At Intel’s 2022 Investor Meeting, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger and Intel’s business leaders outlined key elements of the company’s strategy and path for long-term growth. Intel’s long-term plans will capitalize on transformative growth during an era of unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Among the presentations, Intel announced product roadmaps across its major business units and key execution milestones, including:
- Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics
- Intel Foundry Services
- Software and Advanced Technology
- Network and Edge
- Technology Development
Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics
The Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG) is on track to ship products across its three segments and deliver more than $1 billion in revenue in 2022. As a growth engine for Intel, AXG’s three segments together will approach $10 billion of revenue for Intel by 2026.
- Visual Compute Roadmap and Strategy
- Intel Arc Graphics Timing and Roadmap Update – AXG expects to ship more than 4 million discrete GPUs in 2022. OEMs are introducing notebooks with Intel Arc graphics, code-named Alchemist, for sale in the first quarter of 2022. Intel will ship add-in cards for desktops in the second quarter and workstations by the third quarter. Architecture work has begun on Celestial, a product that will address the ultra-enthusiast segment.
- Project Endgame – Project Endgame will enable users to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience. Project Endgame will be available later this year.
- Super Compute Roadmap and Strategy – More than 85 percent of the world’s supercomputers run on Intel Xeon processors. Building on this foundation, AXG is extending to higher compute and memory bandwidth and will deliver a leadership CPU and GPU roadmap to power high performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. To date, Intel expects more than 35 HPC-AI design wins from top OEMs and CSPs. Additionally, AXG has set a course that paves the way to zetta-scale by 2027.
- Sapphire Rapids with High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) – HBM integrated into the package with Sapphire Rapids offers applications up to 4x more memory bandwidth, providing a generational improvement of 2.8x over Intel 3rd Gen Xeon processors. On the same computational fluid dynamics application, Sapphire Rapids with HBM outperforms competing solutions by up to 2.8x.
- Ponte Vecchio – AXG is on track to deliver Ponte Vecchio GPUs for the Aurora supercomputer program later this year. Ponte Vecchio achieved leadership performance results with up to 2.6x more performance compared with the leading market solution on a complex financial services workload.
- Arctic Sound-M – Arctic Sound-M brings the industry’s first hardware-based AV1 encoder into a GPU to provide 30% bandwidth improvement and includes the industry’s only open-sourced media solution. The media and analytics supercomputer enables leadership transcode quality, streaming density and cloud gaming. Arctic-Sound M is sampling to customers and will ship by mid-2022.
- Falcon Shores – Falcon Shores is a new architecture that will bring x86 and Xe GPU together into a single socket. This architecture is targeted for 2024 and projected to deliver benefits of more than 5x performance-per-watt, 5x compute density, 5x memory capacity and bandwidth improvements.1
- Custom Compute Group – AXG’s Custom Compute Group will build tailored products for emerging workloads such as blockchain, supercomputing at the edge, premium infotainment for cars, immersive displays and more.
Intel Foundry Services
The automotive industry is undergoing a profound transformation, as vehicles become electric, safer, smarter and more connected. These trends are driving considerable growth, with automotive silicon revenues expected to nearly double to $115 billion by 2030. The fragmented supply chains and legacy process technologies of today will not be able to support the increasing demand and the transition to more compute-intensive applications. In response, Intel Foundry Services (IFS) is forming a dedicated automotive group to deliver a complete solution to automakers with three clear priorities:
- Open Central Compute Architecture – IFS will develop a high-performance open auto compute platform that enables automotive OEMs to build next-generation experiences and solutions. This open compute architecture will leverage chiplet-based building blocks, along with Intel’s advanced packaging technologies, providing significant flexibility to build solutions optimized for technology nodes, algorithms, software and applications that address the compute needs of next-generation vehicles.
- Automotive-Grade Foundry Platform – Intel will enable manufacturing technologies that meet the stringent quality requirements of automotive applications and customers. IFS is targeting both leading-edge nodes and technologies optimized for microcontrollers and unique automotive needs, in combination with advanced packaging, to help customers design multiple types of automotive semiconductors. A partnership with Mobileye, a leader in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) solutions with deep experience in automotive-grade products, is enabling IFS to deliver its advanced technology nodes for the automotive segment.
- Enabling Transition to Advanced Technologies – IFS will offer design services and Intel IP to automakers, enabling them to take advantage of Intel’s expertise from silicon to system design. The IFS Accelerator automotive program, announced last year, is designed to help automotive chipmakers transition to advanced process and packaging technologies and innovate with Intel’s custom and industry-standard IP portfolio.
Software and Advanced Technology
Software is a key component of Intel’s competitive advantage that adds value across the stack for Intel’s client, edge, cloud and data center businesses. Intel’s approach to foster an open ecosystem ensures trust, choice and interoperability for our industry and acts as a catalyst for technological adoption and innovation. Intel’s investments in software also present opportunities for growth that are both disruptive and transformative.
- Cross-Platform, Open Development – Intel oneAPI toolkits deliver a cross-platform, open programming model that unleashes developers to solve unique challenges with optimized performance.
- Solving Challenges with AI – The convergence of security and AI demonstrates the incredible promise of open and collaborative frameworks that help protect data while gathering insights. Intel® Core™ processors and Intel® vPRO™ systems using Intel® Threat Detection Technology detect malware behavior below the operating system and feed those insights to endpoint detection and response solutions. For confidential computing in the cloud, 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® Software Guard Extensions protect data and AI models so data can be aggregated and greater insights can be gathered to solve challenging problems, such as identifying brain tumors.
Network and Edge
Networking and edge computing is a quickly growing industry. To accelerate growth in this market and drive the shift toward software-defined and fully programmable infrastructure, Intel created the Network and Edge Group (NEX) in 2021. Intel expects networking and edge revenue to grow at a faster rate than overall TAM over the next decade and be a significant contributor to the company’s overall growth. To take advantage of this opportunity, NEX is producing programmable hardware and open software from the cloud through the internet and 5G networks to the intelligent edge.
- Intelligent Fabric – Intel® Intelligent Fabric is programmable platform that allows customers to advance business opportunities by programming network behavior from end to end, through the infrastructure within the data center. It puts control in the hands of customers, giving them the means to program the network. This lets customers constantly evolve, improve and differentiate their infrastructure for themselves and creates a future where a new class of computing device, the Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), can be integrated into data centers, accelerating cloud infrastructure and maximizing performance.
- Mobile Network Transformation – Intel has led the transformation of telecommunications networks for more than a decade, propellingthe world’s networks away from legacy, fixed-function hardware and enabling them to be defined by open and interoperable software. Intel’s ambition is to provide its customers with the industry’s absolute best and broadest programmable platforms to advance business opportunities, putting control in the hands of the developers to support the buildout of 5G and beyond.
- Accelerating the Intelligent Edge – Intel offers a diverse portfolio of hardware and software offerings and a vast ecosystem of partners to help customers deliver intelligent edge platforms. Enabling new use cases and workloads across a range of vertical industry markets, NEX is positioned to meet the growing need for compute and analytics at the intelligent edge. AI – specifically inferencing at the edge – provides actionable intelligence where and when the data happens. As such, it is becoming the most prolific use case at the edge, transforming and automating factories, smart cities, hospitals and more.
Technology Development
Intel remains on track to reclaim transistor performance per watt leadership by 2025. Intel’s advanced test and packaging technologies give it unmatched industry leadership that benefits its products and foundry customers and will play a critical part in the pursuit of Moore’s Law. Continuous innovation is the cornerstone of Moore’s Law, and innovation is very much alive and well at Intel.
- Process – Intel 7 is in production and shipping in volume with the launch of 12th Gen Intel® Core™ processors and additional products coming in 2022. Intel 4, our implementation of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, will be manufacturing-ready in the second half of 2022. It delivers an approximate 20% increase in transistor performance per watt. Intel 3, with additional features, delivers a further 18% performance per watt and will be manufacturing-ready in the second half of 2023. Ushering in the Angstrom Era with RibbonFET and PowerVia, Intel 20A will deliver up to a 15% performance per watt improvement and will be manufacturing-ready in the first half of 2024. Intel 18A delivers an additional 10% improvement and will be manufacturing-ready in the second half of 2024.
- Packaging – Our advanced packaging leadership gives designers options across thermals, power, high-speed signaling and interconnect density, to maximize and co-optimize product performance. In 2022, Intel will ship leadership packaging technologies in Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio and start risk production on Meteor Lake. Foveros Omni and Foveros Direct, our advanced packaging technologies unveiled at Intel Accelerated in July 2021, will be manufacturing-ready in 2023.
- Innovation – As Intel looks forward to technologies such as High-NA EUV, RibbonFET, PowerVia, and Foveros Omni and Direct, its leaders see no end to innovation and therefore no end to Moore’s Law. Intel remains undeterred in achieving its aspiration of delivering approximately 1 trillion transistors in a single device by the end of the decade.
