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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#431

Post by kergonath »

Cumpiler69 wrote: post #44
bhouston wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. There are a lot of strategic shifts Intel could do but their timeline to paying off at the scale Intel needs is very long. What I see is a bunch of endeavours that get killed off too quickly because they were not paying off fast enough and this creates mistrust in th…

>I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with making Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999, since that's its focus, not venture into making stupid stuff like Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's the core focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules…

> With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with making Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999, since that's its focus, not venture into making stupid stuff like Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's the core focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules those markets forever.

You’re off by a few years. Jobs axed any project not related to the Mac when he came back in 1997, so they actually did what you say they did not. The iPod project started around 1999-2000 when Apple was in a massive growth phase after the iMac and the G3 and then G4 desktops.

Also, in the alternate reality where the iPod did not massively succeed, it would very likely have been killed or remain as a hobby like the Apple TV. Apple might not be as huge as they are now, but the Mac was doing great at the time.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#433

Post by burnte »

bluGill wrote: post #381
burnte wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Incorrect, we have an even greater lack of x86 vendors now than we did in the 80s. In the 80s you had Intel, and they licensed to AMD, Harris, NEC, TI, Chips & Technologies, and in the 90s we had IBM, Cyrix, VIA, National Semi, NexGen, and for a hot minute Transmeta. Even more smaller vendors. Today making mass market x86 chips we have: Intel, AMD, and a han…

I believe in the 80s all those vendors were making the same intel design in their own fab. I don't think any of them did the design on their own. In the 90s some of them had their own designs.

Some were straight second sources but they all had the license to do what NEC, AMD, and OKI did, which is alter the design and sell these variants. They all started doing that with the 8086. There were variants of the 8086, 8088, and 80186, I'm unaware of variants of the 80188, or 80286 although there were still multiple manufacturers, I had a Harris 286 at 20MHz myself. Then with the 386 there were more custom variants of the 386 and 486. In the Pentium days Intel wouldn't license the Pentium design, but there were compatible competitors as AMD also began 100% custom designs that were only ISA compatible and pin compatible with the K5 and K6 lines.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#434

Post by arresin »

jdewerd wrote: post #367
jcranmer wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is absolutely it. You pay the premium not to have to deal with the BS.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#435

Post by hintymad »

paxys wrote: 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…

> The CEO of a public company is a glorified cheerleader.

I find this view limited. If we look at the most successful tech CEOs, they all personally drove the direction of products. Steve Jobs is an obvious example. Elon pushes the products of his companies so much that he even became a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering. Jeff Bezos was widely credited as the uber product manager in Amazon. Andrew Grove pushed Intel to sell their memory business and go all in on CPUs. Walton Jr. was famous for pushing IBM to go all in on electronic computers and later the mainframes. The list can go on and on. In contrary, we can see how mere cheerleading can lead to the demise of companies. Jeff Immelt as described in the book Lights Out can be such an example.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#437

Post by 7speter »

Aromasin wrote: post #112
highwaylights wrote: post #45

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…

I'm not in the industry but from what I gather, i agree with you 100%. Bloomberg published an article on the matter though, but it seems they are reporting that Gelsinger was pushed out by a frustrated board because of "slow progress." This is a real head scratcher to me, even as someone looking in:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/intel-ceo...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#438

Post by lstodd »

paulpan wrote: post #178
phkahler wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

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.

> Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is delayed.

I think at this point no one believes Intel can deliver. So news or not..

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#439

Post by wtallis »

hedora wrote: post #283
RandyOrion wrote: post #277

From a customer's perspective: NO, I don't like the BIG-little core architecture of CPUs on desktop platforms, and I don't enjoy the quality issues of the 13-14th gen CPUs; I also don't like the lack of software support for middling performing GPUs. I used to like intel's SSD, but the division was sold.

They were just rebranded micron ssd’s the last time I checked.

They weren't. Intel and Micron used to co-develop the flash memory but had different strategies for SSD controllers, and Intel did a full generation of flash memory after breaking up with Micron and before selling their SSD business to Hynix.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#440

Post by 7speter »

paxys wrote: post #419
mrweasel wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market isn't really the greatest indicator of anything. Gelsinger has spend three years trying to turn Intel around and the company is only now starting to turn the wheel. It will be at least another three years before we see any results. The market doesn't have a three year patience, three months maybe. I hold no opinion on Pat Gelsinger, but changing the CEO in the middle of ensuring that Intel remains relevant…

> and the company is only now starting to turn the wheel How is it starting to turn the wheel?

It takes something like 5 or 6 years to go from the drawing board for a chip design, and many years to create a process node. Gelsinger hasn't really even had the chance to execute on designs that were started during his tenure. My understanding is that would've started with Intel 18A.
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