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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

intel.com

421–430 of 777 posts

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#421
post #314

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…

If a breakup is in the works for Intel, merger of the foundry side with Global Foundries would make more sense than AMD. Intel's foundries, even in the state they're in would likely be a step up for GF. And given the political sensitiveness, GF already has DoD contracts for producing chips.

Didn't the US government just give Intel $7b on the condition they don't spin off the foundry business?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intels-7-86-billion-subsidy-0...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#422

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…

>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.

What is holding Intel back, there?

Engineering chops?

AMD and nVidia already patented too much of the good stuff?

Too much existing code optimized for AMD and nVidia quirks?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#423
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Those two terms are related but definitely are never interchangeable. Market share is the portion of new sales a company is getting. Install base is the portion of existing in-use products that were from that company. Install base is essentially market share integrated over time, less systems that are discarded or otherwise taken out of service. If market share never changes, install base will approach the same proportions but it's a lagging indicator.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#424
post #418

The CEO of a public company is a glorified cheerleader. Doing the right things is half the job, convincing people you are doing the right things is the other half. Considering Intel's share price dropped 61% under Gelsinger's tenure, no matter the work he did towards the first half, it's pretty clear he thoroughly failed at the second. They desperately need someone who will drive back investor confidence in the compa…

January 18, 2022 - "Intel CEO says AMD is in the rearview mirror and 'never again will they be in the windshield'"

https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-ceo-says-amd-is-in-the-rearvie...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#425

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…

Agreed. My career at Intel coincided with Pat's, although I jumped ship a little earlier. Admittedly this means I probably have a little bias, but based on my hundreds of conversations with Intel vets I do think his business strategy was the right decision. He came on board a company years behind on process, packaging, and architecture technology after years of mismanagement by a largely nontechnical staff, which fav…

Pat was seemed to understand the criticality of fabrication process lead in today's day and age. Hence his push and decision to invest in IFS, plus to win over the government funding to sustain the effort.

In short, a bad or subpar chip design/architecture can be masked by having the chip fabricated on a leading edge node but not the inverse. Hence everyone is vying for capacity on TSMC's newest nodes - especially Apple in trying to secure all capacity for themselves.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#426

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…

>> 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 could see Broadcom picking up x86.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#427
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.

Disagree on "failed on GPU" as it depends on the goal. Sure Intel GPUs are inferior to both Nvidia and AMD flagship offerings, but they're competitive at a price-to-performance ratio. I'd argue for a 1st gen product, it was quite successful at opening up the market and enabling for cross-selling opportunities with its CPUs. That all said, I suspect the original intent was to fabricate the GPUs on IFS instead of TSMC…

The issue with the GPUs is that their transistor to performance ratio is poor. The A770 has as many transistors as about a 3070ti but only performs as well as a 3060 (3060ti on a good day).

So with that, they are outsourcing production of these chips to TSMC and using nearly cutting edge processes (battlemage is being announced tomorrow and will use either TSMC 5 or 4), and the dies are pretty large. That means they are paying for dies the size of 3080s and retaling them at prices of 3060s.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get a CUDA killer without the software infrastructure. Intel finally seem to have got their act together a bit with OneAPI but they've languished for years in this area.

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.

What’s happening with intel wino? That seemed like their cuda ish effort.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#429
post #418

The CEO of a public company is a glorified cheerleader. Doing the right things is half the job, convincing people you are doing the right things is the other half. Considering Intel's share price dropped 61% under Gelsinger's tenure, no matter the work he did towards the first half, it's pretty clear he thoroughly failed at the second. They desperately need someone who will drive back investor confidence in the compa…

Intel has no GPU. Intel has no mobile processors / SOCs. These seem to be the drivers of growth nowadays. And their CPUs have hard time competing with AMD now. I'm not sure that the 3 years which Geslinger had were enough to turn the tide.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#430

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…

I would argue there were many good things but not well delivered. The Optane persistent memory should've been revolutionary for databases but Intel just put it out and expected people to do all the software.

I'm seeing the same thing now with Intel QAT / IAA / DSA. Only niche software support. Only AWS seems to have it and those "bare metal" machines don't even have local NVMe.

About 10 years ago Intel Research was publishing a lot of great research but no software for the users.

Contrast it with Nvidia and their amazing software stack and support for their hardware.

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