On Tuesday, Intel Corp introduced its latest flagship data centre microprocessor. With the new flagship, the company aims at competing with its rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Inc’s faster chips. Intel is calling its new chip ‘Ice Lake’ and says that the new chip is designed to be used by cloud computing providers and others who run huge data centres. The company also revealed that already, 200,000 test units have been shipped.
Intel Corp’s latest chip will yet again be slower than AMD’s latest flagship data centre server chip that was recently released last month. Years ago, Intel lost the lead in the fastest chips. This was as a result of the unprecedented blunders with its in-house 10-nanometer manufacturing technology that the company uses to make the chip. AMD on the other hand outsources its server chip manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd and over time gained market share over Intel Corp.
With its newly released ‘Ice Lake’ chip alongside a portfolio of data storage, networking and other chips designed to work well with the latest ‘Ice Lake’ processor, Intel aims at taking the lead in the market by taking greater control over its supply chain. Intel Corp believes that the chip will be competitive and will serve as a solution to the explosive demand of and global shortage in chips.
The Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Platforms Group at Intel Corp; Navin Shenoy, told Reuters that, “nobody else in the industry has the intersection of (intellectual property), architecture, design and manufacturing. We think that’s a particularly important differentiator for the company at a time when demand is exploding and supply is short”.
Intel is not trying to regain its title of speed. Instead with its new chip, it is focusing on making chips that will be used for specific types of computing. This means that these chips will be designed with a specific purpose in mind and instead of trying to make a chip that tries to do all and doesn’t do that efficiently, Intel Corp is making a chip that will be optimized for specific purposes.
