“We have important customers in the data center side. We have important OEM customers on both data center and client and that needs to be our priority to get the limited supply we have to those customers,” he added.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan added that the continuing proliferation and diversification of AI workloads is placing significant capacity constraints on traditional and new hardware infrastructure, reinforcing the growing and essential role CPUs play in the AI era.
Because of this, Intel decided to simplify its server road map, focusing resources on the 16-channel Diamond Rapids product and accelerate the introduction of Coral Rapids. Intel had removed multithreading from diamond Rapids, presumably to get rid of the performance bottlenecks. With each core running two threads, they often competed for resources. That’s why, for example, Ampere does not use threading but instead applies many more cores per CPU.
With Coral Rapids, Intel is not only reintroducing multi-threading back into our data center road map but working closely with Nvidia to build a custom Xeon fully integrated with their NVLink technology to Build the tighter connection between Intel Xeon processors and Nvidia GPUs.
Another aspect impacting supply has been yields or the new 18A process node. Tan said he was disappointed that the company could not fully meet the demand of the markets, and that while yields are in line with internal plans, “they’re still below where I want them to be,” Tan said.
Tan said yields for 18A are improving month-over-month and Intel is targeting a 7% to 8% improvement each month.
