Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#61

Post by BirAdam » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:12 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #55

LittleTimothy wrote: post #11

Difficult to see how this is anything other than a failure. I had high hopes when Gelsinger returned, but it seems that BK had done too much damage and Gelsinger didn't really get a grip on things. One of the things I heard that really highlighted the failure of this recovery was that BK had let Intel balloon in all sorts of ways that needed to be pared back and refocused, but head count under Gelsinger didn't just s…

Intel needed to be split in two as well, which Gelsinger only half-heartedly did. He split the company into two functions - foundry and design, but didn't take that to its logical conclusion and split up the company completely.

They legally cannot split due to the CHIPS Act.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#62

Post by Cumpiler69 » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:13 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #57

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not do stupid GPUs Hard disagree here x100. Investing in GPUs in the time when Nvidia and AMD started to gouge the market is actually the best decision Intel did in recent times. It's the piece of semiconductor with some of the highest margins in the business and they already own a lot of the patents and IP building blocks to make it happen. The only stupid thing they did was not getting into GPUs earlier so they wo…

Intel just has to make a decent/mediocre GPU with 64GB+ memory at a $500 price point and they will instantly become the defacto local transformer leader. It's a true "build it and they will come" situation. Undercut the big boys with affordable on-prem AI.

>Intel just has to make a decent/mediocre GPU with 64GB+ memory at a $500 price point and they will instantly become the defacto local LLM leader

Intel should have appointed people form the HN comment section as their CEO, as they clearly know more about running a giant chip design and fabrication company than the guy who worked there for 10+ years.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#63

Post by 627467 » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:13 PM UTC

These large troubled incumbents seems to have infinite lives to linger on towards a slow death path destroying value in their journey. Like Boeing, why does intel hangs around taking up space, opportunities, resources, one failed attempt after another failed attempt instead of making space for newer ideas, organizations? at this point is so clear these public companies are just milking the moat their predecessors built around them and the good will (or is it naive will) of their new investors who continue to pour money buying out the ones jumping ship

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#64

Post by etempleton » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:14 PM UTC

I feel like this is a mistake. Pat's strategy is aggressive but what the company needs.

Intel's stock is jumping at this announcement, but I look at it as a bad signal for Intel 18a. If 18a was looking to be a smash hit then I don't think Pat gets retired. If 18a is a success then it is an even more short-sighted decision by the board.

What this likely means is two-fold:

1. Intel 18a is being delayed further and/or there are significant issues that will hamstring performance.

2. Pat is/was unwilling to split the foundry and design business / be part of a M&A but the board wants to do one or the other.

If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. The US Govt would probably co-sign on it for national security concerns overriding the fact that it creates an absolute monopoly on x86 processors. The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#65

Post by rwmj » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:14 PM UTC

BirAdam wrote: post #61

rwmj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel needed to be split in two as well, which Gelsinger only half-heartedly did. He split the company into two functions - foundry and design, but didn't take that to its logical conclusion and split up the company completely.

They legally cannot split due to the CHIPS Act.

No idea if that's true or not, but the CHIPS Act didn't exist when he started as CEO.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#66

Post by echelon » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:14 PM UTC

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #52

paxys wrote: post #7

> Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) today announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger retired from the company after a distinguished 40-plus-year career and has stepped down from the board of directors, effective Dec. 1, 2024 Is it a "he retired" or a "we retired him"?

>Is it a "he retired" or a "we retired him"? Does it matter?

The latter implies the government money comes with strings attached and that the forces eager to see a turnaround will be active participants. It's good to see.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#67

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:14 PM UTC

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #44

bhouston wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. There are a lot of strategic shifts Intel could do but their timeline to paying off at the scale Intel needs is very long. What I see is a bunch of endeavours that get killed off too quickly because they were not paying off fast enough and this creates mistrust in th…

>I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with making Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999, since that's its focus, not venture into making stupid stuff like Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's the core focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules…

Yes, Apple succeeded. But the number of companies that attempt such branching out and succeed are few compared to how many try.

The CEO of company X may think that he's as talented as Steve Jobs, but is he really?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#68

Post by rsanek » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:14 PM UTC

highwaylights wrote: post #45

The market seems to think this is great news. I disagree strongly here, but I can see why traders and potentially the board thought this was the right move. A lot of hate for Pat Gelsinger on Reddit and YouTube from armchair experts who don't really grasp the situation Intel were in or what was needed to turn the ship around, so if he was pushed it seems like it might be to pacify the (not particularly informed) YouT…

why would the board care about "pacifying the YouTube/gamer community"? seems like a very unlikely reason for a CEO to be fired.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#69

Post by HelloNurse » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:14 PM UTC

timschmidt wrote: post #16

hbfdhfdhadfhnfa wrote: post #4

This is not good. We already know what happened when CFO took over. It was a time when Intel totaly lost control. They are gona get bought for penies. OMG Instead of saying to AMD they will be in the rearview mirror, they should have been paranoid. Not do stupid GPUs. and destroy others where it mattered

The GPUs seemed smart. Too late, and timid, but smart. What continually blew my mind was Intel's chiplet strategy. While AMD was making scads of a single chiplet and binning the best for Epyc and recovering cost at the low end with Ryzen, Intel designed and fabricated a dizzying number of single-purpose chiplets. In some cases, just the mirror image of another otherwise identical chiplet. The mind boggles. What pheno…

What you describe is mad inattention to costs, not only to opportunities: maybe a symptom of widespread misaligned incentives (e.g. delivering a design with mirrored chiplets quickly could be more "useful" for an engineer than saving a few millions for the company by taking one more week to design a more complex assembly of identical chiplets) and toxic priorities (e.g. theoretical quality over market value and profits, risk aversion, risk/cost externalization towards departments you want to be axed instead of your own).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#70

Post by kllrnohj » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 2:15 PM UTC

this_user wrote: post #33

LittleTimothy wrote: post #11

Difficult to see how this is anything other than a failure. I had high hopes when Gelsinger returned, but it seems that BK had done too much damage and Gelsinger didn't really get a grip on things. One of the things I heard that really highlighted the failure of this recovery was that BK had let Intel balloon in all sorts of ways that needed to be pared back and refocused, but head count under Gelsinger didn't just s…

They have made too many bad choices, and everyone else has been eating their lunch for the last few years. They are a non-factor in the mobile space where ARM architectures dominate. They are a non-factor in the GPU market where NVDA dominates ahead of AMD. They were focused heavily on data centres and desktop/laptop CPUs where ARM is also increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparabl…

> where ARM is also increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparable performance.

ARM isn't doing any such thing. Apple & Qualcomm are, though. ARM itself if anything looks weak. Their mobile cores have stagnated, their laptop attempts complete failures, and while there's hints of life in data center it also seems mediocre overall.