Intel is much more open about their future than most companies, by publishing a roadmap with years in advance.
Since Pat Gelsinger has become CEO, Intel has reached successfully all the milestones on their public roadmap, even if there have been a few predictable problems that have increased their losses, like low fabrication yields on their new Intel 4 CMOS process.
Unfortunately, even if their roadmap is ambitious, it is still not ambitious enough to ensure a quick return to profitability and some of the decisions on which it is based are very questionable.
The main problem is that it appears that they have a very big inertia in their design and validation processes, which prevents easy corrections of the projects that are already known to have no longer appropriate goals.
While after AMD finishes the design of a new CPU core, like Zen 5, during the next few months they introduce products using the new cores that update all their product lines, from low-power mobile to high-end servers, after Intel launches the first product using new CPU cores, like they are doing now with Lunar Lake, which includes Skymont and Lion Cove cores that are competitive with Zen 5, Intel may continue for a long time to introduce other new products that still use obsolete CPU or GPU cores, like with Granite Rapids for servers later this year or Arrow Lake H for bigger laptops at the beginning of 2025, and they may succeed to update all their product lines only after one year or even more, e.g. they may launch up-to-date server CPUs (Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids) only during the second half of 2025, at a time when they will introduce improved laptop CPU cores in Panther Lake, making again obsolete their 2025/2026 server CPUs, which might end competing against Zen 6, instead of against Zen 5, with which they would have been well matched.
Since Pat Gelsinger has become CEO, Intel has reached successfully all the milestones on their public roadmap, even if there have been a few predictable problems that have increased their losses, like low fabrication yields on their new Intel 4 CMOS process.
Unfortunately, even if their roadmap is ambitious, it is still not ambitious enough to ensure a quick return to profitability and some of the decisions on which it is based are very questionable.
The main problem is that it appears that they have a very big inertia in their design and validation processes, which prevents easy corrections of the projects that are already known to have no longer appropriate goals.
While after AMD finishes the design of a new CPU core, like Zen 5, during the next few months they introduce products using the new cores that update all their product lines, from low-power mobile to high-end servers, after Intel launches the first product using new CPU cores, like they are doing now with Lunar Lake, which includes Skymont and Lion Cove cores that are competitive with Zen 5, Intel may continue for a long time to introduce other new products that still use obsolete CPU or GPU cores, like with Granite Rapids for servers later this year or Arrow Lake H for bigger laptops at the beginning of 2025, and they may succeed to update all their product lines only after one year or even more, e.g. they may launch up-to-date server CPUs (Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids) only during the second half of 2025, at a time when they will introduce improved laptop CPU cores in Panther Lake, making again obsolete their 2025/2026 server CPUs, which might end competing against Zen 6, instead of against Zen 5, with which they would have been well matched.