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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#231

Post by riskable »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #117
mythz wrote: post #29

Well their stock is already in the dumps, they can't do much worse than they already have been. Divesting from their discrete GPUs just as they were starting to become a viable value option was one of their most recent asinine decisions. No idea why they didn't try test the market with a high RAM 64GB+ card before bowing out to see how well they'd do. Nvidia's too busy printing money to add more RAM to their consumer…

They aren't divesting from discrete GPUs. The Battlemage launch is tomorrow.

Gelsinger doesn't think there will be any demand at all for GPUs in the near future!

> "Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future."

From: https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-lunar-...

He may have been talking about something like, "all GPU stuff will just be integrated into the CPU" but I highly doubt that's realistic. Nvidia's latest chip die size is enormous! Their new 5090 die is reportedly 744mm squared: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/the-rtx-5090...

There's no way you're going to be getting an equivalent level of performance from a CPU with integrated GPU when the GPU part of the die needs to be that big.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#232

Post by Workaccount2 »

mnau wrote: post #208
Workaccount2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually did email Deepak Patil (head of Intel Graphics division) about this around a year ago, haha. Never did get a response though. It is something that is easy to miss if you are just looking at typical business strategy and finances. A high memory consumer GPU would undercut their server GPUs, which are presumably higher margin intended golden geese. It's easy to see them chasing server markets and "gamers" be…

> ..open source AI tooling for it will start sprouting... AMD has tried this for many of its technologies and I don't think it is working. Granted, they suck at open sourcing, but a shitload of it was open sourced. See TinyGrad voyage into the Red Box driver (streams on youtube).

Intel doesn't have to open source anything. People will build everything needed to run intel cards efficiently as there is currently zero options for affordable video cards with high memory.

It's either old slow Tesla cards with 48GB or $2000 nvidia cards with 24GB.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#233

Post by Wytwwww »

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.

> Intel needed to be split in two as well

Wouldn't that just pretty much guarantee that the foundry business would fail since Intel wouldn't have any incentives to shift most of their manufacturing to TSMC? The same thing happened with AMD/Global Foundries..

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#234

Post by hedora »

menaerus wrote: post #206
orenlindsey wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people on this thread are underestimating how much of a hold Intel has on the chips industry. In my experience, Intel is synonymous with computer chip for the average person. Most people wouldn't be able to tell you what AMD does differently, they'd just say they're a knockoff Intel. Technologically, both companies are neck and neck. But for the average person, it's not even close.

Last report I read it was ~80% (Intel) vs ~20% (AMD) for PC market. And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers.

For PC’s that can’t be right. For overall consumer, Windows is at 25.75%, Linux is 1.43% and MacOS is at 5.53%.

Ignoring ChromeOS, and assuming 100% of windows and linux is x86 (decreasingly true - the only win11 I’ve ever seen is an arm VM on my mac) and 100% of Mac is arm (it will be moving forward), that puts arm at 20% of the PC market.

Interpolation from your numbers puts intel at 64% (with a ceiling of 80% of PC; 25% of consumer computing devices unless windows makes a comeback).

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#235

Post by vlan0 »

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

He's also 63. Has plenty of money to survive the rest of his life. Has eight grandchildren. There's so much more to life than business. What's to say he doesn't want to simply enjoy life with more connection and community to loved ones around him?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#236

Post by my123 »

phkahler wrote: post #106
Workaccount2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government wants then making SOTA semiconductors. Biden wanted it and I highly suspect Trump will want it too.

Traditionally if you wanted SOTA semiconductors you'd go to IBM for the technology and then build your own fab. I'm not sure how true that is today but I wouldn't be surprised if it is.

That's what Rapidus is doing

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#237

Post by mort96 »

xbar wrote: post #153
phkahler wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. Aside from the x86 monopoly that would create, I don't think Intel has much of value to AMD at this point other than the fabs (which aren't delivering). IMHO if Intel is failing, let them fail and others will buy the pieces in bankruptcy. This would probably benefit several other companies that could use 22nm and up fab capacity and…

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

I believe the "x86 monopoly" was meant to refere to how only Intel and AMD are legally allowed to make x86 chips due to patents. X86 is currently a duopoly, and if Intel and AMD were to merge, that would become a monopoly.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#238

Post by Wytwwww »

mnau wrote: post #168
paulpan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with OP that Intel was probably too deep into its downward spiral. While it seems Pat tried to make changes, including expanding into GPUs, it either wasn't enough or too much for the Intel board. Splitting Intel is necessary but probably infeasible at this point in the game. Simple fact is that Intel Foundry Services has nothing to offer against the likes of TSMC and Samsung - perhaps only cheaper prices and e…

He failed on GPU. The product was substandard. That means either he knew and allowed it to happen, which is bad, or he didn't know and allowed GPU division to squander the resources, which is even worse. Either way, it was an adventure Intel couldn't afford. There is a similar story in other areas.

> He failed on GPU. The product was substandard.

Weren't they pretty good (price/performance) after Intel fixed the drivers during the first year or so after release? The real failure was taking so long to ship the next gen..

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#239

Post by mnau »

timschmidt wrote: post #212
mnau wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He failed on GPU. The product was substandard. That means either he knew and allowed it to happen, which is bad, or he didn't know and allowed GPU division to squander the resources, which is even worse. Either way, it was an adventure Intel couldn't afford. There is a similar story in other areas.

> He failed on GPU. The product was substandard. I will never understand this line of reasoning. Why would anyone expect an initial offering to match or best similar offerings from the industry leader? Isn't it understood that leadership requires several revisions to get right?

Oh, poor multi billion company. We should buy its product with poor value, just to make it feel better.

Intel had money and decades of integrated GPU experience. Any new entrant to the market must justify the value to the buyer. Intel didn't. He could sell them cheap to try to make a position in the market, though I think that would be a poor strategy (didn't have financials to make it work).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#240

Post by hedora »

Wytwwww wrote: post #216
menaerus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last report I read it was ~80% (Intel) vs ~20% (AMD) for PC market. And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers.

> And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers. IIRC their data center CPU revenue was about even this quarter so this is a bit deceptive (i.e. you can buy 1 large CPU instead of several cheaper ones).

Market share is often measured in install base.
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