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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>intel can't afford to axe the gpu division, because there's so much potential in that space

Haha, that's adorable when you consider how many things with potential Intel has either axed, sold off, or abandoned over the years.

  - ARM mobile chips (StrongARM)

  - Mobile modems (now belonging to Apple)

  - Compute stick

  - Itanium

  - The Edison and Curie

  - IoT Gateway

  - Xeon Phy

  - Movidius VPUs haven't been axed but they don't seem to be getting developed further

  - Recon smart glasses

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None of those were core to Intel's business in the way GPUs are likely going to be going forward. The closer integration of CPUs and GPUs is an industry wide trend with Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all trying to eliminate the need to go off-chip for as much as possible. Things can be dramatically faster and more efficient across both consumer and server workloads if everything is just part of the same actual chip and you don't have to go out and use things which are plugged into the motherboard. Making that work is a lot easier if you have both your own CPU and GPU architectures. Apple has both in the M1, Nvidia is pairing ARM cores with its GPUs, AMD obviously makes both, and Intel is trying to get in on the game. They recognize that having their own GPU designs are going to be very important to both their consumer and HPC products going forward, especially as use-cases which rely on GPU or GPU-like acceleration (AI stuff) proliferate. Having competitive GPU designs is critical to their future competitiveness.

Intel actually spent too much effort on the Itanium, it was stillborn. The Xeon Phi was just the product name of the Larrabee without the display output parts, and the Larrabee was demoted to the Xeon Phi BECAUSE it didn't have enough potential to compete with the discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. The current attempt at discrete GPUs is more promising.

Also, they helped develop Infiniband before dropping out. Much later they got back into the Infiniband business by buying QLogic, and from there developed Omnipath which they eventually gave up on, spinning the product line off as a separate company, Cornelis Networks.

Some others: Realsense, Optane, and they sold their NAND busisess to SK Hynix.

Don't forget the Intel purchase of McAfee software for $7.5B

But Intel replaced the Xeon Phi with their discrete GPUs, I would abandon those too, if I had an even better product to sell.

I think they just junked their network switch silicon. Again.

> ARM

Oh what could have been

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