From what we know so far (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-graphics-all-we-k...), it will be a while before Intel competes in the GPU space. The first offering of Xe graphics (still not out yet) will probably not be competitive with cards that AMD and Nvidia released over a year ago.
If Intel can survive their current CPU manufacturing issues, manage to innovate on their design again, and manage to improve the Xe design in a couple generations, they might be in a good position in several years. I (as a layman) give them a 50/50 shot at recovering or just abandoning the desktop CPU and GPU market.
> The first offering of Xe graphics (still not out yet) will probably not be competitive with cards that AMD and Nvidia released over a year ago.
Being a only a year behind market leaders with your first product actually seems pretty impressive to me. Especially if that's at the (unreasonably priced) top of the line, and they have something competitive in the higher volume but less sexy down market segments.
Intel's i860 was released in 1986, that evolved to the i740 in 1996, and later on to the KNC, KNLs, Xeon Phis, etc.
The >= KNC products have all been "one generation behind" the competition. When the Intel Xe is released, Intel will have been trying to enter this market for about 30 years.
This market is more important now than ever before. I hope that they keep pushing and do not axe the Intel Xe after the first couple of generations only to realize 10 years later that they want to try again.
They had a bad product that they had to sell at below cost to get market share. The x86 tax is pretty small for a big out of order desktop core but it's much more real at Atom's scale.
I think radio tech is an issue in the mobile space. It is heavily patented and the big players who can integrate this technology into their chips can offer much more energy efficient solutions.
Intel had that in-house too... it just also kinda sucked too...
That is the thing with a lot of these side projects Intel is always working on. It would be great if they actually delivered good products, but they often spend billions acquiring these companies and developing these products only to turn out one or two broken products and then dump the whole project.
I think this time is different with Xe, but I can't blame anyone for looking at the past history and being dubious that Intel is in it for the long haul.
If Intel can survive their current CPU manufacturing issues, manage to innovate on their design again, and manage to improve the Xe design in a couple generations, they might be in a good position in several years. I (as a layman) give them a 50/50 shot at recovering or just abandoning the desktop CPU and GPU market.