Jeffrey Dustin
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 3 (Reuters) – Intel Corp plans to produce graphics processing units (GPUs), a category of chips promoted by Nvidia, Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan said on Tuesday.
“I just hired a lead GPU architect and he’s very good. I’m happy to have him on board,” Tan said, claiming it took some convincing.
Qualcomm executive Eric Demmers left for Intel last month, a move first reported by industry publication CRN and later confirmed by Demmers on LinkedIn.
In an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of the Cisco Artificial Intelligence Summit, Tan said the GPU work will be targeted at data centers, where Nvidia has built a large presence in recent years, and that Demmers will report to Intel data center chip chief Kevork Kechichian.
“It’s very connected to the data center,” Tan told Reuters. “We’re working with the customer and then defining what the customer needs.”
Tan said on stage that “some customers are actively participating” in Intel’s chip foundry business, known as Intel Foundry. In an interview with Reuters, he said interest is focused on Intel’s 14A manufacturing technology and that volume production may increase later this year.
“In order to have customers… they have to let us know the volume and product type so that we can plan and take the time to build capacity,” Tan told Reuters.
Tan also said that during a recent recruitment process for chip designers, he was “shocked” to find that Huawei Technologies Co. had hired about 100 “top” designers despite U.S. restrictions on its use of chip industry software and tools.
Tan said that when he asked Huawei designers why they joined the Chinese company without access to U.S. tools, “They said, ‘Even though we don’t have access to the best tools, like the (electronic design automation) tools from Cadence and Synopsys, we have the poor man’s way of doing it, and we can do it,'” Tan said.
“To me, they’re not far behind us and if you’re not careful, they’re going to jump in front of us.”
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dustin in San Francisco; Writing by Stephen Nellis; Editing by Mark Porter and Nick Ziminski)
