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An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

morethanmoore.substack.com

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Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#31

Post by cubefox »

aurareturn wrote: post #27
scrlk wrote: post #12

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion. "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert…

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. My speculation: * Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years. * Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there a…

> Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.

That's nonsense. Intel's problems were caused by falling behind TSMC, which was not the fault of Pat Gelsinger. Quite the contrary, he did a lot to turn things around, but this takes time, a lot more than three years.

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#32

Post by dieortin »

dzonga wrote: post #23
scrlk wrote: post #12

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion. "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert…

me personally, I wouldn't bet against companies like Intel that have full government banking. soon or later they were gonna turn things around with military precision specially with DOD, Intelligence folks giving advice.

What makes the DoD qualified to give advice about manufacturing microprocessors?

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#33

Post by aurareturn »

cubefox wrote: post #31
aurareturn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. My speculation: * Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years. * Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there a…

> Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years. That's nonsense. Intel's problems were caused by falling behind TSMC, which was not the fault of Pat Gelsinger. Quite the contrary, he did a lot to turn things around, but this takes time, a…

They had far more problems than just falling behind TSMC. See my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706423#47738977

Under Pat, Intel overestimated the covid boom, which nearly put them into bankruptcy. They hired many more employees while their revenue tanked. He went on an IFS spending spree while he lacked execution on actually winning external customers. He didn't stop dividends until 2024 which tells me he lacked awareness of where Intel was as late as 2024.

LBT was hired because he could actually see Intel as what it is today, instead of the Intel dominance that Pat thought he was still operating in.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/revenue

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#34

Post by melling »

mort96 wrote: post #24
melling wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy. Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.

I don't understand what you mean. Stock price has tripled since last August based on Intel finally having a competitive architecture and a competitive process again, no? At least that in combination with various geopolitical circumstances. Sounds like Pat's decision resulted in Intel's stock price rising?

“The stock price has tripled since last August”

That’s just a statement of fact. I offered no other analysis.

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#35

Post by mort96 »

melling wrote: post #34
mort96 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you mean. Stock price has tripled since last August based on Intel finally having a competitive architecture and a competitive process again, no? At least that in combination with various geopolitical circumstances. Sounds like Pat's decision resulted in Intel's stock price rising?

“The stock price has tripled since last August” That’s just a statement of fact. I offered no other analysis.

This seems like analysis? "Pat killed Intel’s share price."

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#36

Post by zozbot234 »

aurareturn wrote: post #27
scrlk wrote: post #12

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion. "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert…

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. My speculation: * Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years. * Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there a…

Issuing a dividend is a terrible sign for the market. It's telling investors "we have so much money that we have no idea what to do with, please take some of it yourself and invest it somewhere other than Intel."

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#37

Post by jmyeet »

Intel really needs to be studied for how it's spiralled into a possibly terminal state of dysfunction.

EPIC was Intel's first big folly that I remember and it almost killed the company. Years late, too expensive, motivated by Intel's desires rather than customer needs, software would've required significant rewrites at every level. The Gigahertz race (culminating in the Pentium 4) was near-fatal to AMD but then near-fatal to Intel and they only recovered because somebody went back to the Pentium 3 and bolted on AMD's x86_64 extensions. Still, for half a decade Athlon/Opteron were a huge problem for Intel..

But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork.

Many (including myself) thought Pat's appointment was a good sign for Intel, being an engineer. From the outside it seemed like Intel was organizationally broken, having descended into fiefdoms that didn't communicate let alone cooperate.

So this conversation is largely about what Pat's doing now rather than what happened at Intel. He's previously pointed the finger at Wall Street "short-termism" [1], for example.

It's interesting that they talk about the relationship with the current administration being positive and receiving funding from the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was passed in 2022.

But if we're looking ahead here, I'm a little disappointed China was only mentioned once at that was just with building solar capacity. I'm sorry but if you're in the chip space and not thinking about what China is doing, I don't know what you're doing.

China has been restricted by the US from buying the best chips and buying the latest lithography technology. So they're making their own and it's happening way faster than I think many of these industry types are telling you it will happen. A few years from now when China produces EUV chips, I guarantee you'll read news articles about how this came out of nowhere and nobody expected it.

[1]: https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-ame...

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#38

Post by [deleted] »

aurareturn wrote: post #27
scrlk wrote: post #12

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion. "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert…

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. My speculation: * Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years. * Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there a…

[deleted]

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#39

Post by osnium123 »

aurareturn wrote: post #27
scrlk wrote: post #12

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion. "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert…

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. My speculation: * Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years. * Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there a…

As others have noted, there was over hiring. I think part of it was driven by Pat’s desire to get governments to give subsidies but in retrospect, it led to too many empty shells being built and too many people getting hired. Intel Foundry eventually got Intel 18A node out and that is a promising node. However, the demand for it is now predicated on the AI boom continuing and TSMC being constrained for capacity. Once that goes away, who knows what happens for demand for non TSMC nodes.

Re: An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

#40

Post by osnium123 »

m132 wrote: post #21
melling wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy. Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.

Was it Pat or Brian? If I recall correctly, it was under Brian when Intel had one of its worst periods of stagnation, when the 10 nm process all the bets were on turned out to be a non-starter, and when Meltdown and Spectre erupted. It's easy to overlook this because Intel had fairly no competition around then, but that doesn't mean the company was in a good shape. I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was ch…

BK really destroyed the company and Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision. Pat was the visionary who saw the value of the fabs but it took a long time to turn things around.
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