[The Exiled]

Intel CEO vows to challenge nVidia, market is "hungry" for alternative GPUs

In a recent interview with CRN that covers several topics with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, one subject that was emphasised on was its impending battle with nVidia. Moving forward, one way Intel plans to differentiate itself from the GPU giant is by being "much more ecosystem-friendly" in terms of software that supports its components. "nVidia has become too proprietary, and that's widely seen in the industry, and so we're going to fill out that stack with oneAPI but do it in a way that's much more favorable and open to the industry and their innovations," he stated. oneAPI is an open programming model that covers different types of architectures, which includes Intel's silicon products such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs.

Addressing Intel's "under-focused" graphics business, Gelsinger stressed that the company's efforts in the GPU market have to go above and beyond in terms of features, performance and power, all of which have to be delivered at compelling price points for the consumer. Gelsinger attributed nVidia's success largely to how its leadership has operated the company for the past decade, but also pointed out how "they got really lucky" in the artificial intelligence field. "nVidia had essentially a 10x or better performance leadership for a decade. If you have that, a 10x leadership for 10 years, people are going to take advantage of that. And then they got really lucky: AI happens. A 30-year overnight success, and they harvested it really well at that point. So they worked hard, they earned and then they got lucky in that respect," Gelsinger explained.

Further detailing how Intel specifically intends to provide attractive products in the GPU market, Gelsinger touched on how they're going to make it seamless to go from integrated to discrete on the Intel platform. Putting weight behind his words, Intel has poached a former top GPU architect at AMD, Vineet Goel, to oversee its Xe GPU architecture that future GPU products will be based on. He will lead a team of architects and design engineers in "architecting, designing and verifying Intel's Xe IP roadmap."

Izvor: TechSpot