US-based Intel is set to review its chip strategy in order to reduce pressure from AMD and others, Reuters reported.
The world’s second-largest chipmaker by revenue – behind Samsung — will be upgrading its existing chips and combine them with a new memory technology, Navin Shenoy, Intel’s data center chief, said.
Analysts expect AMD to eat in to Intel’s market share with its planned launch next year of chips with a tiny 7 nanometers between transistors.
Intel chips have 14 nanometers between transistors, indicating slower speed. There is some dispute about the measurements, with analysts saying Intel’s numbers are better than headline figures convey, but AMD appears to have secured a lead for 2019.
Intel will not launch its own 10-nanometer chips in PCs until late 2019, with server chips coming in 2020.
The Santa Clara, California, company has lost control of the technology driven business as rivals tout their more efficient plants, said Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon.
Navin Shenoy, Intel’s data center chief and a 23-year veteran of the chipmaker, will lay out Intel’s plans to analysts on Wednesday.
Data center market is larger and faster-growing than the company previously thought. Navin Shenoy will also lay out expectations for that market and will reveal Intel’s revenue from fast-growing technology fields such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Though the 10-nanometer chips are expected to give more business to Intel, they will not start shipping in large volumes until 2020. Until then, Intel believes its earnings growth can outpace the overall market’s growth if the company focuses on improving its existing chips, Shenoy told Reuters ahead of the meeting.
Intel’s data center business grew by 26 percent in the last quarter.
Intel’s plan is to stitch together its CPUs with its memory chips and its software offerings. The company also plans to tweak its chips to make them more competitive against offerings from Nvidia for AI work. Together they will compete in costs and computing horsepower with rivals’ systems, Shenoy said.
Intel plans to pair a new memory chip technology called Optane with its processors next year, gaining more capability than its rivals.
AMD is expected to pick up market share over the next year, mostly based on its chips with the smaller circuits, which improve efficiency, analysts say.
While Intel is behind in the chip size race, its processors are more capable than the numbers might indicate, and it is unlikely to lose its dominant place in data centers between now and 2020, said analyst Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research.
