The interesting question is what this means for VMware. Besides Pat's departure, Rajiv Ramaswami left to lead Nutanix. They have multiple holes to fill.
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
#72Intel is in shambles. The whole 10nm thing is a fiasco at this point. Who could've pictured 10 years ago that Intel would've even considered outsourcing their fabrication? Intel's core strength was their seemingly unassailable lead in chip design and fabrication.
From various articles over the years it seems that what's happened to Intel internally is fairly typical: internal fiefdoms, empire-building, turf wars and the like. This is something you have to actively prevent from happening.
This is going to take someone with deep experience in fab engineering to figure out, not a bean counter. And it should probably involve a massive house cleaning of middle management.
And no the answer isn't just another reorg. Unless you actively prevent it reorgs become a semi-constant thing. Every 3-6 months you'll be told how some VP in your management chain you've never heard of let alone or met now reports to some other VP you've never heard of or met. There'll be announcements about how the new structure is streamlined and better fits some new reality. And 6 months later you'll go through the same thing.
This is a way of essentially dodging responsibility. Nothing is in place long enough for anyone to be accountable for anything working or not working.
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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. You lost me at Apple. Apple owns around 15% of the PC market space and almost the entirety of that is Intel-based systems. Outside of HN, nobody cares about the M1 chip, it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends. If so…
> it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends
Really? That's surprising to me. I'd imagine that for the demographic of her and her friends, quality of life increases for their phones are far more material than for their computers.
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#74This 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.
You have it backwards. AMD is steadily taking market share from Intel in both the desktop and server space. ARM is only a potential threat at the moment, with a tiny market share outside of mobile and IOT.
Granted, ARM is huge threat to Intel over the longer term, but AMD is taking market share now.
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#75The 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.
From [0]:
Gelsinger earned a master's degree from Stanford University in 1985, his bachelor's degree from Santa Clara University in 1983 (magna cum laude), and an associate degree from Lincoln Technical Institute in 1979, all in electrical engineering.
I'd call it an engineering background.
[0]: https://www.vmware.com/company/leadership/pat-gelsinger.html
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you might over estimate the prevalence of video editing software like this. Adobe don't appear to sell consumer versions anymore, it's only pro subscriptions now. Magix is sold at a "vacation video friendly" price, but doesn't mention Intel in their marketing material. I just don't think the market for home devices is thinking about their video encoding time when they buy a laptop, but I do think they'll use…
MAGIX heavily mentions Intel in their marketing.
"4K Ultra HD video editing with Intel and MAGIX"
"Enjoy HD Video editing with Magix Movie Editor Pro and Intel Iris Graphics"
"Edit in 4K Ultra HD" + Intel Logo
"Finish and Share videos quickly with Intel Iris Graphics"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9KOtN7KFM
Plus, as a user of the software, I can tell you that if you tick the "Hardware Acceleration" checkbox on AMD, a popup will tell you to buy a supported Intel CPU and then turn the checkbox off again.
BTW I'm picking Magix here because in the local electronics store, that's the video software that you can buy as a box and that is featured in bundles with Intel laptops. So if someone clueless walks in there and says they need video editing, this is most likely what they will end up with.
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. You lost me at Apple. Apple owns around 15% of the PC market space and almost the entirety of that is Intel-based systems. Outside of HN, nobody cares about the M1 chip, it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends. If so…
I think you are vastly underestimating the revolution of what the M1 represents to the PC industry.
I think you are vastly underestimating how hard IT departments will kick you if you request or bring a device that cannot properly execute the company-critical legacy Windows x64 software. Like SAP, for example.
(SAP is the largest non-American software company by revenue and does business management, workflow automation, and bookkeeping)
My prediction is that outside of hipster startups, M1 will have no effect on business laptop sales.
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. You lost me at Apple. Apple owns around 15% of the PC market space and almost the entirety of that is Intel-based systems. Outside of HN, nobody cares about the M1 chip, it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends. If so…
>it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends Gargantuan battery life isn't a selling point? For laptop? In what universe?
the m1 isn’t competing on many of the same axes as an intel or amd cpu, because it’s necessarily packaged inside of an entire computer built around it. that computer is a mac, which might be different from the purchaser’s current os so they decide not to switch, or they already bought software for windows and want to use it there, or they’re married to the microsoft ecosystem, etc.
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#79To 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…
> I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes Intel dominate certain industries is software. And it has been for some years already
Intel's secret sauce is inertia.
The thought that Intel's is not challengeable, and the world doesn't need a company to dethrone it either.
But that assumption is no longer true, and the counter movement is in its full swing.
The future of computing is on not CPU if you ask me. It would move from general computing to heterogeneous computing, and possibly application-specific chips/FPGA. MKL is fast, probably, but GPU and ASIC would be even faster.
Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. You lost me at Apple. Apple owns around 15% of the PC market space and almost the entirety of that is Intel-based systems. Outside of HN, nobody cares about the M1 chip, it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends. If so…
>it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends Gargantuan battery life isn't a selling point? For laptop? In what universe?
I'm not really sure to be honest. We've moved on from laptops that you can't watch movie on without charging few years ago. I don't really care if my laptop works for 10 hours or 15.