Among other things, Intel has been able to not only deliver five process nodes out of the Intel foundries in four years, as Gelsinger committed to at the time, but now for the second time is able to deploy an advanced process node earlier in the Xeon SP roadmap, thus helping to close the gap with its datacenter CPU rivals – the number of which is still increasing. The Data Center and AI Group update did more than just reaffirm the Xeon SP roadmap that Singhal talked to us about when Intel finally got around to putting a Xeon roadmap out in February 2022, a little more than a year after Pat Gelsinger was named chief executive officer and returned to the place where he learned all he knows about the semiconductor industry after stints at EMC and VMware. And, in a good mood and soon to be under threat with the impending 128-core “Bergamo” Epyc processors from AMD and already feeling the heat from the current 128-core Altra Max CPUs from Ampere Computing, Intel also decided to divulged some information about “Clearwater Forest,” a successor to its first efficient-class Xeon SP, code-named “Sierra Forest,” that is coming later this year. Luckily, there was no more bad news out of Intel, and in fact, the company is doing better with its 18A chip manufacturing process, so much so that it is pulling in the delivery of one of its future performance-class Xeon SP chips. And we had a good laugh at our own expense. It is important to not jump to conclusions in life, and in a prebriefing with Ronak Singhal, the chief architect of the Xeon line and a Senior Fellow, ahead of that meeting, we expressed exasperation that such a thing had come to pass.

So naturally, before that Wall Street call happened, we wondered if Intel was going to shut down its discrete GPU. The chip designer and maker – the last one in the world that does both – had announced a datacenter product line update for Wall Street analysts only a week after Raja Koduri, the former AMD GPU chief architect who had that same task at Intel, announced his departure. It was a reasonable enough gut reaction given the many changes happening at Intel in recent months.

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