Friday, April 25th 2025
Intel's AI PC Chips Underperform, "Raptor Lake" Demand Sparks Shortages
Intel's latest AI-focused laptop processors, "Lunar Lake" and "Meteor Lake," have encountered slower-than-anticipated uptake, leading device manufacturers to increase orders for the previous-generation "Raptor Lake" chips. As a result, Intel 7 manufacturing lines, originally intended to scale up production of its newest AI-ready CPUs and transition to newer nodes, are now running at full capacity on "Raptor Lake" output, limiting the availability of both the new and legacy models. In its first-quarter 2025 financial report, Intel recorded revenue of $12.7 billion, essentially flat year-over-year, and a net loss of $821 million. The results fell short of the industry's expectations, and the company's stock declined by more than 5% in after-hours trading.
Management attributed the shortfall to cautious buying patterns among OEMs, who seek to manage inventory in light of ongoing US-China tariff discussions, and to consumer hesitancy to pay higher prices for AI-enabled features that are still emerging in mainstream applications. CEO Lip-Bu Tan outlined plans to reduce operating expenses by $500 million and lower capital expenditures by approximately $2 billion to address these challenges in 2025. He also confirmed that workforce reductions are planned for the second quarter, though specific figures were not disclosed. Looking ahead, Intel intends to focus on strengthening its data-center business, where demand for Xeon processors remains robust, and to prepare for the late-2025 introduction of its Panther Lake platform. The company will also continue efforts to encourage software development that leverages on-device AI, aiming to support wider adoption of its AI-capable hardware.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Management attributed the shortfall to cautious buying patterns among OEMs, who seek to manage inventory in light of ongoing US-China tariff discussions, and to consumer hesitancy to pay higher prices for AI-enabled features that are still emerging in mainstream applications. CEO Lip-Bu Tan outlined plans to reduce operating expenses by $500 million and lower capital expenditures by approximately $2 billion to address these challenges in 2025. He also confirmed that workforce reductions are planned for the second quarter, though specific figures were not disclosed. Looking ahead, Intel intends to focus on strengthening its data-center business, where demand for Xeon processors remains robust, and to prepare for the late-2025 introduction of its Panther Lake platform. The company will also continue efforts to encourage software development that leverages on-device AI, aiming to support wider adoption of its AI-capable hardware.
14 Comments on Intel's AI PC Chips Underperform, "Raptor Lake" Demand Sparks Shortages
But i doesen´t take advantage of all those loose LGA 1700 wallets, that would buy a 10 or 12 p-core-only chip in a heartbeat. Even without hyperthreading.
Did AMD not make millions in selling new AM4 chips for old hardware?
That's an understatement. Despite all the marketing there are basically no locally running AI applications worth mentioning.
The browser can't show me all the pictures stored locally that contains a specific item or words just by searching a query. The browser will ask me for an additional subscription for denoising a picture. The browser isn't going to conceal how the place that I'm in looks like by replacing the background when I'm doing a video call. (The last few health specialists that I've consulted in video call used that feature. Very useful when things get hectic, and your place looks like a mess) And yes, you can run that on the GPU, but then it's going to drain your battery life.
Their issue is thinking that it's worth a premium, and the CPU with those functionality also happens to be slower than RPL. Local A.I should just be a given. That's how phones operate, and that why local A.I on phones is much more developed vs the desktop. Samsung, Google, and Apple, never tried to sell an "A.I edition" of their phones for a premium. It's just something that you get when you buy any of their recent phones. When Apple (yes, them of all people) started to sell their M laptops with the NPU, they were cheaper than the NPUless laptops that they replaced. Meanwhile the PC industry tried to do the opposite.
At the end of the day, it’s all a big marketing hogwash, which bet on the ignorance of consumers.
they failed because intel was trying to do to much at the same time
ditch the npu tile and hybrid cores on the compute tile and get that configuration running at at levels comparable to the previous generation.
and when that’s done try something new like some accelerator for who knows what