While presenting third quarter financial results, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger made several newsworthy confessions and revelations. For example, he declared that the design memory-on-package that Lunar Lake processors use was an error; it also called into question the future of dedicated Arc GPUs.
Get rid of memory!
Pat Gelsinger clarified that the low-consumption Lunar Lake mobile processors, in other words the Core Ultra 200V launched last September, would remain isolated cases in terms of design.
For the record (no pun intended), these chips have their LPPPDR5X memory directly grafted onto the die ; they therefore do not use traditional barrettes. This composition is not intended to be repeated according to the Intel boss. In any case, it will not be for their successors (Panther Lake then Nova Lake): with these chips, the firm will take a more traditional approach with memory installed elsewhere on the motherboard (perhaps exploiting other formats than the SO-DIMM, for example the CAMM standard – Compression Attached Memory Module).
Pat Gelsinger states that “Lunar Lake was initially designed as a niche product where we wanted to get the best performance and long battery life. Then AI PCs appeared. With AI PCs, we have moved from a niche product to a high volume product”. And according to the CEO of Intel, this design memory-on-package poses profitability problems.
However, according to the company, it helps reduce energy consumption associated with moving data through system components by 40%. It will therefore be interesting to see how the next chips will compensate for this “decay” of their DRAM.
Furthermore, Intel was forced to outsource the production of its Lunar Lake chips to TSMC. Here again, in the future, the company wishes to change its approach, by regaining control over manufacturing.
Concretely, more than 70% of Panther Lakes will be manufactured by Intel's own foundries; what's more, they will be the first mainstream processors to benefit from the Intel 18A node. This range is planned for the second half of 2025.
Dedicated GPUs, soon to be relics of the past, says Pat Gelsinger
A few words on dedicated GPUs to finish. Pat Gelsinger didn't dwell too much on the subject; he simply made an allusion to it during a more general speech on the company's desire to streamline its catalog by reducing the number of references that make up each series; the idea is to limit yourself to a few products rather than dozens. In this area, Intel has clearly not yet achieved the frugality of AMD, whose Ryzen AI 300 range was initially limited to two references, now three; the Core Ultra 200V series includes nine SKUs, and there are a plethora of other mobile chips awaiting CES 2025.
In this context, Pat Gelsinger shared his vision of the future of consumer PCs: a market where the market share of dedicated GPUs will be increasingly eroded by those of integrated solutions (iGPU). As a result, releasing dedicated graphics cards is likely not the company's priority. With this prism and the failure of the Arc Alchemist, it is therefore not guaranteed that the upcoming Battlemage series will one day be followed by the Celestial and Druid series as was planned…
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Pat Gelsinger
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