This week, Pat Gelsinger bravely stepped into the heart of this drama. The former Intel CEO is a special guest at NVIDIA's GTC 2025 conference, which is currently being held in San Francisco, California. Tech news outlets excerpted key quotes from Kissinger's reflections during an in-person appearance on Acquired's "GTC Live" video podcast.
In the past, the former Intel chief has considered NVIDIA "extremely lucky" to hold the market leadership position. Yesterday's panel discussion once again brought Gelsinger back to his long-held view: "The CPU is king, and I applaud Jen-Hsun Huang's tenacity in just saying, 'No, I'm not trying to build one of those; I'm just trying to tackle workloads starting with graphics.' You know, It became a broader perspective. And then he was lucky in AI, and one time I was debating with him, he said, ‘No, I’m lucky in AI workloads because it requires that type of architecture.’ That’s where the center of application development is.”
The American businessman and electrical engineer believes that AI hardware costs are climbing to unreasonable levels: "Today, if we think about training workloads, that's okay, but you have to give up something that is more suitable for inference. Because the way of stacking GPUs is so expensive, I think it will cost 10,000 times more to fully achieve what we want to deploy AI inference systems, and certainly beyond."
Although one of Intel's older designs "failed," Gelsinger discussed some fond memories of the past: "I had a project that was well known in the industry called Larrabee, which tried to combine the programmability of the CPU with a throughput-oriented architecture (GPU), and I think if Intel continued down that path, you know, the future might be different... I give Jen-Hsun a lot of credit for sticking to the throughput computing or acceleration (vision)."
With the recent cancellation of the "FalconShores" chip design, Intel's AIGPU division may be reorganized around its next-generation "JaguarShores" project - a rack-scale platform that industry regulators estimate will arrive in 2026.