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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#121

Post by etempleton »

cogman10 wrote: post #107
etempleton wrote: post #64

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 t…

> The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs. I'm not convinced of this. Fabs are incredibly expensive businesses. Intel has failed to keep up and AMD spun off their fabs to use TSMC. There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated markets. The model for US based fabbing has to…

They would have at least 5 years to figure it out before ARM becomes viable on desktop assuming there continues to be movement in that direction. There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now. The latest Intel mobile processors address the efficiency issues and prove that x86 can be efficient enough for laptops.

IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to. Gamers are not going to switch unless performance is actually better. There just isn't the incentive to switch.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#122

Post by timschmidt »

HelloNurse wrote: post #69
timschmidt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profi…

Couldn't agree more.

To me, AMD's approach demonstrates planning and buy-in across multiple teams (CPU die, Ryzen IO die, Epyc IO die, etc), and that suggests a high degree of management involvement in these engineering decisions.

Intel's activities seem comparatively chaotic. Which I agree smells of disincentives and disinterested middle management hyperfixated on KPIs.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#123

Post by Cumpiler69 »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #92
KeplerBoy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the US govt allow a merge with AMD? Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.

Maybe they'll sell Intel to Northrop Grumman /hj

Boeing should buy Intel the way they bought McDonald Douglass. It's gonna be a success, trust me.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#124

Post by adventured »

bee_rider wrote: post #99
KeplerBoy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the US govt allow a merge with AMD? Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.

Nvidia makes a lot more sense than AMD; it is better for the market (preserving some competition in x86), and at least Intel does something Nvidia doesn’t.

China and the EU would never allow an Nvidia Intel merger, not under any scenario the US would find acceptable.

They'll barely allow Nvidia to acquire anybody at this point, no matter how small. See recent EU response to Run:ai. Intel would be considered 100x worse.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#125

Post by mrweasel »

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…

The market isn't really the greatest indicator of anything. Gelsinger has spend three years trying to turn Intel around and the company is only now starting to turn the wheel. It will be at least another three years before we see any results. The market doesn't have a three year patience, three months maybe.

I hold no opinion on Pat Gelsinger, but changing the CEO in the middle of ensuring that Intel remains relevant in the long term, seems like a bad move. Probably his plan for "fixing" Intel is to slow for the market and the board. Let's see who takes over, if it's not an engineer, then things just became more dangerous for Intel. The interim people are an administrator and a sales person, that does not bode well.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#126

Post by crowcroft »

Stock moving up slightly? In the context of the last week even it seems like Wall Street mostly doesn't care either way.

At this stage in Intel's life I think having a financier overseeing the company might actually be a good move. Engineering leadership is of course critical across the business, but they company has historically paid large dividends and is now moving into a stage where it's removing those pay outs, taking on debt and managing large long-term investments across multiple parts of the business.

Someone needs to be able to manage those investments and communicate that to Wall Street/Investors in a way that makes sense and doesn't cause any surprises.

Pat's error isn't that Intel revenues are slowing or that things are struggling, it's the fact he continued to pay dividends and pretend it wasn't a huge issue... until it was.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#127

Post by CuriousCosmic »

bee_rider wrote: post #99
KeplerBoy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the US govt allow a merge with AMD? Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.

Nvidia makes a lot more sense than AMD; it is better for the market (preserving some competition in x86), and at least Intel does something Nvidia doesn’t.

What do they do that Nvidia doesn't (and that Nvidia would care about)?

They already do networking, photonics, GPUs, high speed interconnects, and CPUs. They are planning on selling their FPGAs (the Altera acquisition) to Lattice.

The only things left are their fab ops, thunderbolt/usbc, wifi, and ble.

Their fab ops would take over a decade of heavy investment to catch up to TSMC or Samsung and idk if even Nvidia is ambitious enough to take that on.

Wifi and BLE could be good additions if they wanted to branch out their mellanox portfolio to wireless. Thunderbolt/USB C also might be worthwhile.

But that IP is probably going to be cheaper to buy piecemeal so idk if it's worth it to buy the whole company outright.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#128

Post by Cumpiler69 »

brokencode wrote: post #84
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’d argue that focus is what Intel fundamentally lacks. Or any kind of real vision. If they had focused more on mobile CPUs, GPUs, or especially GPGPUs a decade ago, they could have more product diversity now to hold them over. Instead, they dipped their toes into a new market every few years and then ran away screaming when they realized how difficult and it would be to gain market share. If they had any actual visi…

>they could have a line of ARM CPUs now to compete with the onslaught in all major CPU markets.

Disagree. Selling ARM chips with high profit margins is tough. There's too much competition from the likes of Samsung, MediaTek and until the US ban, Hi Silicon(Huawei). ARM chips are a race to the bottom in terms of price with a market dominated by companies from Asia. There's no guarantee Intel could have had a competitive ARM design that could beat Apple's or Qualcom's.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#129

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #113
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are jesting, but there is some wisdom to that post. No reasonable person is suggesting global company changes direction on the basis of one post on the internet, but the advice provided is not without merit. Surely, a company of that size can do some research to see if it is a viable path. In fact, if it does anything right, it should have people like that ready to do appropriate analysis. I have my thoughts on t…

>but there is some wisdom to that post. That's just speculation. There's no guarantee that would have happened. Nobody has a crystal ball to guarantee that as the outcome. It's like saying if someone would have killed Hitler as a baby, that would have prevented WW2.

I think you may be either misinterpreting my post or misunderstanding the sequence of events.

What do you think has happened so far?

Your mental model of the world may help me understanding the point you are trying to make.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#130

Post by ethbr1 »

solarkraft wrote: post #109
etempleton wrote: post #64

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 t…

> I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD (…) it creates an absolute monopoly on x86 processors If this happens, couldn’t they force them giving out licenses as a condition? The licensing thing has been such an impediment to competition that it seems like it’s about time anyway.

It's a good point, and yes, afaik any redress can be requested as a condition for blessing a merger.
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