Intel’s progress in advanced semiconductor processes has been slow for a few years. AMD from the x86 CPU camp and multiple competitors from the Arm camp have made Intel’s consumer-grade Core CPUs and enterprise-grade Xeon CPUs a big deal. pressure.
Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who took office this year, is working hard to change this situation.
In March, Pat Kissinger announced the Intel IDM2.0 strategy;
In April, Intel launched the third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor;
In June, at the Six Five Summit, Intel’s new infrastructure processor IPU was launched;
In July, Pat announced the most detailed process technology and packaging technology roadmap in Intel’s history, and said that Intel will return to process leadership in 2025;
In August, Intel Architecture Day announced the first high-performance hybrid architecture Alder Lake, a new high-performance independent GPU architecture, a new IPU architecture, and details of the data center GPU architecture.
This week, at the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit, Intel launched the Alder Lake 12th-generation Core processor. The architecture has undergone the biggest transformation in a decade, and the performance has been greatly improved. At the same time, Intel emphasizes software first and further strengthens the developer ecosystem.
After Pat Kissinger took office, the goal of a series of actions was to release a clear message to the outside world-Intel is back!
Is Intel really back?
How to 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 current market competition. Intel has maintained its leadership in the desktop and high-performance CPU market for a long time. However, the frustration of the 10nm process has given AMD the opportunity to use TSMC’s advanced semiconductor technology to win the desktop CPU market. Bringing a lot of pressure.
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 requirements have led Amazon and Ali to develop server CPUs with Arm architecture. Intel has suffered from the enemy in the CPU field where it is best.
Wang Rui, Senior Vice President of Intel Corporation and Chairman of Intel China
For this situation,Wang Rui, who was promoted to Intel’s senior vice president and chairman of Intel China in September this year, said frankly when communicating with Lei Feng.com during the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit: “In the past few years, Intel’s execution has been slower. Of customers provide the differentiation they need. So from a certain angle, customers make this choice.”
She also said at the same time, “Competition in the market is not a bad thing, especially from a global perspective. When we have the most advanced chip, we are confident to negotiate and collaborate with our partners again, and then look at it. See if they can win back their business.
Just as it is very difficult for tech giants to make up their minds to develop self-developed chips, it is also difficult to look back after tasting the sweetness of self-developed chips. A good example is Microsoft and Apple. One of the two companies is a representative of open systems and the other is a representative of closed systems. At first, the closed system won, then the open system won, and then back to the closed system.
To win back these customers, the best way is to launch chips that are stronger than their self-developed chips, or to find new ways of cooperation. At this time, advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes have become very important again.
The basis for winning back customers-leading process
Advanced manufacturing processes are the basis for the continuous advancement of the semiconductor industry. Intel has also maintained its leadership by relying on advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes in the past few decades. However, starting in 2015, Moore’s Law began to slow down, and comments that Moore’s Law failed.
At the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit, Kissinger said, “Moore’s Law is still valid, and we will maintain Moore’s Law in the next ten years, even faster than Moore’s Law.”Kissinger is not chanting slogans. According to his previously announced route, Intel will iterate the five-generation process in the next four years.
As long as Moore’s Law continues to be effective, the semiconductor manufacturing process is iterated every 18 months to two years. Intel wants to catch up with the current industry leaders faster than Moore’s Law.
“We are running the marathon at a sprint speed.” Wang Rui described Intel’s current state and expressed its determination to return to process leadership.
She also explained that Moore’s Law is not a law of physics, it is a law of economy.If you look at it from a very specialized and primitive perspective, there is indeed post-Moore’s law. But the essence of Moore’s Law is to provide economic value, so as long as there are technological breakthroughs, solutions are found, and economic value continues to be provided, Moore’s Law can be maintained.
For Intel, execution is the key to regaining process leadership.
“In the past few years, we have had some setbacks in execution, and we have fallen a few somersaults,” said Wang Rui: “Intel has been using it year after year, and the product generation after it has been launched on time has proved Intel’s most famous It’s Intel’s execution power. Our biggest competitor is ourselves.”
Once Intel has regained its leadership in advanced manufacturing processes, it will have the technical foundation to win back customers, and at the same time it will be able to have new cooperation with customers of self-developed chips. The core change of Intel IDM2.0 is to provide customers with chip foundry services. “We can not only provide customers with advanced manufacturing processes, but under the same manufacturing process, our advanced packaging technology can also help our customers.” Wang Rui pointed out.
A more open ecology is the strongest competitiveness
The leadership of advanced process technology is Intel’s most basic and core competitiveness, but the ecology based on advanced process and hardware is all its competitiveness.
Wang Rui said: “Intel is very aware of its own advantages and the market competition it faces. Before the release of a new generation of more competitive high-performance CPU Sapphire Rapids, our ecology played an important role. We want to create new high-performance computing data. Central ecology, the investment in the entire structure is very large, and this is a long-term investment.”
Relying on the advantages of the ecology, Intel is also providing more cost-effective CPUs through architectural innovation before the advanced manufacturing process returns 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 the Intel 7 process technology, adopts a high-performance hybrid architecture, including performance cores and energy efficiency cores. Brings a great performance improvement over the generations. This is the biggest change in the x86 architecture in the past ten years. At the same time, we have a deep partnership with Microsoft, and the close collaboration between the two parties can intelligently and give full play to the latest generation of Core processing The advantages of performance cores and energy efficiency cores can achieve higher performance and efficiency in real scenarios.”
The 12th-generation Core i9-12900K in the Geekbench 5 database shows the running scores of the Windows 11 platform. The CPU single-thread score is 1834 and the multi-thread score is 17370, which is better than AMD’s latest generation 16-core flagship CPU Ryzen 9 5950X single-core and multi-core. The performance is 11% and 5.6% higher than that of Apple’s latest and most powerful M1 Max, which has a multi-core running score of 12559. It also has obvious advantages.
More importantly, Intel is also adapting to customers’ demands for computing power under new demands.In the past, Intel’s attitude was that the next-generation CPU customers needed was the CPU they provided.
“We have known for a long time that in a complex and diverse digital society, we must be closer to the end users 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 and end users There is a natural shortcoming at some distance, and we are closely integrated with our partners.”
This is closely reflected in Intel’s software first and more attention to the development of the developer community.
Software is the product closest to developers and customers. For most developers and customers, they don’t care about the underlying hardware architecture and hardware scheduling methods. What makes them pay is easy-to-use and stable software. And higher cost performance.
Intel has launched oneAPI, a unified development platform across hardware architectures (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC), and continues to improve its performance, including the newly announced oneAPI 2022, adding 900 new features, and launching a complete Intel Developer Directory Reduce the difficulty for developers to use and play Intel hardware, and lower the barriers to innovation for developers.
It is also important that Intel builds the ecosystem with a more open mind. What Pat Kissinger proposed is to provide developers with an open, selective, and trustworthy open source ecosystem. This is both Intel’s goal and Intel’s challenge.
“It is not easy to build an open source community. Even companies with strong capabilities like Intel and Alibaba cannot build the entire ecosystem with just one company. We have to 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 have not made major mistakes.” This is what a senior expert on domestic CPUs said to Leifeng.com (Public Account: Leifeng.com).
Intel’s success over a long period of time is based on advanced manufacturing processes. However, Intel’s lagging behind in this field in the past few years has become the key to its recent fierce competition. Of course, Intel is also facing new challenges from customers’ differentiated demands for computing power in the digital age.
This is why Pat Kissinger not only announced his plan to return to process leadership and emphasized software first, but also restored the logic behind the Intel On (previously called IDF) summit held for developers.
Technical background, Pat Kissinger, who has worked for Intel for many years, when will Intel return the true king?
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Original link: Lei Feng Net
Editor in charge: Zhaohui
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