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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#361

Post by jillyboel »

vlan0 wrote: post #294
shermantanktop wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a healthy, balanced and long-term-oriented approach. But those who get to the level of CEO are subjected to intense forces that select against those traits. I don’t know much about this guy but it’s reasonable to assume that any C-level exec will hold on to the position for dear life until they are forced out.

Here's more info on Pat. He is not your average CEO. He wrote this book almost 20 years ago. Why do you resort to conversation about assumptions? The Juggling Act: Bringing Balance to Your Faith, Family, and Work https://www.amazon.com/Juggling-Act-Bringing-Balance-Family/...

[flagged]

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#362

Post by _huayra_ »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #315
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…

Who/what is BK? Are they the previous person who held Pat Gelsingers position?

Brian Krzanich, the CEO before Pat

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#363

Post by mrandish »

_lvbh wrote: post #35

Is this not a bit too short a time for results to show yet? Turning a ship too many times would just result in it spinning in circles around the same position

>Is this not a bit too short a time for results to show yet?

Pat so suddenly getting "retired" like this isn't based on the success or failure of the new foundry nodes. You're correct that they weren't supposed to ship yet anyway. With this news most are expecting they'll be (further) delayed soon, but the real cause of today's action is strategic.

Things at Intel are so far gone that there's now no choice but to look at splitting up the company and/or selling/merging key parts off. Pat didn't want to preside over breaking up Intel, he wanted to save the company by shipping the new nodes. This was always a long shot plan which would require the existing businesses to do well and new things like GPUs to contribute while massively cutting costs in other areas.

Those things didn't work out. The GPUs were late and under performed forcing them to be sold near break even. The market for desktop and laptop CPUs was much softer than expected for macro economic reasons and, worse, there were massive, delayed death field failures of the last two gens of desktop CPUs. Competitors like AMD generally took more share from Intel faster than expected in other markets like data center. The big layoffs announced last Summer should have been done in 2021. Those things combined caused time and money to run out sooner than the new nodes could show up to save the day. This is reality finally being acknowledged. Frankly, this should have happened last Summer or even earlier. Now the value has eroded further making it even harder to save what's left.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#364

Post by [deleted] »

etempleton wrote: post #228
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.

People miss this. A lot of people will only buy Intel. Businesses and IT departments rarely buy AMD, not just out of brand loyalty, but because of the software and hardware features Intel deploys that are catered to the business market.

[deleted]

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#365

Post by timschmidt »

mnau wrote: post #339
timschmidt wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't calling for people to purchase a sub-par product, rather for management and investors to be less fickle and ADHD when it comes to engineering efforts one should reasonably expect to take several product cycles. Honestly, even with their iGPU experience, Arc was a pretty impressive first dGPU since the i740. The pace of their driver improvement and their linux support have both b…

> I don't care if they have to do the development at a loss for half a dozen cycles, And here is the problem. You are discussing a dream scenario with unlimited money. This thread is about how CEO of Intel has retired/was kicked out (far more likely) for business failures. In real world, Intel was in a bad shape (see margins, stock price ect) and couldn't afford to squander resources. Intel couldn't commit and thus i…

Well, seeing as GPU is important across all client segments, in workstation and datacenter, in console where AMD has been dominant, and in emerging markets like automotive self-driving, not having one means exiting the industry in a different way.

I brought up Intel's insane chiplet [non-]strategy elsewhere in the thread as an example where it's clear to me that Intel screwed up. AMD made one chiplet and binned it across their entire product spectrum. Intel made dozens of chiplets, sometimes mirror images of otherwise identical chiplets, which provides none of the yield and binning benefits of AMD's strategy. Having a GPU in house is a no-brainer, whatever the cost. Many other decisions going on at Intel were not. I don't know of another chip manufacturer that makes as many unique dies as Intel, or has as many SKUs. A dGPU is only two or three of those and opens up worlds of possibility across the product line.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#367

Post by jdewerd »

jcranmer wrote: post #308
quotemstr wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already packages that let people run CUDA programs unmodified on other GPUs: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560 For whatever reason, people just delete these tools from their minds, then claim Nvidia still has a monopoly on CUDA.

There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives, and even several CUDA-to-non-Nvidia-GPU alternatives (which aren't supported by the hardware vendors and are in some sense riskier). To my knowledge (this isn't really my space), many of the higher-level frameworks already support these CUDA alternatives. And yet still the popcorn gallery says "there no [realistic] alternative to CUDA." Methinks the real issue is that C…

> There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives

Is there?

10 years ago, I burned about 6 months of project time slogging through AMD / OpenCL bugs before realizing that I was being an absolute idiot and that the green tax was far cheaper than the time I was wasting. If you asked AMD, they would tell you that OpenCL was ready for new applications and support was right around the corner for old applications. This was incorrect on both counts. Disastrously so, if you trusted them. I learned not to trust them. Over the years, they kept making the same false promises and failing to deliver, year after year, generation after generation of grad students and HPC experts, filling the industry with once-burned-twice-shy received wisdom.

When NVDA pumped and AMD didn't, presumably AMD could no longer deny the inadequacy of their offerings and launched an effort to fix their shit. Eventually I am sure it will bear fruit. But is their shit actually fixed? Keeping in mind that they have proven time and time and time and time again that they cannot be trusted to answer this question themselves?

80% margins won't last forever, but the trust deficit that needs to be crossed first shouldn't be understated.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#368

Post by lucianbr »

kgeist wrote: post #307
Wytwwww wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual Russian software developers might be reliable but that's hardly the point. They should've just moved them to US or even Germany or something like that if they were serious about entering the GPU market, though... e.g. There are plenty of talented engineers in China as well but it would be severely idiotic for any western company to move their core R&D there. Same applied to Russia.

Well, Intel Russia opened in 2000 back when USA and Russia were on good terms, and Putin was relatively unknown. Sure it was a mistake in hindsight...

I think if you're CEO of Intel, some foresight might be in order. Or else the ability to find a solution fast when things turn impredictibly sour. What did he get a $16mil salary for?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#369

Post by stonogo »

pbalcer wrote: post #296
gpapilion wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren’t interested in creating an open solution. Both intel and AMD have been somewhat short sighted and looked to recreate their own cuda, and the mistrust of each other has prevented them from a solution for both of them.

Disclaimer: I work on this stuff for Intel At least for Intel, that is just not true. Intel's DPC++ is as open as it gets. It implements a Khronos standard (SYCL), most of the development is happening in public on GitHub, it's permissively licensed, it has a viable backend infrastructure (with implementations for both CUDA and HIP). There's also now a UXL foundation with the goal of creating an "open standard acceler…

This is all great, but how can we trust this will be supported next year? After Xeon Phi, Omnipath, and a host of other killed projects, Intel is approaching Google levels of mean time to deprecation.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#370

Post by baq »

bcantrill wrote: post #345

I am amazed -- stunned -- how many people here seem to think that Gelsinger was the right person for the job, but wronged by the people who pre-dated him (BK?!) or the CHIPS act (?!) or other conditions somehow out of his control. Gelsinger was -- emphatically -- the wrong person for the job: someone who had been at Intel during its glory days and who obviously believed in his heart that he -- and he alone! -- could…

let's not pretend BK did any good for the company though, you sound like he did an ok job
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