4 ms·
He was a very nice person who I greatly liked but as an alumni I'm saddened at the architectural missteps that plagued the company such as the Pentium 4 archite
by robk 9y ago
He was a very nice person who I greatly liked but as an alumni I'm saddened at the architectural missteps that plagued the company such as the Pentium 4 architecture changes that otherwise cost billions of shareholder value. There was a vocal part of engineering who were disappointed a finance guy was in charge for the first time.
- Analemma_ 9y agoThis might be trying to put a post facto positive spin on a disaster, but I always heard from people involved with NetBurst that they learned a lot of lessons from that debacle that were applied to make Core as good as it was, and that without those it wouldn’t have been nearly as good. Again, take that all with a grain of salt, but maybe the P4 was a necessary step to get all the pretty-good chips that came afterward. Besides, if you’re looking for screw-ups that hammered Intel’s shareholder value, I don’t think the P4 is even in the top 3. Selling XScale and missing the boat on ARM was much worse.
- simonh 9y agoI still dot get that. I can see how they made that move based on the situation at the time, but if not with the iPhone then by 2010 at least with the iPad launch they must have seen how much things had changed. It also was far from too late to pivot back into ARM. Look what Apple managed to do in just a few years starting from scratch. It’s not as if Intel worked out an alternative strategy either, if so where is it now? They’ve still effectively got nothing worthwhile in the mobile space after a decade.
- wmf 9y agoSome people have speculated that selling low-margin phone SoCs would be worse for Intel than doing nothing.
- mixmastamyk 9y agoThe innovator’s dilemma in one sentence.
- simonh 9y agoI can see that from a margins perspective. Even if it were profitable it would depress Intel's ASP, but the strategic risk is also an issue. Apple now ships more processors than Intel. ARM chips have already appeared in Chromebooks and are feeling for a toehold in data centres. All I'm saying is Intel needs a counter to this threat.
- webosdude 9y agoHe wasn't a finance guy. He led sales and marketing before becoming CEO at Intel.
- irrational 9y agoThat actually sounds worse (I work in the sales department of a Fortune 150 company).
- moomin 9y agoThe P4 was pretty much an architecture designed by the marketing department.