I thought this quote from the NY Times article was interesting: “She also determined that Intel had scheduled more products than its engineers and customers could easily handle. So she streamlined that product road map, including pushing back a successor to Sapphire Rapids to 2024 from 2023.”

In other words, Xeon Emerald Rapids is also delayed again. Emerald Rapids is just Sapphire Rapids with some more errata fixed, a 17% increase in DRAM bandwidth and a 25% increase in intersocket bandwidth on the same process technology. It could be that the complexity of x86 and the hairball of their numerous instruction set extensions is just too much for anyone to deal with. I would also guess a big part of Intel’s problem is poor management. Andy Grove was probably the best technology manager of all time but that was a long time ago. Now the type of innovation we get from Intel is renaming the process technology from Intel 4 to Intel 3 because a name with a smaller number must surely be better.