From ExtremeTech, December 20:
If it hadn't been for that meddling company, Intel would be rich by now!
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has been in the news lately, as he just finished launching the company's next-generation CPUs for both client and server. As part of his recent press tour, he sat down with the students of MIT's engineering school to discuss the state of the semiconductor industry. In his comments, he made news by stating Intel could have been leading the AI industry these days, but instead, it's Nvidia—only because the company got lucky.
Gelsinger's comments came in response to a professor who asked what Intel was doing along the lines of AI hardware. This query prompted Gelsinger to recap Intel's ill-fated history with GPUs and "throughput computing" (as opposed to scalar), where he noted that when Intel pushed him out of the company 11 years ago, it also cancelled its discrete GPU project named Larrabee. According to Gelsinger, if the company had stuck with that project, it would be Intel at the apex of the AI industry right now. Instead, Nvidia finds itself at the helm, which Gelsinger says results from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang getting "extraordinarily lucky."
He argues that Nvidia was always focused on graphics, which is correct since it was always a gaming company that eventually branched out into AI and data centers. Gelsinger notes that the company didn't even want to support its first big AI project, as you needed a supercomputer to run the big data sets they were using. While Nvidia slowly focused on "throughput computing," Intel did nothing for 15 years. When Gelsinger returned to the company in 2021, he immediately corrected this mistake by restarting the project, which we now know as its Arc graphics line of GPUs....
....MUCH MORE
Also at ExtremeTech (Dec. 22):
Nvidia Engineer Responds to Intel CEO Saying It Got Lucky With AI Dominance
The employee, who worked at both Intel and Nvidia, says vision and execution are the reasons for its supremacy, not luck....
