intel eventually be up for sale?

The shock ‘retirement’ of Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, with immediate effect highlights the ructions currently underway in the chip market.

Just in case you haven’t come across the word ‘defenestrated’ before, it’s perfect for times like this. The official statement is that Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has retired. Bloomberg amongst others reckons that he was forced out after the turnaround plan he implemented close to four years ago hasn’t worked. Thus defenestrated; to be thrown out the window. And all just as the company is hosting a fairly major event later on today that is likely the long-rumoured appearance of Arc 2 Battlemage, its second gen graphics card that hopes to compete with Nvidia and AMD in the fevered graphics card market.

All in all, this year had some pretty interesting surprises in the personal computing industry.  With Qualcomm making a solid entry into the PC market it joined Intel, AMD and Apple in the PC CPU world.

Falling short

Intel, with the help of massive funding from the CHIPS act, built several new fabs and actually got to within spitting distance of TSMC’s designs, but its own CPU designs continue to fall short. The 12^th generation managed to outperform AMD’s offerings at significantly higher power draw, until AMD launched its 3D Vcache and retook the gaming performance crown. Intel put so much focus on efficiency that its 13^th generation actually ended being slightly slower than its predecessor, though also much more power efficient.

That, is, when it worked. Quite a few reviewers had trouble getting their 13^th generation processors to work, never mind benchmarking them.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite shook the market up quite a bit, because it was competitive, and Qualcomm did an excellent job getting the major laptop makers on board. It has been quite popular. Indeed, it was popular enough that Apple actually pushed the M4 launch to get it out on the market sooner, also with a solid launch.  

AMD launched its Ryzen AI 300 series processors with decent integrated graphics and a mix of Zen5 and Zen5 Compact cores, with a strong reception. They are able to run at 20 watts and perform well with completely silent fans, but can be pushed all the way to 80 watts, allowing for some serious overclocking under load – but only on mains power.

Already dominating Intel in the gaming market, AMD followed up with another winner, resolving a major flaw with its original 3D Vcache implementation, by putting the cache under the CPU core chiplet rather than above where it inhibited heat dissipation. The new 3D Vcache models have higher clock speeds and lower draw than the previous generation Zen4 version. 

On your marks...

Intel’s prospects are... questionable. For one thing, in spite of the massive investments resulting from the CHIPS act, the flubbed flagship CPU releases are less than encouraging. The imminent Battlemage GPU looks promising, potentially adding some competition to the GPU market, but Intel’s woes have led the DOW to delist it. The Biden administration is uncertain about investing more in Intel given its less than stellar performance, while the incoming Trump administration is already seeking to repeal the CHIPS Act.

Ask Shutterstock for an Intel image and this AI-generated artwork is one of the options...

So the sharks are circling – Qualcomm and Samsung have been considering buying up some or all of Intel, and apparently even AMD and Apple are potential candidates for absorbing the company. Today’s launch hoopla aside, Intel may not be a participant in the PC CPU market by the end of next year.

AMD meanwhile is just getting started with its Halo products; the flagship Ryzen AI Max Pro (thank you, marketers – I prefer the name Strix Halo) will include up to 16 full Zen5 cores complete with AVX-512 support and an RDNA 3.5 GPU with 40 compute units, which is a huge GPU.

Also astonishing is that Strix Halo will have a base power of between 20 and 30 watts, but a maximum of a whopping 120 watts, allowing the APU to run all of its cores at upwards of 5 GHz while also pushing the integrated GPU hard. Since all 16 cores have two FPUs, and each FPU supports AVX-512, Strix Halo promises to be a monster. The first computer announced using this is an Asus Flow 13” device with up to 128GB of memory and a newly designed thermal solution to dissipate the heat it will produce when it amps up the Halo to 120 watts. 

If AMD delivers on that, it could spell the end of discrete GPUs in gaming laptops. At the moment the only production 3D rendering engine that’s popular in the VFX industry that supports AMD GPUs is RedShift, so AMD definitely needs to get more of them on board in order to break into the workstation market. Expect more details along with a preview of the laptops coming to market with Strix Halo at the CES unveiling.

As one might guess, while both gamers and content creators are excited about the Strix Halo, Nvidia is not. Being squeezed out of the gaming market would not be great for Nvidia’s bottom line, so now that Nvidia has taken Intel’s place on the DOW it wants to stay there.

There is of course only one way for Nvidia to stay in the gaming GPU market in the face of the monster CPUs from AMD: make an APU. Nvidia has made ARM processors before for its Shield gaming consoles, which are not particularly popular. Nvidia’s ARM CPUs historically have been less than impressive. The ARM based CPUs in Nvidia’s datacenter GPUs are not exactly affordable for gamers and far too power hungry for laptops, so Nvidia instead joined forces with MediaTek, which is one of the largest ARM SoC purveyors out there. MediaTek’s Dimensity SoCs have earned a reputation for performing well.

Nvidia is pushing hard on this; it wants to get its new APU onto the market with a high-performance integrated Nvidia GPU before AMD launches its highly anticipated and quite mysterious Sound Wave APU, possibly also ARM-based. Nvidia is expected to unveil this officially at CES in January, with the launch targeting September 2025.

It is possible that Intel will survive the coming storm largely of its own making, but it’s probably going to be overshadowed by its three big competitors even if so. 

Yet more competition

Ever since Intel and AMD started ramping up the engineering effort dedicated to their GPUs, the writing has been on the wall regarding the fate of discrete laptop GPUs. That they would eventually be squeezed out of the market entirely was inevitable, implying that Nvidia entering the market was also inevitable. Nvidia’s attempt to acquire ARM was probably an indication that Nvidia agreed; AMD finally hitting its stride with its GPUs created the deadline for Nvidia.

Where Intel will land in this increasingly competitive landscape by the end of next year is anybody’s guess. Should the incoming administration implement its tariff plan, then it might create enough incentive for Qualcomm and Apple to try to buy Intel as the tariffs drive up the prices of goods from TSMC.

We are living in interesting times, as Pat Gelsinger can attest.

tl;dr

• Pat Gelsinger’s unexpected retirement highlights turmoil within Intel, particularly as his turnaround strategy failed to meet expectations, coinciding with the launch of the new Arc 2 Battlemage GPU.
• Qualcomm's successful entry into the PC CPU market and AMD's advancements with its Ryzen AI 300 series are intensifying competition, challenging Intel's once-dominant position.
• Intel’s latest CPU generations have struggled with performance despite efforts to enhance efficiency, with significant issues reported by reviewers that hindered benchmarking.
• AMD's upcoming flagship Ryzen AI Max Pro, featuring up to 16 Zen5 cores and a powerful RDNA 3.5 GPU, suggests potential dominance in gaming laptops, positioning AMD favorably against competitors like Nvidia.