Intel @ CES 2025. Doubling Down On The AIPC & Other Fantastical Tales

We didn’t expect much from Intel’s CES 2025 keynote and, as such, were neither surprised or disappointed with what they delivered. Michelle Johnston Holthaus (MJ) Intel’s co-interim CEO did the honours opening the keynote and doubling down from the get-go on the company’s “AI Inside” marketing pitch, a touching, indeed nostalgic, nod back to the glory days of the famous “Intel Inside” marketing campaign some thirty four years ago…

During an event that lasted forty minutes, MJ hosted for just ten minutes at the beginning before turning it over to Jim Johnson, SVP of the Client Computing Group. She did, however, make a return for a brief hurrah in the closing minutes of the session.

If one were to summarise the event in one short acronym, that would be AIPC. If you were to add in a second word to support that summary, it would be “customer”, mentioned a cool 35 times in total. Yes, MJ has come to the conclusion that a lack of customer focus has led to the company’s present predicament and is on a mission to talk endlessly about how important customers are and how they should be listened to.

For the record, when I joined Intel in January 1992, “Customer Orientation” was one of the six Intel Values that we were introduced to during our New Employee Training session. Today, that value has been renamed to “Customer First”, but I’m not sure when that subtle change took place. In any case, it’s a pretty well known fact that through the vast majority of its storied history, this was a value that garnered at best lip service throughout the company. In fact, if you replace the word “customer” with the word “arrogance”, you would be much closer to what the company’s culture actually was, and largely still is.

But I digress. Before getting into the details of what we learned from Intel at CES 2025, I should clarify that, despite all the negativity (rightly) surrounding Intel these days, their PC business is still a massive franchise and they remain hugely dominant in this very important segment. Furthermore, their processor designs are generally quite competitive, now that they have finally gone down the chiplet route, albeit it remains a work in progress, e.g. Lunar Lake, while a great design, is cost-prohibitive to manufacture because of its on-chip memory design.

The problem for the Client group is that margins are severely under pressure as a result of having to outsource manufacturing to TSMC. That problem is fixable, either by slashing costs in the Client group or bringing the manufacturing back in house, or both.

OK, so what gems did we glean from Intel at CES 2025? Let’s dig in…