Intel’s future laptops will have memory sticks again

Intel is rolling back one of the biggest changes to its laptop chips in years. Remember how this fall's Lunar Lake laptops ditched the idea of memory sticks, putting a fixed amount of RAM on the processor package instead? Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger now says that turned out to be a financial mistake, and Intel won't do it again. Oh, and he may be axing desktop GPUs, too.

Future Intel generations of chips, including Panther Lake and Nova Lake, won't have baked-on memory. "It's not a good way to run the business, so it really is for us a one-off with Lunar Lake," said Gelsinger on Intel's Q3 2024 earnings call, as spotted by VideoCardz.

"We'll build it in a more traditional way with memory off-package, and the CPU and I/O capabilities in the package. But volume memory will be off-package in the roadmap going forward," he said.

It may seem a bit of a head-scratcher, because Intel touted Lunar Lake's on-package memory as a competitive advantage when it came to laptop battery life - boasting that it reduced the power consumption of moving data through the system by 40 percent.

But on the earnings call, Gelsinger suggested that Lunar Lake was supposed to be more of an experiment, rather than the core of Intel's laptop efforts it became:

Lunar Lake was initially designed to be a niche product that we wanted to achieve highest performance and great battery life capability, and then AI PC occurred. And with AI PC, it went from being a niche product to a pretty high-volume product.

Don't we all want the best performance and battery life from our laptops? Perhaps - but Lunar Lake became a problem for Intel because it relied too much on external partners for the memory chips and wafers from rival TSMC. Last quarter, when Intel announced its mass layoffs and restructuring, Intel's CFO revealed that Lunar Lake was too costly to help turn Intel's fortunes around. Gelsinger says Lunar Lake hasn't shipped 100 million units or anything like that, but it became "a meaningful portion of our total mix."

Unfortunately for PC graphics enthusiasts, it seems like Intel's discrete GPU efforts are similarly seen as a failed experiment now. Gelsinger says he's focused on simplifying the company's consumer products now, and dedicated graphics cards / chips are apparently on the chopping block. He said:

How are we handling graphics? That is increasingly becoming large, integrated graphics capabilities, so less need for discrete graphics in the market going forward.

If Intel axes them, it won't come as a huge surprise - its gaming graphics initiative only had very limited success with standalone cards, and only ever managed to play at the ultra-budget end of the field, which AMD is now threatening even more.

But it'd be a bit of a shame if Intel never manages to get past the letter A - Alchemist - and the gamers waiting for Intel's Battlemage dGPUs never manage to see its sophomore effort. At least Intel's Arc graphics efforts, including Battlemage, did trickle down to the increasingly powerful integrated graphics aboard its laptop chips.