Despite comments made by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who was ousted from the company last month, Intel will not eliminate its discrete graphics business. “We are very committed to the discrete graphics market and will continue to make strategic investments in this direction,” Intel's new co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus told the audience at the company's keynote at CES 2025. She says that It's a question you get asked a lot.
Gelsinger was incredibly blunt on a recent earnings call about the company's radically different Lunar Lake laptop processors being something of a failed experiment from a financial perspective, and suggested there would also be “less need” for the company's investments in discrete graphics: “How are we handling graphics? These are increasingly larger integrated graphics capabilities, so in the future there will be less need for discrete graphics in the market.”
Now, it's possible that Holthaus' new statement is code for “we're pulling out, but slowly and less openly,” as his overall tone in this morning's speech was extremely optimistic despite Intel's recent troubles. He also celebrated the Lunar Lake chip, calling 2024 “the year Intel really reaffirmed us as a leader in this ai PC market” for its performance and battery life, even though the Arrow Lake chips it just released advertise the company are built differently.
Intel's future “strategic investments” could also be in the ai space rather than gaming, similar to how AMD and Nvidia have recently refocused their efforts on the huge opportunity there.
However, there will be at least one more game card coming soon. Holthaus says Intel will release its already-announced upcoming B570 GPU next week, a card that's even more budget-friendly than the B580.
