Intel exec John Pitzer told a conference crowd that Team Blue wants to chase edge inference chips and custom ASICs after getting smoked by Nvidia and AMD in the datacenter AI race. The company thinks it can pull a Broadcom or Marvell move by selling custom silicon services while also offering foundry access to hyperscalers who want to skip the middleman and go straight to fab production.
The edge play is already happening through AI PC chips like Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake that pack beefier NPUs for local processing, and there is also Crescent Island coming for inference tasks. The ASIC hustle looks more interesting because new CEO Lip-Bu Tan brought serious custom silicon chops from his time at Cadence, and the company already has networking ASIC customers buying SmartNIC designs for packet processing stuff.
Intel thinks bundling design services with its own fabs gives better turnaround times than competitors who farm manufacturing out to TSMC or Samsung.
The edge play is already happening through AI PC chips like Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake that pack beefier NPUs for local processing, and there is also Crescent Island coming for inference tasks. The ASIC hustle looks more interesting because new CEO Lip-Bu Tan brought serious custom silicon chops from his time at Cadence, and the company already has networking ASIC customers buying SmartNIC designs for packet processing stuff.
Intel thinks bundling design services with its own fabs gives better turnaround times than competitors who farm manufacturing out to TSMC or Samsung.
