Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 154 posts

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#141

Post by consteval »

rowanG077 wrote: post #137
consteval wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has. What? No. 1. Unlike the private sector, the public sector is built on hard budgets, not speculation. They don’t balloon up like your typical money-burning tech company. 2. They can, and do, fire people for performance. No idea where the myth that they can’t do that came from. 3. They run probationary periods just like the private sector…

1. That is simply a budget cap. There is still no pressure to optimize. It's like if I tell this function has to run in 10 seconds. You will make it run in 9.9 seconds and stop there. Maybe the function could run in 9.0 seconds, 5.3 seconds or even one second. Forcing continuous optimization is what is needed. Not a hard budget cap. 2. Firing individual people is obviously not what this is about. It's about departmen…

1. Okay, and this is somehow better than, say, Uber, making approx -500 million a year every year for a decade and a half.

2. Firing people isn't what this is about? Or you blind or just dishonest? The only action DOGE has taken has been firing people. That's literally the only thing they've done! Not only is firing people "all this is about", it's all it could possibly be about!

4. No, there was MANY before. MANY of which were actually cut by the DOGE! And, somehow, DOGE has convinced bumbling idiots such as yourself that they're "saving" something. You aren't getting anything, and it should've been obvious a long time ago.

I don't even know why I'm arguing with you, it's obvious you're a cultist for Trump and Musk and will literally parrot anything they say, no matter what. You've said multiple things now that are just... blatantly untrue. Just, no evidence at all behind them. And this is all public information. You can see how the departments run, how the inspector generals work, how the Government Accountability Office works, etc. Why am I wasting my breath, or keystrokes, on someone who is either a diehard cultist or a literal computer program?

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#142

Post by bgnn »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #4

He's supposedly quite low level, savvy about Platform Development Kits (PDK). Worked at Cadence, so he knows a lot about relating to other people making chips, selling IP, working with EDA tools. A lot of potential here! The disagreement with the board was supposedly related more to elements of the board trying to parts up and sell off bits of Intel. Harder to report that directly. Good for him, food sign if true. To…

Cadence is a horrible company which just relies on monopolistic tactics rather than innovation to keep their position. Plus, their digital design tools are second grade.

That aside, he doesn't have fab experience. I guess that's very hard to come by, especially outside Taiwan and Korea.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#143

Post by bgnn »

ahartmetz wrote: post #106
ksec wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He is a business guy with some hard science behind (not electronics per se). It doesn't feel right. I think you need to look up Cadence and look into how the fabless industry works. Picking him means Intel is possibly about to spin off or spin out the Chip division and only focus on Fabless.

My interpretation is that Intel didn't understand the customers of the fabless business and Tan does, so he's there to make Intel fabs attractive to them.

EDA companies have limited exposure to the inner workings of the fabless semi giants (Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD). They have even less exposure to running a fab service for fabless companies.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#144

Post by oskarkk »

dash2 wrote: post #104
htk wrote: post #55

This author has a very interesting mail list on the semiconductor industry, and kind of predicted the new CEO: https://irrationalanalysis.substack.com/p/make-intel-great-a...

I read through some posts and found this, after Gelsinger was fired: >It’s over. > If corporations are people, then Intel has decided to commit suicide and sell its vital organs. Yet now the same guy seems more positive ("The best outcome has happened.... Lip-Bu Tan lacks the critical flaw that Gelsinger had… excessive kindness"). > A tsunami of decapitation (headcount reduction) is coming. However unpleasant the las…

> Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?

The author thinks that it's about to happen, so it's too early to expect any revision. In that earlier post they said that Lip-Bu Tan resigned from the board because he wanted to reduce headcount more than Gelsinger, and that in their opinion hiring him and carrying out that reduction would be the best outcome for Intel.

Given that Lip-Bu Tan got hired, I think it's reasonable to expect some reductions soon. Before this the author listed a couple of possible outcomes, and as I understand it, Lip-Bu Tan and his reductions are described as one of the less chaotic and "unpleasant" options for Intel, because his cuts would be more specific than cuts that would be the result of splits/mergers/bankruptcy.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#145

Post by oskarkk »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #123

Question: Why is Intel rehiring people they previously let go? Pat Gelsinger – ex-Intel, rehired as CEO, ousted. Lip-Bu Tan – ex board member, ousted due to disagreements on how to turn the company around. If Intel removed him over disagreements on turnaround, what will be different this time?

It seems that Lip-Bu Tan resigned on his own, because he disagreed with the direction of the board and Gelsinger. Given that they fired Gelsinger and hired Lip-Bu Tan, it seems that they now think his direction may be better for Intel.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-board-member-quit-a...

> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly. (...)

> To cut costs, Intel announced in August layoffs of more than 15% of its workforce (...). The layoff plan was one source of tension between Tan and the board, according to sources. Tan wanted specific cuts, including middle managers who do not contribute to Intel's engineering efforts.

> Gelsinger, who took over in 2021 as part of a turnaround plan, added at least 20,000 employees to Intel's payroll by 2022. To Tan and some former Intel executives, the workforce appeared bloated. Teams on some projects were as much as five times larger than others doing comparable work at rivals such as AMD, according to two sources. One former executive said Intel should have cut double the number it announced in August years ago.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#146

Post by bcrl »

bgnn wrote: post #143
ahartmetz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interpretation is that Intel didn't understand the customers of the fabless business and Tan does, so he's there to make Intel fabs attractive to them.

EDA companies have limited exposure to the inner workings of the fabless semi giants (Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD). They have even less exposure to running a fab service for fabless companies.

EDA tool vendors have to work extremely closely with both fabless firms and fabs forever to tune their products to deal the ever increasing complexity of nanometer scale manufacturing processes. Backside power delivery? You bet your ass that the tools folks were involved in making that work well for designers. Gate-All-Around? Probably needed the tool vendors to make tweaks based on feedback from the fabs.

The important thing is that Lip-Bu is from the industry, and has contacts on the tools side of things as well as the customers for those tools which happen to be potential future customers for any Intel fab services. This is a step in the right direction for INTC which has a board where industry experience is severely lacking.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#147

Post by rowanG077 »

consteval wrote: post #141
rowanG077 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. That is simply a budget cap. There is still no pressure to optimize. It's like if I tell this function has to run in 10 seconds. You will make it run in 9.9 seconds and stop there. Maybe the function could run in 9.0 seconds, 5.3 seconds or even one second. Forcing continuous optimization is what is needed. Not a hard budget cap. 2. Firing individual people is obviously not what this is about. It's about departmen…

1. Okay, and this is somehow better than, say, Uber, making approx -500 million a year every year for a decade and a half. 2. Firing people isn't what this is about? Or you blind or just dishonest? The only action DOGE has taken has been firing people. That's literally the only thing they've done! Not only is firing people "all this is about", it's all it could possibly be about! 4. No, there was MANY before. MANY of…

1. In the long run Uber won't exist if they cannot optimize. In fact Uber is a great example. they turned multi billion profit in 2024 after years of optimization.

2. Firing people in large groups is definitely part of it. Not firing individuals. That is what you originally said.

4. Considering the real impact DOGE has already made in the few weeks it has existed I think we can at least conclude they weren't doing their job then.

Ah now I understand. You simply don't like musk and trump and anything they do must be obviously bad. I really don't like them either but at least I can still see that the government is not a lean functioning machine. I hope DOGE can fix that. And I don't particularly care if trump, musk or even Obama had done it.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#148

Post by alterom »

branko_d wrote: post #96
alterom wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What does he bring over Pat or Michelle? Understanding everything it takes to design a chip, after spending 15 years leading the company that makes software tools for chip design, perhaps. Cadence Design Systems, that is. I worked there for a couple of years on computational lithography/optical proximity correction software that we licensed to TSMC and Micron. If you don't know about Cadence, well, you don't know ab…

> Some of the biggest EDA tools come from companies that use them for a reason (NX by Siemens, CATIA by Dassault, ...). What do you mean? NX and CATIA are mechanical CAD systems, not EDA tools.

Pardon me, I wanted to make an analogy between EDA and CAD by drawing a parallel to the CAD world.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#149

Post by alterom »

Veserv wrote: post #92
signatoremo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that Jensen Huang has been running Nvidia for 30 years? Anyone can pick examples to prove their point.

Thank you for agreeing with me that “years experience in industry” has numerous examples both ways for efficacy and is thus insufficient support for snide assertions of fitness for position as the person I was responding to was making.

The entire point of the comment I was responding to was that Lip-Bu Tan doesn't have the experience in the industry, hence the snideness.

Whether he'd be a good chairman given his experience in the industry is a discussion that we can have once people understand which experience he actually has.

Re: Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its CEO

#150

Post by lvl155 »

pwarner wrote: post #79
lvl155 wrote: post #12

I am not sure if Intel can survive on its own. Games changed quite a bit and Nvidia is about to enter the space and will likely gain significant shares if they bundle their products in anticompetitive ways. It will be cutthroat for both Intel and AMD. But if he pulls it off, he will go down in history as the guy who saved Intel.

They certainly need to make chips for others to retain the scale needed to make chips. As far as x86 goes, it's not as sexy as GPUs or mobile chips but they're still selling a ton of x86.

For now. Nvidia is starting to package everything and eat the whole DC market. x86 is not looking so great outside of legacy use cases.
Post reply on HN