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Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

cnbc.com

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Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#11

Post by totalZero »

wronglebowski wrote: post #7

This spoils any optimism I may have had for Intel. Reading that this came due to a search for "Strategic alternatives" is damning. Intel is like Boeing. They make one thing and they used to make it very well, silicon. If Boeing told you they were looking into alternatives to making planes would you be optimistic? It feels like they're throwing in the towel on being the leader, giving up on trying to catch up process…

I don't see much similarity between the story of Intel and the story of Boeing.

Boeing made an entire line of defective airplanes that could autonomously kill everyone aboard under normal usage. Then, a respiratory virus hammered the travel industry.

In contrast, the semiconductor industry is seeing more demand than ever before, and presently undergoing a shortage. Intel has mismanaged 10nm and 7nm, but the company maintains a majority CPU market share overall and an even wider margin for servers.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#12

Post by iKevinShah »

sithadmin wrote: post #9

Definitely a win for Intel. Pat will be sorely missed at VMware, though.

Can confirm. With multiple other amazing things he brought to the table, he was super excited about things we were doing no matter how small or big. He truly respected everyone. Definitely will be missed.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#13

Post by satya71 »

The CEO of a semiconductor company needs to have an engineering background, IMO. The tech is too complex and too important to the business to have a CEO who doesn't understand the nuances. Wish Pat all the success at Intel. We need Intel to do better.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#15

Post by eznzt »

swyx wrote: post #10

poor guy. stepped in way too late to catch up to AMD, now falling on his sword. Intel needs a Wartime CEO now. (that said i'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank with his millions so i'm not feeling too sorry for him)

Yes, they should call Stephen Elop

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#16

Post by msoad »

xwdv wrote: post #6

This won’t change anything, by the time Intel gets back on it’s feet, big techs will be building their own silicon and AMD will have eaten up whatever is left of Intel’s lunch.

People underestimate what it means for Intel when Microsoft and Apple are going to produce their own chips and AWS is pushing their ARM offering. It does not take much for the industry to switch to ARM as default for desktop and server.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#17

Post by ghaff »

xwdv wrote: post #6

This won’t change anything, by the time Intel gets back on it’s feet, big techs will be building their own silicon and AMD will have eaten up whatever is left of Intel’s lunch.

It's not about AMD which is (sorry) a marginal factor in all this. It's whether other architectures like Arm and RISC-V really upset the apple cart.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#19

Post by fxtentacle »

To me, that move makes a lot of sense. But judging from the other comments, I'm the only one with that assessment.

I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes Intel dominate certain industries is software. And it has been for some years already.

If you need really fast mathematical number crunching, e.g. high frequency trading or realtime audio filtering, then you need MKL, the Intel math kernel library.

If you want to further reduce latency with parallelism, you need TBB, the Intel thread building blocks.

Raytracing? Intel embree.

Once you are locked in that deeply, the raw Intel vs AMD performance becomes meaningless. You only care about how fast the Intel libraries run

So a CEO with experience building high performance low level software seems like an amazing fit.

Edit: And I almost forgot, the Intel compiler used in pretty every PC game to speed up physics. Plus some people have seen success replacing GPUs with icc+avx for huge deployment cost savings in AI.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#20

Post by ghaff »

acallan wrote: post #3

Pat was a "boy wonder" at Intel and could do no wrong — until Larrabee. I was working at Intel at the time and remember always assuming that Pat would someday be CEO. His departure came as such a shock to a lot of us, as does his return. He might have what it takes to turn Intel around.

There was also Intel's whole pursuit of frequency--they demoed I think it was a 10GHz chip at IDF at one point (and Itanium was essentially an ILP-oriented design)--and resistance to multi-core. Some of it was doubtless Intel convincing themselves they could make it work. But they were also under a lot of pressure from Microsoft who didn't have confidence that they could do SMP effectively--at least that's what a certain Intel CTO told me. (Ironically, multi-core didn't end up being nearly the issue a lot of people were wringing hands over at the time thought it would be for various reasons.)
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