Lip-Bu Tan is pitching a return to graphics with an ex-Qualcomm hire, but the roadmap still looks like it was drawn on the back of a fag packet.
Chipzilla has been wobbling since Tan took the top job, with the outfit still failing to lay out a clean plan for where it is going with AI. On its accelerator side, the only clear name floating around is the inference-focused Crescent Island, while progress on Jaguar Shores remains murky.
On the consumer side, Chipzilla pushed out Battlemage SKUs at the end of 2024 and rolled out Pro variants in the second half of 2025. Those launches demonstrated that it can still ship silicon, but they did not prove that it is ready to commit to a full-fledged GPU war.
Speaking at the Cisco AI summit, Chipzilla chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said he is still working on GPUs internally. When asked about using the foundry arm to produce future line-ups “at scale”, Tan backed the idea and said the company’s recent executive hire from Qualcomm, Eric Demers, fits into a broader plan to return to GPUs.
Tan said, “I just hired the chief GPU architect, and he’s very good. I’m very delighted he joined me, and it took some persuasion.”
At the Intel Tech Tour, Chipzilla said it is shifting to an annual product cadence and talked up work on Crescent Island, and the next Jaguar Shores line-up, signalling it still wants a slice of the AI accelerator total addressable market. The problem is the segment is already dominated by Nvidia and AMD.
If it really wants back in, it must nail execution, cost, scale and the surrounding infrastructure, not just brag about hiring smart people. Tan’s next job is to produce a roadmap that does not change every time someone sneezes, whether it is aimed at gamers or enterprise buyers.
Intel has been touting progress with Xe3 ‘Celestial’ integrated GPUs tied to Panther Lake, and the Arc B390 has been talked up as competitive with AMD’s Strix Halo in some cases. For discrete graphics, the Arc B770 Battlemage card is still the rumoured next step and could get an outing at this year’s Computex.
