I don’t think Lunar lake wasn’t a “mistake” so much as it was a reaction. Intel couldn’t make a competitive laptop chip to go up against Apple and Qualcomm. (There is a very weird love triangle between the three of them /s.) Intel had to go to TSMC to get a chip to market that satisfied this AI Copilot+ PC market boom(or bust). Intel doesn’t have the ability to make a competitive chip in that space (yet) so they had to produce lunar lake as a one off.
Intel is very used to just giving people chips and forcing them to conform their software to the available hardware. We’re finally in the era where the software defines what the cpu needs to be able to do. This is probably why Intel struggles. Their old market dominant strategy doesn’t work in the CPU market anymore and they’ve found themselves on the back foot. Meanwhile new devices where the hardware and software are deeply integrated in design keep coming out while Intel is still swinging for the “here’s our chip, figure it out for us” crowd.
In contrast to their desktop offerings, looking at Intel’s server offerings shows that Intel gets it. They want to give you the right chips for the right job with the right accelerators.
He’s not wrong that GPUs in the desktop space are going away because SoCs are inevitably going to be the future. This isn’t because the market has demanded it or some sort of conspiracy, but literally we can’t get faster without chips getting smaller and closer together.
Even though I’m burnt on Nvidia and the last two CPUs and GPUs I’ve bought have been all AMD, I’m excited to see what Nvidia and mediatek do next as this SOC future has some really interesting upsides to it. Projects like ashai Linux proton project and apple GPTK2 have shown me the SoC future is actually right around the corner.
Turns out, the end of the x86 era is a good thing?
I would like to see further development but I always had a sneaking suspicion that its life was limited due to the fact that ARC does not come from Intel’s fabs either. Like lunar lake, Arc is also made at TSMC.