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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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371–380 of 777 posts

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#371

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…

I don't think you're wrong but the overarching structure of the chip business is very different from times gone by. It's not even clear what "technical leadership" should mean. When Intel was the leading edge volume leader just on their own processor line, that gave them a scale advantage they no longer have and that won't come back. They built a culture and organization around thick margins and manufacturing leadership, what we're seeing now looks like everyone from investors to employees searching for anyone who will tell them a happy story of a return to at least the margins part. Without a cohesive version of what the next iteration of a healthy Intel should look like all the cost cutting in the world won't save them.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is delayed. Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors is that it's broken.

The original "5 Nodes in 4 Years" roadmap released in mid 2021 had 18A entering production 2H 2024. So it's already "delayed". The updated roadmap has it coming in Q3 2025 but I don't think anyone ever believed that. This after 20A was canceled, Intel 4 is only used for the Compute Tile in Meteor Lake, Intel 3 only ever made it into a couple of server chips, and Intel 7 was just renamed 10nm.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/con...

I have next to zero knowledge of semiconductor fabrication, but “Continued Momentum” does sound like the kind of corporate PR-speak that means “people haven't heard from us in a while and there's not much to show”.

I also would never have realized the 20A process was canceled were it not for your comment since this press release has one of the most generous euphemisms I've ever heard for canceling a project:

“One of the benefits of our early success on Intel 18A is that it enables us to shift engineering resources from Intel 20A earlier than expected as we near completion of our five-nodes-in-four-years plan.”

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#373

Does Nvidia use Intel foundry? No. Does Apple use Intel foundry? No. The two largest fabless companies in the world never used, and have no plans to use Intel foundries. "Intel foundry" as a service is a fiction, and will remain so. Intel can't get others to use their weird custom software tooling.

Amazon AWS said they'd use the hypothetical Intel foundry to fab their chips. https://press.aboutamazon.com/aws/2024/9/intel-and-aws-expan...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#374
post #258
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

X86 is more than just the ISA. What’s at stake is the relatively open PC architecture and hardware ecosystem. It was a fluke of history that made it happen, and it would be sad to lose it.

PCI-e is the culmination of that ecosystem, and like PCI before it, is available on all architectures to anyone who pays PCI-SIG.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD... Why would AMD want a merger? They aren't a charity, and certainly don't need the distraction.

Well, for at least a time they would have the entire x86 market. That is not nothing. Also AMD may want to get back into the fab business. Without competition in x86 why not use Intel's fabs?

They would technically have no market, because the Intel-AMD X86 license is non-transferable and expires if one party goes out of business.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#376

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

>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…

>The only stupid thing they did was not getting into GPUs earlier

Intel has been "getting into" GPUs for two decades now going back to Larrabee. They are just not good at it.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#377

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…

Nope. Look at what Pat did to VMware. He's doing the exact same thing at Intel. He came in, muddied the waters by hiring way too many people to do way too many things and none of them got done appropriately. Pat is a huge part of the problem. I had the unfortunate pleasure of watching him not understand, at all, VMware's core competency. It was a nightmare of misunderstanding and waste in that company under his leade…

When he came back to Intel I was saying that all this ‘finally an engineer’ in charge stuff was misunderstanding Pat Gelsinger and VMWare was front and center in my thinking that.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#378
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy (MS wants your company yo buy / subscribe to windows too). And google sheets in my opinion is not good for complicated stuff - the constant lag..

I would bet 95%+ of people who use Excel are not affected by any difference between Excel for macOS versus Windows.

I work in a large enterprise company, have both windows and mac machines, and excel works equally great in both, but more and more excel runs in a browser.

We mostly email links to spreadsheets running in cloud. So it really doesn't matter what your OS is any more from an excel perspective, as long as your computer can run a modern browser you are good.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#379

Pat returned as CEO in 2021. I don't think that 3 years is enough time to clean out the internal rot that has led Intel to where it is today and a lot of problems have been in motion for a while. Short-term this might be better for Intel but this move lacks long term vision. Intel also just got a big hand-out from the government that would've kept them moving in the right direction regardless of what CEO is leading t…

How long would you give him to run it into the ground?

I'm not sure but from the outside it seems his biggest sin was not clearing out the executives that let the rot get to this point to begin with.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#380

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

I think a merger with Nvidia would be more likely given the antitrust issues that a merger with AMD would bring up.

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