The News: At its inaugural Intel Vision event, Intel announced advancements across silicon, software, and services, geared at showcasing how it brings together technologies and the ecosystem to unlock business value for customers today and in the future. Among the benefits highlighted across real-world examples are improved business results and insights, reduced total cost of ownership, and accelerated time to market and value. Read the Intel Press Release here.
Intel Augments its Silicon, Software, and Services Portfolio Vision
Analyst Take: The news of Intel augmenting its silicon, software, and services offerings at its Intel Vision event is timely. These augmentations to Intel’s portfolio capabilities that can power ecosystem-wide digital transformation are exactly what customers need today. Intel’s key portfolio-wide announcements included:
- Habana Gaudi2 and Greco AI accelerators: These new products are built on a single software stack and Synapse AI (enabling support for different architectures). Intel touts that Gaudi2 is designed to deliver twofold improvement in AI training performance compares to the current in-market A100-based offerings across key vision and NLP workloads.
- 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors: Intel is now shipping initial SKUs of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) and will support DDR5, PCIe Gen5, and CXL 1.1 capabilities as well as new integrated accelerators that Intel advocates could deliver 30x performance over the prior generation through hardware/software optimizations for AI workloads. Targeted applications include improving vRAN capacity and boosting memory bandwidth memory for high-performance computing.
- Project Apollo: In alliance with Accenture, Intel launched Project Apollo, a program targeting enterprises with 30 open-source AI solutions kits that are designed to make AI more accessible to customers across multi-cloud, edge, and on-prem environments.
- IPU Roadmap: Intel share its IPU roadmap through 2026, including new FPGA+ Intel architecture platforms (code-named Hot Springs Canyon) and the Mount Morgan ASIC, as well as forward-looking 800GB products.
- Single GPU Solution: Intel’s data center GPU (code-named Arctic Sound-M) is an AV1 hardware encoder aimed at media transcode, visual graphics, and inference in the cloud applications. ATS-M will be launched in Q3 2022 in two form factors and in more than 15 system designs from partners such as Dell Technologies, Supermicro, H3C, and Inspur.
- 12th Gen Intel Core HX Processors: The new 12th Gen Intel Core HX processors are targeted at workforces that require flexibility and better performance for evolving hybrid work environments.
Taken together, I see the Intel Vision announcements as validating the fact that Intel’s portfolio development approach now fully encompasses and flexibly integrates a three-pronged silicon, software, and services strategy. I believe major emerging applications such as AI workload optimization, clean energy, supercomputing, confidential computing, agricultural autonomy through private wireless networks, and augmented retail experiences all require a holistic silicon, software, and services blueprint to become more widely accepted and monetized across the digital ecosystem.
From my view, Intel also bolsters its overall portfolio vision with the companion launch of its in-development software infrastructure initiative Project Endgame, set for beta tests this year. Through Project Endgame, applications such as GPU workloads can capitalize on this software infrastructure layer to enable devices to use computing resources from other devices distributed across network fabrics to support the objective of continual, low-latency compute services.
Additionally, at the Intel Vision event Intel unveiled its Intel On Demand services aimed at supporting enterprises in optimizing their workload administration in accordance with fulfilling sustainability objectives. I anticipate that Intel’s alliances with key partners such as HPE GreenLake, Lenovo TruScale, and PhoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud can help incentivize organizations to expand their consideration and adoption of consumption models for assuring their infrastructure requirements are more fully accorded with their business outcome goals.
The new portfolio advancements move Intel further away from its silicon-centric marketing roots to a more robust, more thorough ecosystem marketing vision, which I believe will become increasingly critical in order for the company to effectively compete long-term successfully against key silicon, software, and services rivals such as Arm, AMD, NVIDIA, and Marvell as well as an expanding array of home-grown chipsets, especially cloud silicon offerings like AWS (Graviton) and Azure (Ampere Altra Azure VMs).
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Image Credit: Intel
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
