The 10 Biggest Intel News Stories Of 2024

While Intel faced significant challenges this year ranging from the abrupt retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger to massive job cuts, the semiconductor giant continued to push forward with new products such as the Intel Core 200V series as well as the Intel Foundry business.

Intel ended 2024 in a significantly different position than when it started the year.

A large part of that was because of the abrupt retirement of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger at the beginning of December, but it also had to do with the fact that the semiconductor giant had to cut over 15,000 jobs and more than $10 billion in costs in the second half of the year.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company also saw big changes in channel leadership multiple times this year, most notably the global channel chief role.

This was all happening as Intel faced growing competition across multiple fronts, including in the PC and cloud infrastructure markets where it has traditionally held dominance.

But despite all the challenges the chipmaker faced, it continued to push forward with new products such as the Intel Core 200V series and Gaudi 3 and the Intel Foundry contract chip manufacturing business that was championed by Gelsinger during his tenure as CEO.

These developments helped make up the 10 biggest Intel stories of 2024. What follows are the most important things you should know about each development.

10. Interim Intel Co-CEOs Outline Post-Gelsinger Strategy

Three days after the sudden retirement of Gelsinger on Dec. 1, interim co-CEO David Zinsner (pictured) said the semiconductor giant’s “core strategy remains intact” while noting a few tweaks to its product and manufacturing businesses.

Zinsner said at a Dec. 4 investor event that Intel’s board of directors wants company leadership to put an “emphasis on execution around the product side of the business,” referring to the business units for chip products such as the Xeon and Core processors. Doing this, he added, will ensure the success of Intel Foundry, the company’s contract chip manufacturing business that was separated from the products group this year.

The board also wants Intel to push for more incremental returns on the massive investments the semiconductor giant has put into its manufacturing operations, according to Zinsner, who is also Intel’s CFO.

“I’d say the one thing that has definitely come out of the way the board’s thinking about this is they do recognize and have pushed us that, ‘Hey, we made a lot of investment from a capital perspective in Foundry, and we need to start seeing some incremental [return on invested capital] on those investments,’ and so, and that's what we’re committed to do. That’s going to be one of my major focuses,” he said.

A little more than a week later, on Dec. 12, Michelle Johnston Holthaus joined Zinsner at another investor conference in their first public appearance together as Intel’s interim co-CEOs and gave blunt assessments of Intel’s accelerator chip and server CPU efforts while painting a rosier picture of its PC chip strategy.

“On the data center side, we have a lot of work to do there. But on the client side, our say-do ratio for the last four years has been very good,” said Holthaus, who had led Intel’s Client Computing Group for more than two years before.

As for Intel’s accelerator chip strategy, Holthaus said the company’s Gaudi chips do “not allow me to get to the masses” and that the successor to the recently launched Gaudi 3, code-named Falcon Shores, will not be “wonderful” but instead a “good first step.”

9. Intel Foundry Launches With Microsoft As First Marquee Customer

Intel in February marked the official launch of its contract chip manufacturing business, Intel Foundry, and named Microsoft as a marquee customer.

At the launch event, the chipmaker called Intel Foundry the “world’s first systems foundry” for the AI era, reiterated its goal of displacing Samsung to become the world’s second-largest foundry by 2030 and revealed an expanded process road map.

Intel Foundry was a key part of Gelsinger’s comeback plan, which called for a massive expansion in manufacturing capacity in the West and an acceleration of advanced chip-making capabilities to support the revitalized foundry effort.

At the time, the company said that its Intel 3 process is ready for high-volume manufacturing while the last two nodes on its node acceleration plan—Intel 20A and Intel 18A—are on track to become ready for manufacturing this year. The company has said that it expects Intel 18A to give Intel an edge over Asian foundry rivals TSMC and Samsung by 2025, when Intel plans to start using the node for high-volume manufacturing.

(In September, the company said it no longer planned to commercialize Intel 20A and would instead focus on Intel 18A for 2025.)

In a process road map update, Intel said it will follow up Intel 18A with Intel 14A, which is expected to enter commercialization in late 2026 and slated to be the first node to use an advanced form of lithography called High NA EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet).

Intel also disclosed that it’s developing modified versions of Intel 3, Intel 18 and Intel 14A that have been optimized to improve performance, introduce new features or implement its Foveros Direct 3-D stacking technology for advanced chip designs.

Microsoft confirmed that it will become an Intel Foundry customer for a chip design it plans to manufacture on the Intel 18A process.

“We are in the midst of a very exciting platform shift that will fundamentally transform productivity for every individual organization and the entire industry,” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.

“To achieve this vision, we need a reliable supply of the most advanced, high-performance and high-quality semiconductors. That’s why we are so excited to work with Intel Foundry, and why we have chosen a chip design that we plan to produce on the Intel 18A process,” he added.

8. Intel Makes Foundry Independent, Names AWS Foundry Customer

Gelsinger said in a September update that the company plans to turn its contract chip manufacturing business into an independent subsidiary among other changes he laid out that will help it save billions of dollars and bounce back financially.

Gelsinger also highlighted a new “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework” where Intel will design and manufacture custom chips for Amazon Web Services.

In the Sept. 21 letter to employees, made public on Intel’s website, he said turning Intel Foundry into an independent subsidiary will give customers and suppliers “clearer separation and independence from the rest of Intel,” namely its product businesses, like the Data Center and AI Group and the Client Computing Group.

The CEO said at the time that the move will also give Intel the ability to raise funding from outside groups and “optimize the capital structure of each business to maximize growth and shareholder value creation.”

While this will not result any leadership changes for Intel Foundry, the contract chip-making business will gain an operating board that includes independent directors as part of the semiconductor giant’s push for “greater transparency, optimization and accountability across the business,” according to Gelsinger.

When Intel marked the official launch of Intel Foundry in February, the company emphasized that its decision to financially separate the contract chip-making division from its chip design businesses will show potential and existing customers that Intel Foundry is independent from the rest of intel.

Intel called the new AWS chip design and manufacturing deal a “significant expansion” of their “longstanding strategic collaboration.”

As part of the deal, Intel plans to manufacture an AI fabric chip for AWS on Intel 18A, which is the advanced chip-making node that the semiconductor giant has said will allow it to leapfrog Asian foundry giants TSMC and Samsung in processor performance by next year as part of Gelsinger’s comeback plan.

The chipmaker said it also plans to manufacture a custom Xeon 6 chip on the Intel 3 node, which entered mass-manufacturing this year.

The two companies said the deal leaves open the possibility for Intel to work with AWS on additional custom chip designs as well as existing Intel designs using Intel 18A and next-generation nodes like Intel 18AP and Intel 14A.

7. Intel Faces Growing Competition In PC, Cloud Markets

Intel faced growing competition this year across multiple fronts, including in the PC and cloud infrastructure markets where it has traditionally held dominance.

In the PC market, Qualcomm made a revitalized push with the June launch of its Snapdragon X processors, which were the first chips to power laptops from several OEMs in Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program.

Meanwhile, Intel didn’t release processors that were compatible with Copilot+ PCs until September, and Microsoft only made Copilot+ features available to Windows Insider Community members for testing in December.

At the same time, AMD ramped up its PC offerings this year with the launch of the Ryzen AI 300 series for laptops and the Ryzen 9000 series for desktops.

In the data center and cloud infrastructure markets, AMD marked the launch of its fifth-generation EPYC “Turin” processors in October, calling the lineup the “world’s best server CPU for enterprise, AI and cloud.”

Elsewhere, Intel’s largest cloud computing processors all introduced new Arm-based CPUs this year, with AWS launching instances powered by its new Graviton4 chip in July, Google Cloud revealing its Axion CPU in April and Microsoft Azure launching virtual machines powered by its Cobalt CPU in October.

Intel also faced growing competition in the AI computing space, where Nvidia commanded an increasingly larger share of data center and cloud spending thanks to its expensive but powerful GPUs and associated systems.

In addition, AMD announced in June its plan to release a new data center GPU every year instead of every two years starting with its Instinct MI325X chip.

6. Intel Launches Gaudi 3 With Focus On ‘Price Performance’ Advantage

Intel marked the launch of its Gaudi 3 accelerator chip in September, saying that it delivers a “price performance advantage” against Nvidia’s H100 GPU.

At launch, the company said Gaudi 3 was set to debut in servers from Dell Technologies and Supermicro in October. General availability was expected later in the fourth quarter, a delay from the third-quarter release window Intel gave in April.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise was expected to follow with its own Gaudi 3 system in December. System availability from other OEMs, including Lenovo, was not disclosed.

On the cloud front, Gaudi 3 was set to become available through services hosted on IBM Cloud early next year and sooner on Intel Tiber AI Cloud, the chipmaker’s recently rebranded cloud service that is meant to support commercial applications.

Intel used a launch event in September to outline its Gaudi 3 strategy, which executives said will not focus on chasing the market for training massive AI models that has created seemingly unceasing demand for Nvidia’s GPUs and led to a new class of expensive, energy-chugging data centers.

Instead, the semiconductor giant believes its Gaudi 3 chips will find traction with businesses that need cost-effective AI systems for training and, to a much greater extent, inferencing smaller, task-based models and open-source models.

“We feel like where we are with the product, the customers that are engaged, the problems we’re solving, that’s our swim lane. The bet is that the market will open up in that space, and there’ll be a bunch of people building their own inferencing solutions,” said Justin Hotard, general manager of Intel’s Data Center and AI Group.

5. Intel Heralds New Server CPU Era With Xeon 6

Intel heralded a new era of server CPUs with this year’s launch of the Xeon 6 processors, which represented a major change not only for the brand but also for how it competes in the data center, edge and cloud infrastructure markets amid increasing competition.

Announced at the Intel Vision event in April, the semiconductor giant revealed an updated brand for Xeon that took effect with the sixth generation. Rather than calling the product family 6^th-Gen Intel Xeon, it’s called Intel Xeon 6, ditching the generation nomenclature and moving the generation number to the end of the name.

With Xeon 6, Intel would offer, for the first time in its sever CPU lineup, two microarchitecture options. Rather than relying on a single core type for all CPUs in the lineup, the product family consists of processors containing one of two core types: a performance core (P-core) or an efficient core (E-core).

Whereas the Xeon 6 chips with P-cores are optimized to deliver performance for compute-intensive and AI workloads, the ones with E-cores are optimized to deliver efficiency for high-density and scale-out workloads. Both can handle general-purpose work.

The decision to bifurcate Xeon CPUs between two core types is about “delivering flexibility to meet any organization’s diverse efficiency and performance requirements,” according to the company. Intel introduced the idea of P-cores and E-cores in 2021 with the launch of the 12^th-Gen Core client processors, many of which include both core types.

The Xeon 6 processors with E-cores launched in June with the Xeon 6700E series. Formerly code-named Sierra Forest, the processors take advantage of the E-cores to “deliver exceptional efficiency” and bring core counts to new highs.

The Xeon 6 processors with P-cores launched with the Xeon 6900P series in September. Formerly code-named Granite Rapids, these CPUs will serve as the direct successor to the 5^th-Gen Xeon processors that launched last year

4. Intel Fights Back In AI PC Arena With Core Ultra 200 Chips

Intel used the second half of the year to launch its Core Ultra 200 series processors for laptops and desktop PCs as part of an expanded AI PC strategy.

In September, the company launched the Core Ultra 200V processors for laptops, saying that they would deliver “exceptional performance, breakthrough x86 power efficiency, a massive leap in graphics performance, no-compromise application compatibility, enhanced security and unmatched AI compute.”

Intel said the chips would power more than 80 consumer designs from more than 20 of the world’s top PC vendors, including Dell, HP Inc., Lenovo and Samsung.

Then in October, the company launched the Core Ultra 200S processors for desktops, saying that they provide “excellent performance in AI and content creation” as well as an “immersive gaming experience” and “landmark power reductions across everyday applications, gaming and creation applications.”

3. Intel Shakes Up Channel Leadership Multiple Times In One Year

Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group saw big changes in channel leadership multiple times this year, most notably the global channel chief role.

The first big change happened in January when the company announced that it had appointed Trevor Vickers to succeed John Kalvin as general manager of Intel’s Global Partners and Support organization.

Kalvin, who was Intel’s global channel chief for a little more than three years, was given the newly created position of general manager of the new Go To Market Operations Group in Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group.

Then in February, Intel said it had promoted longtime U.S. channel chief Jason Kimrey to the expanded role of vice president of Intel’s newly created North America commercial and partner sales organization.

Kimrey’s new group combined the U.S. channel scale and partners team he previously led with teams managing relationships with large U.S. enterprise customers, U.S. communications service providers as well as Canadian customers and partners.

Michael Green, a 25-year company veteran, succeeded Kimrey the same month as general manager of U.S. partner sales and programs.

After Intel told SMG employees in August it would cut the group’s costs by more than 35 percent as part of the company’s broader push to slash more than 15,000 jobs and over $10 billion in costs in response to worsening financial conditions, the company’s channel leadership experienced another wave of changes.

On Sept. 13, SMG employees were informed that Kimrey was leaving Intel, CRN reported. Later that month, Kimrey said he had accepted an “early retirement opportunity” and added that the decision was “not based on a lack of faith” in the company or its strategy.

Then on Oct. 9, CRN exclusively reported that Intel had appointed three-year channel official Dave Guzzi (pictured) as its new global channel chief. Guzzi took over from Vickers as vice president of global partners.

Greg Ernst, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Americas sales organization and global accounts, told CRN at the time that the company’s global partners organization was instituting a new regional engagement model where each major region covered by Intel, including North America, will have its own channel leader.

Later in the month, CRN exclusively reported that U.S. channel chief Green would take on an expanded role as general manager of the new North American partner scale group and lead relationships with distributors, national solution providers, national systems integrators, global systems integrators and retailers based in the U.S.

2. Intel Announces Plan To Cut 15,000 Jobs, $10 Billion In Costs

Intel on Aug. 1 said it would cut 15,000 jobs—or 15 percent of its workforce—as part of a plan that’s aimed at reducing costs by over $10 billion.

The company revealed the plan along with the release of its second-quarter earnings report and said it would make large cuts in operating and capital expenses in addition to suspending its dividend starting in the fourth quarter.

“This is painful news for me to share,” wrote Gelsinger in an open letter to Intel employees posted on the company website. “I know it will be even more difficult for you to read. This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history.”

Intel said its second-quarter revenue was $12.8 billion, down 1 percent year over year. It also reported a GAAP net loss of $1.61 billion, or 38 cents per share, a significant change from the prior year’s net income of $1.47 billion, or 25 cents per share. On a non-GAAP basis, Intel reported net income of $83 million, or 2 cents per share, down from the previous year’s net income of $547 million, or 13 cents per share.

A few days later, on Aug. 5, Christoph Schell, Intel’s chief commercial officer, told employees of the Sales and Marketing Group that the division would slash costs by more than 35 percent by the end of the year to aid with the broader cost-cutting effort, CRN exclusively reported. The reduced SMG costs were expected to come from a mix of reduced head count and the simplification of programs.

In a September update, Gelsinger said that Intel planned to lay off thousands of employees after the company reduced more than half of the 15,000 jobs it targeted for elimination through early retirement packages and voluntary buyouts.

Intel began layoffs in October, impacting 1,300 employees in Oregon, 385 employees in Arizona, 319 employees in California and 251 employees in Texas.

1. Intel CEO Gelsinger Abruptly Retires

Intel announced on Dec. 2 that Gelsinger (pictured), its CEO of nearly four years, retired the day before, an unexpected development as the semiconductor giant attempts to bounce back from financial struggles and execute on Gelsinger’s ambitious comeback plan.

The company said its board of directors named two interim co-CEOs to lead the chipmaker while it searches for Gelsinger’s permanent replacement: CFO Zinsner and Client Computing Group General Manager Holthaus.

Holthaus, who was previously head of Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group, will also serve in the newly created role as CEO of Intel Products, a group that consists of the company’s Client Computing Group, Data Center and AI Group and Network and Edge Group.

In addition, Intel said that Frank Yeary, independent chair of Intel’s board, will become interim executive chair during the company’s leadership position.

Multiple reports, including one by Bloomberg, said Intel’s board of directors gave Gelsinger a choice to resign or be fired after it had lost confidence in his comeback plan, which has involved the company spending tens of billions of dollars to expand its manufacturing footprint as well as its advanced chip-making capabilities.

“On behalf of the board, I want to thank Pat for his many years of service and dedication to Intel across a long career in technology leadership,” Yeary said in a statement.

“Pat spent his formative years at Intel, then returned at a critical time for the company in 2021. As a leader, Pat helped launch and revitalize process manufacturing by investing in state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing, while working tirelessly to drive innovation throughout the company,” he added.

Gelsinger retired from the company less than a week after Intel announced that it will receive up to nearly $8 billion in funding to subsidize new chip manufacturing sites in the U.S. as part of the federal government's U.S. CHIPS and Science Act.

While the subsidies marked a victory for Gelsinger, it was less than the $8.5 billion Intel was originally expecting, and the funding was awarded after the company in August said that it would cut the jobs of 15,000 employees—or 15 percent of its workforce—and more than $10 billion in costs in response to worsening financial conditions.