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

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

#21

Post by danpalmer »

fxtentacle wrote: post #19

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 me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure.

Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing well. The next ~30% of their business is servers, where there may be a significant number of HPC clients, but the bulk of this is again likely to be VMs running non-Intel specific software, and this market is starting to realise that Intel is nothing special here.

Looking at their revenue breakdown, I struggle to put more than 20% into the things that you mention they are great at. Should they focus on this? It would lose them much of their market cap if they did.

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

#22

Post by ethbr0 »

ghaff wrote: post #20
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 cer…

From my personal memory at the time, early NUMA multicore on Windows wasn't the smoothest sailing.

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

#23

Post by hehehaha »

totalZero wrote: post #5
hehehaha wrote: post #4

Really don’t see how this changes things inside Intel. Pat Gelsinger is not new to Intel at all. This is just playing musical chairs.

Pat was fairly effective at VMW. The fact that he himself is not new to Intel is probably beneficial for the company, but there's a pretty substantial difference between being CTO and actually steering the ship. I'm not comparing Gelsinger to Steve Jobs in a general sense, but Jobs wasn't new to Apple when he returned -- and yet Jobs' return to leadership was transformative for the company.

I see a lot of parallels between what happened at Boeing and now at Intel. It’s a cultural phenomenon and I am not convinced Pat is going to shake things up.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he literally fired most, if not all, of management consulting types. He changed the culture overnight. I don’t see that happening at Intel (but I hope I am wrong).

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

#24

Post by ericbarrett »

totalZero wrote: post #11
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 m…

I think Spectre and related vulnerabilities are directly comparable to the 737 MAX debacle, insofar as they reflect poor engineering decisions made directly against the customer in favor of short-term profit. Of course Boeing’s decision was far more devastating and led to the loss of 346 souls, but the pathology that gave rise to both situations (executive hubris, failure to tackle accumulated tech debt) seems quite similar.

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

#26

Post by fxtentacle »

danpalmer wrote: post #21
fxtentacle wrote: post #19

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 me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure. Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing…

I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment.

In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users.

And the 30% that you mention that run VMs... Wouldn't they be pretty happy if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better?

I agree that for the work that I do, AMD is as good as or better. But people doing highly parallelizable tasks like compiling are the minority.

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

#27

Post by reacharavindh »

fxtentacle wrote: post #19

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…

The compiler tricks can only get you so far. I administered a HPC cluster and we have a lot of software dependent on MKL and BLAS. However, with the lucrative performance boost AMD seems to put out, open source libraries like BLIS and open BLAS are attempting to fill gaps. Trust me, no one likes the intel lock-in if there is an alternative that is even close enough in performance.

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

#29

Post by ghaff »

ethbr0 wrote: post #22
ghaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cer…

From my personal memory at the time, early NUMA multicore on Windows wasn't the smoothest sailing.

It wasn't. A few years earlier, I was the product manager for a line of large NUMA systems which admittedly had far larger near-far memory latency differences than it was on multicore systems. Commercial Unix systems still could have issues for write-intensive workloads but Windows was pretty much unusable for configurations that had far memory. Things were likely better by the mid-2000s but Windows was definitely still behind Unix in this regard. (Don't really know where Linux was at that point but IBM at least had done work in OSDL on various scale-up optimizations.)

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

#30

Post by gameswithgo »

fxtentacle wrote: post #19

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…

mkl runs fine on amd now once you un-handicap it
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