Intel dives into consumer and data center GPUs amid market uncertainty

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Cloud gaming didn't have its best week this week as Google decided to shut down its Stadia cloud gaming service by January.

But in doing so, the company said its service has proven itself over the past few years and that it will continue to provide this technology. On top of that, other rivals such as Nvidia's GeForce Now, Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon's Luna continue with their own services.

That's encouraging for Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of Intel's Super Compute Group. The company launched its new data center graphics processing units (GPUs), dubbed the Flex Series. I talked about it with McVeigh at the Intel Innovation event this week. He sees new markets, like bringing cloud gaming to hotel rooms so gamers can play while they travel.

Intel is rolling out GPUs for the data center and its $329 Intel Arc 770 also for midrange gaming PCs. Its timing isn't the best, as there is currently a glut of GPUs in the market due to a sudden collapse in Chinese market orders, a crypto crash and changes in mining, and... 'a general global economic slowdown.

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Nevertheless, McVeigh is optimistic about Intel's future and long-term plans to compete against Nvidia and Advanced Micro in the data center and consumer graphics markets. McVeigh's role is to focus on the high-performance computing and data center markets, where the success of applications such as cloud gaming will determine Intel's own path in graphics.

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Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

Intel is targeting both gamers and data centers with its GPUs.

VentureBeat: And you have new chips coming out.

Jeff McVeigh: The fries are coming out! Different products. Here are our Flex 140 and 170. Focused on flexible use cases, that's why we came up with this name. This allows us to build our added value around media processing, cloud gaming, AI inference. We will enable new use cases in the future. We went from PowerPoint to reality.

VentureBeat: Where do you find the opportunity in the market? What is the aperture?

McVeigh: We started with media streaming and cloud gaming. We see good traction for both. W...