Intel Releases New Chip Launch Schedule, Focuses On Energy Efficiency And Artificial Intelligence

JAKARTA - US chipmaker Intel Corp announced on Wednesday March 29 that its first semiconductor product for data center customers focused on energy efficiency, Sierra Forest, will be delivered in the first half of next year, as the company underlines the chip release schedule following previous delays.

"These last few years have been very challenging as we have introduced many innovations but also a lot of complexity and date of release of our product has been delayed," the Head of Intel Data Center and AI Group, Sandra Rivera, told Reuters ahead of the investor event.

Intel still dominates the PC and server processing chip market, with a market share of more than 70%, according to technology research firm IDC. However, that figure decreased from more than 90% in 2017.

Intel's fourth-strongest generation Xeon processor for data center, Saphire Rapids, faces a delay that gives its rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) to pursue. But Rivera said "our release schedule is in line with plan" and "fulfills all of our key engineering milestones".

He added that the fifth-generation Xeon processor, Emerald Rapids, is scheduled to be delivered by the end of this year and the next generation, Granite Rapids, which is being tested by customers, will be delivered next year after the Sierra Forest release.

Intel says the next energy-efficient chip, Clearwater Forest, will be on the market by 2025.

Rivera said Intel is also working on building Intel Developer Cloud with 256 Xeon chips and 512 Gaudi chips for artificial intelligence (AI) that will be available to AI developers to train and run new models. He said startups AI Hugging Face and Stable Diffusion already use Intel chips.