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Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

572 points by totalZero 6y ago

roomey 6y ago
No harm to VMware on this I think. As it pushes into SAAS it really does need a big shake up. Not that Pat wasn't good, but it is an old company with a lot of inertia, some fresh blood and fresh ideas could really be beneficial. Hopefully the next CEO is as committed to all the other stuff, like treating the employees very good and the community stuff. The best bit of the company isn't the tech at all (in my opinion)
- samaxe 6y ago
  They need to get out from under Dell’s thumb. Until then no new CEO will bring significant changes.
  - roomey 6y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with that. I've been there now over 8 years and the only difference since Dell bought emc is they are cross selling. In terms of product development, staffing, benefits etc they have no influence. This is in opposition to EMC, who had a lot of benefits and nice things like free coffee cut to match with dell.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >but it is an old company That makes me feel old given that I first spoke with them as an analyst before ESX Server came out :-)
acallan 6y ago
Pat was a "boy wonder" at Intel and could do no wrong — until Larrabee. I was working at Intel at the time and remember always assuming that Pat would someday be CEO. His departure came as such a shock to a lot of us, as does his return. He might have what it takes to turn Intel around.
- ghaff 6y ago
  There was also Intel's whole pursuit of frequency--they demoed I think it was a 10GHz chip at IDF at one point (and Itanium was essentially an ILP-oriented design)--and resistance to multi-core. Some of it was doubtless Intel convincing themselves they could make it work. But they were also under a lot of pressure from Microsoft who didn't have confidence that they could do SMP effectively--at least that's what a certain Intel CTO told me. (Ironically, multi-core didn't end up being nearly the issue a lot of people were wringing hands over at the time thought it would be for various reasons.)
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    From my personal memory at the time, early NUMA multicore on Windows wasn't the smoothest sailing.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      It wasn't. A few years earlier, I was the product manager for a line of large NUMA systems which admittedly had far larger near-far memory latency differences than it was on multicore systems. Commercial Unix systems still could have issues for write-intensive workloads but Windows was pretty much unusable for configurations that had far memory. Things were likely better by the mid-2000s but Windows was definitely still behind Unix in this regard. (Don't really know where Linux was at that point but IBM at least had done work in OSDL on various scale-up optimizations.)
    - glandium 6y ago
      It seems it's not great now either, seeing how the first iteration of AMD's Threadripper performed badly on Windows.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    I’m not sure Itanium was a technical failure, to me it always was a business model failure as that CPU was co-developed with HP and essentially became a dedicated HP-Oracle box and by the time the ecosystem was opened up it was too late. The heavy reliance on the compiler for ILP was an “odd-choice” but not something that was unsound in principle. If the ecosystem was more open from the get go and more vendors were involved it had a much better chance of taking off. And if nothing else at least it was something new. The biggest disappointment I have with Itanium is that it and later Larabee/XeonPhi kinda pushed Intel even further into their own little x86 box when it came to processing units. I think that failure is also why they haven’t really done anything interesting with Altera.
hehehaha 6y ago
Really don’t see how this changes things inside Intel. Pat Gelsinger is not new to Intel at all. This is just playing musical chairs.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Pat was fairly effective at VMW. The fact that he himself is not new to Intel is probably beneficial for the company, but there's a pretty substantial difference between being CTO and actually steering the ship. I'm not comparing Gelsinger to Steve Jobs in a general sense, but Jobs wasn't new to Apple when he returned -- and yet Jobs' return to leadership was transformative for the company.
  - hehehaha 6y ago
    I see a lot of parallels between what happened at Boeing and now at Intel. It’s a cultural phenomenon and I am not convinced Pat is going to shake things up. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he literally fired most, if not all, of management consulting types. He changed the culture overnight. I don’t see that happening at Intel (but I hope I am wrong).
  - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    Only in the incestuous world of CEOs does being "fairly effective" at your last job grant you the keys to one of the biggest companies in the world.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      You could argue that VMware was slow to move into containers and should probably have better leveraged Pivotal before they drew them in. The former is something of an innovator's dilemma thing. The lack of focus on developers and applications was something of a VMware blind spot going back to Diane Greene days. But "fairly effective" underplays how well VMware has done over the past 10 years or so overall. There are things they should have been more aggressive about, especially with the benefit of hindsight, but they've been a very successful software company/subsidiary.
xwdv 6y ago
This won’t change anything, by the time Intel gets back on it’s feet, big techs will be building their own silicon and AMD will have eaten up whatever is left of Intel’s lunch.
- msoad 6y ago
  People underestimate what it means for Intel when Microsoft and Apple are going to produce their own chips and AWS is pushing their ARM offering. It does not take much for the industry to switch to ARM as default for desktop and server.
  - baskire 6y ago
    I’ve noticed the switch to arm isn’t drastically harder than switch to amd for large DC/Cloud users. The biggest burden is political. The technical work is only a few months. With savings often more than paying to hire substantially more staff to assist in migration then accelerate the core product.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It's not about AMD which is (sorry) a marginal factor in all this. It's whether other architectures like Arm and RISC-V really upset the apple cart.
  - metabagel 6y ago
    You have it backwards. AMD is steadily taking market share from Intel in both the desktop and server space. ARM is only a potential threat at the moment, with a tiny market share outside of mobile and IOT. Granted, ARM is huge threat to Intel over the longer term, but AMD is taking market share now.
  - neogodless 6y ago
    Let's see if this is true, statistically: https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-intel-amd-market-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int... Intel/AMD split in x86 currently 61.4% / 38.6%. If we (very incorrectly assume) 100% of Intel sales were through Apple and were going to all be replaced by Apple, then, even given current trends AMD and Apple would be at roughly 50/50 before long. Looks like OS X is around 16-17% of desktop operating system share though. So the ~82% of buyers still buying x86 are going to continue choosing between Intel and AMD. Apple M1 has some people believing that suddenly everyone will stop buying x86 chips and buy Apple unless someone releases a competitive ARM based chip for Windows/Linux. I'd like to see some evidence for that premise, though. Apple's messaging has always been "better designed hardware + better software experience", and yet they still haven't breached 20% market share. A CPU that increases battery life (and yes performs very well) but still can't be bought with your Windows PC isn't going to rapidly change the market share. It could erode it over time, but this is certainly just conjecture, not proof. Let's revisit the conversation in 5 years and see what Apple, Intel and AMD have done, technologically, and what consumers have decided.
wronglebowski 6y ago
This spoils any optimism I may have had for Intel. Reading that this came due to a search for "Strategic alternatives" is damning. Intel is like Boeing. They make one thing and they used to make it very well, silicon. If Boeing told you they were looking into alternatives to making planes would you be optimistic? It feels like they're throwing in the towel on being the leader, giving up on trying to catch up process wise and will look to maximize their existing revenue. RIP
- totalZero 6y ago
  I don't see much similarity between the story of Intel and the story of Boeing. Boeing made an entire line of defective airplanes that could autonomously kill everyone aboard under normal usage. Then, a respiratory virus hammered the travel industry. In contrast, the semiconductor industry is seeing more demand than ever before, and presently undergoing a shortage. Intel has mismanaged 10nm and 7nm, but the company maintains a majority CPU market share overall and an even wider margin for servers.
  - ericbarrett 6y ago
    I think Spectre and related vulnerabilities are directly comparable to the 737 MAX debacle, insofar as they reflect poor engineering decisions made directly against the customer in favor of short-term profit. Of course Boeing’s decision was far more devastating and led to the loss of 346 souls, but the pathology that gave rise to both situations (executive hubris, failure to tackle accumulated tech debt) seems quite similar.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Eh. Some of the vulnerabilities in that class were Intel-specific. But there is a whole class of vulnerabilities that potentially can hit any design that has speculative execution--and people just aren't OK with shutting off speculative execution because the performance hit is so big.
      - ericbarrett 6y ago
sithadmin 6y ago
Definitely a win for Intel. Pat will be sorely missed at VMware, though.
- iKevinShah 6y ago
  Can confirm. With multiple other amazing things he brought to the table, he was super excited about things we were doing no matter how small or big. He truly respected everyone. Definitely will be missed.
- vkat 6y ago
  I always thought VMware was super lucky to have Pat as CEO. The mood is pretty grim today at VMware.
swyx 6y ago
poor guy. stepped in way too late to catch up to AMD, now falling on his sword. Intel needs a Wartime CEO now. (that said i'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank with his millions so i'm not feeling too sorry for him)
- eznzt 6y ago
  Yes, they should call Stephen Elop
- icelancer 6y ago
  Gelsinger can definitely be that Wartime CEO. If they let him do his job.
satya71 6y ago
The CEO of a semiconductor company needs to have an engineering background, IMO. The tech is too complex and too important to the business to have a CEO who doesn't understand the nuances. Wish Pat all the success at Intel. We need Intel to do better.
- iamricks 6y ago
  I agree, that is why Lisa Su runs AMD so well
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  From [0]: Gelsinger earned a master's degree from Stanford University in 1985, his bachelor's degree from Santa Clara University in 1983 (magna cum laude), and an associate degree from Lincoln Technical Institute in 1979, all in electrical engineering. I'd call it an engineering background. [0]: https://www.vmware.com/company/leadership/pat-gelsinger.html https://www.vmware.com/company/leadership/pat-gelsinger.html
  - KptMarchewa 6y ago
    I've understood it as a critique of a previous CEO, not the new one.
- AlphaSite 6y ago
  Wasn’t he Andy Groves Protege?
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  Disclosure: I worked at AMD for about a decade, although that's a while back now. It is traditional in semiconductor companies (or was, anyway) to have a triumvirate: 1) the "outside" guy (sales, know the customer) 2) the "inside" guy (operations, now the employees) 3) the "tech" guy Any of these three can run the company, but whichever one it is, they need to have the other two near at hand, and they need to listen closely to them. The problem comes when, as at Intel and perhaps also at Boeing, you have options (1) or (2) in charge, and they're not listening to the person who is position (3) in the triumvirate, or they don't have a triumvirate at all. If the person in position (3) is in charge (as at AMD currently), they will still need to have experts in (1) and (2), and they will need to listen to them.
dave_aiello 6y ago
The world really needs a company like Intel to succeed, if only to take some of-- let's say-- the geographic concentration risk out of such a high percentage of the cutting-edge device manufacturers depending on TSMC's fabs.
albertopv 6y ago
Intel is still making tons of money, so there's still time and Pat seems the right choice. Competition is good and Intel could still be competitive.
- marcusklaas 6y ago
  For sure. Considering from what depths AMD has managed to recover, people are much too eager to count out Intel.
fxtentacle 6y ago
To me, that move makes a lot of sense. But judging from the other comments, I'm the only one with that assessment. I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes Intel dominate certain industries is software. And it has been for some years already. If you need really fast mathematical number crunching, e.g. high frequency trading or realtime audio filtering, then you need MKL, the Intel math kernel library. If you want to further reduce latency with parallelism, you need TBB, the Intel thread building blocks. Raytracing? Intel embree. Once you are locked in that deeply, the raw Intel vs AMD performance becomes meaningless. You only care about how fast the Intel libraries run So a CEO with experience building high performance low level software seems like an amazing fit. Edit: And I almost forgot, the Intel compiler used in pretty every PC game to speed up physics. Plus some people have seen success replacing GPUs with icc+avx for huge deployment cost savings in AI.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  To me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure. Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing well. The next ~30% of their business is servers, where there may be a significant number of HPC clients, but the bulk of this is again likely to be VMs running non-Intel specific software, and this market is starting to realise that Intel is nothing special here. Looking at their revenue breakdown, I struggle to put more than 20% into the things that you mention they are great at. Should they focus on this? It would lose them much of their market cap if they did.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment. In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users. And the 30% that you mention that run VMs... Wouldn't they be pretty happy if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better? I agree that for the work that I do, AMD is as good as or better. But people doing highly parallelizable tasks like compiling are the minority.
amelius 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Gelsinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Gelsinger Not sure what to make of the fact that he wrote two books on balancing work and family life, and makes me wonder if this is the general that will win the silicon war. Time will tell, I suppose.
- mepian 6y ago
  This article doesn't do him justice, he was one of the key people behind the 386 project which saved Intel during its first major crisis. After that, he went on to become the lead of the 486 project and kept moving up on the management ladder until the Larrabee fiasco.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That is so typically Wikipedia. 10,000 word articles on trivial subjects and basically a stub listicle for an article on the longtime CEO of one of the largest (but "uncool") software companies in the world.
    - NonEUCitizen 6y ago
      You are free to edit and expand the article.
      - Der_Einzige 6y ago
        No he isn't, someone will instantly undue the changes unless he's a respected member of the wikipedia politburo. Found this out the hard way when I tried to edit some articles about Max Stirner. They don't even like small changes by randoms...
  - thunkshift1 6y ago
    Why was larrabee considered a fiasco?
    - daniel-thompson 6y ago
JoshTko 6y ago
Pretty damming to Bob Swan when a $200B market cap company jumps +8% on news that you are stepping down.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Pretty sure he gives zero fucks about this considering the juiciness of his golden parachute. The only gig where you get rewarded handsomely even if you fail.
  - astlouis44 6y ago
    This x 1000.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    But us customers can watch Intel succeed again, rather than squander 7 years.
- __turbobrew__ 6y ago
  Is there any security to short Bob Swan? Seems like a good bet.
PedroBatista 6y ago
The trillion dollar question is: Is the board leaning into the usual MBA moves 101 and turn Intel into a "services company" gradually going fabless and milking those sweet patents OR will they put the work boots on and start building an actual tech company with the people who actually can save them on the payroll? cutting on the usual contractors meat grinder and invite the vast armies of middle-management and marketing drones to leave?
- quercusa 6y ago
  Or are they looking for that one acquisition that (this time!) will fix everything?
  - CalChris 6y ago
    Arguably a re-aquisition. Gelsinger was at Intel for 30 years.
    - nwsm 6y ago
      They didn't mean Gelsinger as the acquisition. The question is what direction Gelsinger will take them, with one option being to acquire some company or companies to bootstrap a new path forward.
  - nikanj 6y ago
    Time to sign your startup in for the lottery. Your company might be the next Pure Digital or Autonomy Corporation!
- mepian 6y ago
  Pat Gelsinger fits the second option better, he has an actual engineering background and worked on some of the most important Intel products early in his career.
  - CalChris 6y ago
    Swan was utterly the first option.
atlgator 6y ago
Pat completely missed the boat on building a VMWare cloud when AWS started taking off. Can't say I'm enthused for Intel.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  He recovered from the mistake. The drop in VMW share price on news that he's leaving shows what the market thinks of his affect on VMW value.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    CEO departures almost always cause a drop in the share price, usually not because the CEO is considered great but investors perceive it to signal private information about the state of the company
- ghaff 6y ago
  He didn't become CEO of VMware until 2012 which is 6 years after AWS launched. Even if VMware had decided to directly go after AWS, they would have started way behind. Also, for good reasons and bad, it's unclear to me that would have been a great move. IMO, you can look to other trends they could have latched onto more quickly that would have been better fits.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
Gelsinger was pushed out as CTO after horribly failing to address AMD's competitive threats. I have no idea how he wormed his way back in, but this does not bode well for Intel's future: Gelsinger is proof of the "Peter Principle", being promoted too high. EDIT: I was a bit harsh, toned it down. EDIT 2: This is probably petty, but I can't ignore the fact that there was a significant hubbub at Intel regarding him using the "Dr" prefix. He scrubbed it from his bio and internal pages when it was pointed it out didn't come from an accredited university and that it was honorary. He also caught flak internally for having the pope bless a wafer for Intel's future success. It was very weird, especially given the high percentage of Muslim engineers at Intel, and its focus on neutrality.
- jhloa2 6y ago
  Any references on the Pope blessing a wafer? I really want to see this but can't find it
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    Nope, I can't find it on Google. Nada. Even on Wayback. It may have been internal but I definitely remember it. It was pope Benedict.
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    seconded. that's insane.
- eco 6y ago
  Silicon wafer or communion wafer?
  - scandox 6y ago
    Jesus was carbon based ... As far as we know.
    - angry_octet 6y ago
      The Church of the Silicon Jesus. I like it.
deleted 6y ago
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hodgesrm 6y ago
The interesting question is what this means for VMware. Besides Pat's departure, Rajiv Ramaswami left to lead Nutanix. They have multiple holes to fill.
cletus 6y ago
Intel is in shambles. The whole 10nm thing is a fiasco at this point. Who could've pictured 10 years ago that Intel would've even considered outsourcing their fabrication? Intel's core strength was their seemingly unassailable lead in chip design and fabrication. From various articles over the years it seems that what's happened to Intel internally is fairly typical: internal fiefdoms, empire-building, turf wars and the like. This is something you have to actively prevent from happening. This is going to take someone with deep experience in fab engineering to figure out, not a bean counter. And it should probably involve a massive house cleaning of middle management. And no the answer isn't just another reorg. Unless you actively prevent it reorgs become a semi-constant thing. Every 3-6 months you'll be told how some VP in your management chain you've never heard of let alone or met now reports to some other VP you've never heard of or met. There'll be announcements about how the new structure is streamlined and better fits some new reality. And 6 months later you'll go through the same thing. This is a way of essentially dodging responsibility. Nothing is in place long enough for anyone to be accountable for anything working or not working.
ksec 6y ago
"Notable absent from that list is he fired Pat Gelsinger. Please just bring him back as CEO." - [1] 2012 on HN, when Paul Otellini Retired. "The only one who may have a slim chance to completely transform Intel is Pat Gelsinger, if Andy Grove saved Intel last time, it will be his apprentice to save Intel again. Unfortunately given what Intel has done to Pat during his last tenure, I am not sure if he is willing to pick up the job, especially the board's Chairman is Bryant, not sure how well they go together. But we know Pat still loves Intel, and I know a lot of us miss Pat." [2] - June, 2018 "This is the same as Intel pushing out Pat Gelsinger. The product people get pushed out by sales and marketing. Which are increasingly running the show at Apple." [3] 30 Days ago. And numerous other reference since 2009. Many more around various other forums and twitter. I am getting quite emotional right now. I cant believe this is really happening. ( I am wiring this with tears in my eyes! ) I guess Andy Bryant retired makes the decision a little easier. And Pat has always loved Intel. I guess he is pissed those muppets drove it to the ground. This is 12 years! 12 years to prove a point! Consider 4 - 5 years of work in lead-time since he left in 2009. That is 2014. Guess what happen after 2014? May be it is too little too late? Or May be this will be another Andy Grove "Only the paranoid survive" moment? The King is Back at Intel, despite being a fan of Dr Lisa Su, I am little worry about AMD. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804875 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17391707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17391707 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25435150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25435150
- heyheyhey 6y ago
  Wow, I'm impressed by your persistence. Have you worked with him or know him personally?
  - hangonhn 6y ago
    I worked at VMware when Pat first became the CEO. Pat is very much an engineer. If you ever wanted an engineer as your CEO, then that's Pat. That comes with some goods and some not-so-greats. Pat isn't very inspiring, at least not when he first became CEO. But I always got the feeling that he genuinely love engineers and is more comfortable around them than anything else. I once hosted a fun little engineering challenge (building bridges out of spaghetti). It wasn't a fancy event -- just a bunch of engineers having fun. Pat actually agreed to come by to hand out the awards at the end. I left VMware partly because I've been there so long and partly because I wasn't excited about it anymore. I felt its best days were behind it. Well, Pat proved me wrong by a wide margin. If no-nonsense engineering is what you need to win, then Pat is the right person for the job. It's a good day for Intel I think.
MangoCoffee 6y ago
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/294637-2020-was-a-mess-for-intel/ https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/294637-2020-was-... >A few years ago, back in 2016, Intel did a “RIF” (reduction in force) of about 11%. Intel had previously done a significant reduction way back in 2006 of about 10% >In an industry that runs on “tribal knowledge” and “copy exact” and experience of how to run a very, very complex multi billion dollar fab, much of the most experienced, best talent walked out the doors at Intel’s behest, with years of knowledge in their collective heads bottom line: Intel created the hole by itself and jump into that deep end.
- nikanj 6y ago
  Management rule of thumb: For every % you cut from the bottom, you lose from the top. Cut 10% of workforce, and 10% of your best people say "yes" to the next headhunter trying to poach them.
  - belval 6y ago
    It's actually more complex than that, when a big company wants to reduce workforce they will fire the bottom and offer retirement packages to their oldest employees which are above or near retirement age, sometime as much as a full year of salary. The intuition is that older employees cost more and by cutting them you can reduce your payroll more significantly while doing what looks like smaller employee cuts from the outside. This is often viewed favourably by investors because on paper it doesn't seem as the company is stalling (head count is still high, costs are down). The obvious issue is that these older employees are not easily replaceable and you end up losing more velocity in the long run than originally anticipated. The above is more applicable to traditional blue-chip businesses where workforce movements are more limited. For software engineering (which Intel is not really) your assumption is correct and once cuts are announced a lot of your great engineers will jump ship.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Those older employees better be replaceable! Many will be gone in a few more years because they retire anyway, so you should have a plan in place to save their knowledge. The above applies to everyone. When I was an intern the company folklore was full of horror stories because the last guy knew anything about a very profitable product died suddenly. (the product was for mainframes: clearly near end of life, but it was still mission critical for major customers and got had to get minor updates) I've also known important people to find a better job. Even when an offer of more money gets them to stay, my experience is they always wonder if they made the right decision and so are never again as good as they were before. Moral of the story: don't allow anyone in your company to get irreplaceable. This is good for you too: it means you won't stagnate doing the same thing over an over.
mathattack 6y ago
Wow! Big musical chairs.
downrightmike 6y ago
Hopefully Pat fires all the consultants and puts engineers into positions that can actually make Intel succeed long term.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
one loser for another loser
jack_riminton 6y ago
First job should be to acquire Jim Keller’s new startup and get him back
throwawayriver 6y ago
All those hundreds of millions of dollars Intel shelled out over the past five years for SJW and "diversity" initiatives are finally paying off!!!
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  I think you're raising an interesting point regarding the CEO's focus vs. company performance. Friendly advice from someone who's learned this the hard way: If you edit your comment so that it's tone is a bit more friendly, it's more likely to foster a real discussion.
jeffrogers 6y ago
Can't wait to see which celebrity they bring on to be the next innovation leader...
gavin_gee 6y ago
where does Intel go from here? we are in the tech wave of propriety chips vertically integrated. cloud providers building their own CPU designs for their service offerings, consumer computer providers integrating cpu, hardware, and software (Apple). Isnt Intel going to continue to get squeezed out of the market?
rayiner 6y ago
He joined Intel at 18 with an associate’s degree from a trade school (Lincoln Tech). Amazing.
- person_of_color 6y ago
  Only in America.
  - tryptophan 6y ago
    You're getting downvotes, but it's true. The rest of the world is a lot more obsessed with credential-ism and pedigree.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Even Silicon Valley in 2020.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        Is, what? Obsessed with credentials? It really isn't (but I can't tell if I'm just misreading you and don't want to belabor it).
        rayiner 6y ago
        I meant Silicon Valley 2020 is more focused on credentials than it was when Pat Gelsinger was starting out.
        tptacek 6y ago
        Maybe? I don't know what it was like when Gelsinger started. But it's the least credential-driven high-status professional market in the country, and maybe the world. It's hard to start your career with a first job at Google without a top 10 CS degree, but that might be the only example; it can be your second job without one.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Here's a fun fact (and I suspect shows what a loser I am :-)) Pat Gelsinger and I were colleagues at Intel in the early 80's. We both worked in what was called "MIPO" (Microprocessor Operation) but I was in Systems Validation and he was on the customer facing side with field engineering. My career went off through a variety of engineering roles, his went into management and up. When he joined EMC, I told him I had always thought he would have been Intel's CEO. He told me, "Hey, maybe I still will be :-)" That was like 10 years ago, and here he is. There are a lot of things you can say about Silicon Valley, but one of the more interesting aspects of it for me has been how "small" it is in terms of people have an oversized impact. I have never been one of those people of course, just a part of the entourage. But it has been interesting to watch and learn from folks who are good (and bad) role models.
- LogicX 6y ago
  Pat went to my high school and computer science program. It’s in a small rural, Pennsylvania farming town - pop 2000. Somehow we got an amazing math teacher turned CompSci and he turned out world class students - we always ranked high enough each year to compete internationally in ACSL. A few years back when the teacher retired, we all gathered together to thank him, including Pat! World-class guy, and makes us proud! So great to share a story with students, who come from nothing, how you can leave our hometown and eventually be the CEO of Intel. Wishing Pat the best of luck in his new role!
  - BatteryMountain 6y ago
    A single good teacher can make all the difference in the world.
    - bipson 6y ago
      Which is kind of sad, isn't it? Doesn't that mean that a lot of people will never be on the receiving end just because they did not win the teacher-lottery (arguably the chance of getting such a teacher is rather slim)? Shouldn't our systems be more robust? (Not talking about normalizing these effects down, but creating a better environment for everyone, using these effects en masse)
737min 6y ago
Great to see a technologist back in charge of Intel. This was a company that was founded and CEO’ed by top-tier engineering elite. AMD’s CEO is an MIT PhD with long track record of technical achievement earlier in her career. Intel needs the same.
deleted 6y ago
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arminiusreturns 6y ago
Was Pat the one responsible for the near complete degredation of VMWare support over the last X years? I had enough interactions with it to finally get that they were funneling the low paying support contracts to a completely different set of crappy support people, but if you payed the premium you got something much better. Maybe it was prior to him and things have gotten better though.
Bendub1 6y ago
Finish him
mmargerum 6y ago
“We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino" makes, Gelsinger told employees. "We have to be that good, in the future” Sounds like old guard thinking to me

572 points by totalZero 6y ago

No harm to VMware on this I think. As it pushes into SAAS it really does need a big shake up. Not that Pat wasn't good, but it is an old company with a lot of inertia, some fresh blood and fresh ideas could really be beneficial. Hopefully the next CEO is as committed to all the other stuff, like treating the employees very good and the community stuff. The best bit of the company isn't the tech at all (in my opinion)

samaxe 6y ago
They need to get out from under Dell’s thumb. Until then no new CEO will bring significant changes.
- roomey 6y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with that. I've been there now over 8 years and the only difference since Dell bought emc is they are cross selling. In terms of product development, staffing, benefits etc they have no influence. This is in opposition to EMC, who had a lot of benefits and nice things like free coffee cut to match with dell.
ghaff 6y ago
>but it is an old company That makes me feel old given that I first spoke with them as an analyst before ESX Server came out :-)

acallan 6y ago

Pat was a "boy wonder" at Intel and could do no wrong — until Larrabee. I was working at Intel at the time and remember always assuming that Pat would someday be CEO. His departure came as such a shock to a lot of us, as does his return. He might have what it takes to turn Intel around.

ghaff 6y ago
There was also Intel's whole pursuit of frequency--they demoed I think it was a 10GHz chip at IDF at one point (and Itanium was essentially an ILP-oriented design)--and resistance to multi-core. Some of it was doubtless Intel convincing themselves they could make it work. But they were also under a lot of pressure from Microsoft who didn't have confidence that they could do SMP effectively--at least that's what a certain Intel CTO told me. (Ironically, multi-core didn't end up being nearly the issue a lot of people were wringing hands over at the time thought it would be for various reasons.)
- ethbr0 6y ago
  From my personal memory at the time, early NUMA multicore on Windows wasn't the smoothest sailing.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It wasn't. A few years earlier, I was the product manager for a line of large NUMA systems which admittedly had far larger near-far memory latency differences than it was on multicore systems. Commercial Unix systems still could have issues for write-intensive workloads but Windows was pretty much unusable for configurations that had far memory. Things were likely better by the mid-2000s but Windows was definitely still behind Unix in this regard. (Don't really know where Linux was at that point but IBM at least had done work in OSDL on various scale-up optimizations.)
  - glandium 6y ago
    It seems it's not great now either, seeing how the first iteration of AMD's Threadripper performed badly on Windows.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  I’m not sure Itanium was a technical failure, to me it always was a business model failure as that CPU was co-developed with HP and essentially became a dedicated HP-Oracle box and by the time the ecosystem was opened up it was too late. The heavy reliance on the compiler for ILP was an “odd-choice” but not something that was unsound in principle. If the ecosystem was more open from the get go and more vendors were involved it had a much better chance of taking off. And if nothing else at least it was something new. The biggest disappointment I have with Itanium is that it and later Larabee/XeonPhi kinda pushed Intel even further into their own little x86 box when it came to processing units. I think that failure is also why they haven’t really done anything interesting with Altera.

hehehaha 6y ago

Really don’t see how this changes things inside Intel. Pat Gelsinger is not new to Intel at all. This is just playing musical chairs.

totalZero 6y ago
Pat was fairly effective at VMW. The fact that he himself is not new to Intel is probably beneficial for the company, but there's a pretty substantial difference between being CTO and actually steering the ship. I'm not comparing Gelsinger to Steve Jobs in a general sense, but Jobs wasn't new to Apple when he returned -- and yet Jobs' return to leadership was transformative for the company.
- hehehaha 6y ago
  I see a lot of parallels between what happened at Boeing and now at Intel. It’s a cultural phenomenon and I am not convinced Pat is going to shake things up. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he literally fired most, if not all, of management consulting types. He changed the culture overnight. I don’t see that happening at Intel (but I hope I am wrong).
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  Only in the incestuous world of CEOs does being "fairly effective" at your last job grant you the keys to one of the biggest companies in the world.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    You could argue that VMware was slow to move into containers and should probably have better leveraged Pivotal before they drew them in. The former is something of an innovator's dilemma thing. The lack of focus on developers and applications was something of a VMware blind spot going back to Diane Greene days. But "fairly effective" underplays how well VMware has done over the past 10 years or so overall. There are things they should have been more aggressive about, especially with the benefit of hindsight, but they've been a very successful software company/subsidiary.

xwdv 6y ago

This won’t change anything, by the time Intel gets back on it’s feet, big techs will be building their own silicon and AMD will have eaten up whatever is left of Intel’s lunch.

msoad 6y ago
People underestimate what it means for Intel when Microsoft and Apple are going to produce their own chips and AWS is pushing their ARM offering. It does not take much for the industry to switch to ARM as default for desktop and server.
- baskire 6y ago
  I’ve noticed the switch to arm isn’t drastically harder than switch to amd for large DC/Cloud users. The biggest burden is political. The technical work is only a few months. With savings often more than paying to hire substantially more staff to assist in migration then accelerate the core product.
ghaff 6y ago
It's not about AMD which is (sorry) a marginal factor in all this. It's whether other architectures like Arm and RISC-V really upset the apple cart.
- metabagel 6y ago
  You have it backwards. AMD is steadily taking market share from Intel in both the desktop and server space. ARM is only a potential threat at the moment, with a tiny market share outside of mobile and IOT. Granted, ARM is huge threat to Intel over the longer term, but AMD is taking market share now.
- neogodless 6y ago
  Let's see if this is true, statistically: https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-intel-amd-market-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int... Intel/AMD split in x86 currently 61.4% / 38.6%. If we (very incorrectly assume) 100% of Intel sales were through Apple and were going to all be replaced by Apple, then, even given current trends AMD and Apple would be at roughly 50/50 before long. Looks like OS X is around 16-17% of desktop operating system share though. So the ~82% of buyers still buying x86 are going to continue choosing between Intel and AMD. Apple M1 has some people believing that suddenly everyone will stop buying x86 chips and buy Apple unless someone releases a competitive ARM based chip for Windows/Linux. I'd like to see some evidence for that premise, though. Apple's messaging has always been "better designed hardware + better software experience", and yet they still haven't breached 20% market share. A CPU that increases battery life (and yes performs very well) but still can't be bought with your Windows PC isn't going to rapidly change the market share. It could erode it over time, but this is certainly just conjecture, not proof. Let's revisit the conversation in 5 years and see what Apple, Intel and AMD have done, technologically, and what consumers have decided.

wronglebowski 6y ago

This spoils any optimism I may have had for Intel. Reading that this came due to a search for "Strategic alternatives" is damning. Intel is like Boeing. They make one thing and they used to make it very well, silicon. If Boeing told you they were looking into alternatives to making planes would you be optimistic? It feels like they're throwing in the towel on being the leader, giving up on trying to catch up process wise and will look to maximize their existing revenue. RIP

totalZero 6y ago
I don't see much similarity between the story of Intel and the story of Boeing. Boeing made an entire line of defective airplanes that could autonomously kill everyone aboard under normal usage. Then, a respiratory virus hammered the travel industry. In contrast, the semiconductor industry is seeing more demand than ever before, and presently undergoing a shortage. Intel has mismanaged 10nm and 7nm, but the company maintains a majority CPU market share overall and an even wider margin for servers.
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  I think Spectre and related vulnerabilities are directly comparable to the 737 MAX debacle, insofar as they reflect poor engineering decisions made directly against the customer in favor of short-term profit. Of course Boeing’s decision was far more devastating and led to the loss of 346 souls, but the pathology that gave rise to both situations (executive hubris, failure to tackle accumulated tech debt) seems quite similar.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Eh. Some of the vulnerabilities in that class were Intel-specific. But there is a whole class of vulnerabilities that potentially can hit any design that has speculative execution--and people just aren't OK with shutting off speculative execution because the performance hit is so big.
    - ericbarrett 6y ago

sithadmin 6y ago

Definitely a win for Intel. Pat will be sorely missed at VMware, though.

iKevinShah 6y ago
Can confirm. With multiple other amazing things he brought to the table, he was super excited about things we were doing no matter how small or big. He truly respected everyone. Definitely will be missed.
vkat 6y ago
I always thought VMware was super lucky to have Pat as CEO. The mood is pretty grim today at VMware.

swyx 6y ago

poor guy. stepped in way too late to catch up to AMD, now falling on his sword. Intel needs a Wartime CEO now. (that said i'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank with his millions so i'm not feeling too sorry for him)

eznzt 6y ago
Yes, they should call Stephen Elop
icelancer 6y ago
Gelsinger can definitely be that Wartime CEO. If they let him do his job.

satya71 6y ago

The CEO of a semiconductor company needs to have an engineering background, IMO. The tech is too complex and too important to the business to have a CEO who doesn't understand the nuances. Wish Pat all the success at Intel. We need Intel to do better.

iamricks 6y ago
I agree, that is why Lisa Su runs AMD so well
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
From [0]: Gelsinger earned a master's degree from Stanford University in 1985, his bachelor's degree from Santa Clara University in 1983 (magna cum laude), and an associate degree from Lincoln Technical Institute in 1979, all in electrical engineering. I'd call it an engineering background. [0]: https://www.vmware.com/company/leadership/pat-gelsinger.html https://www.vmware.com/company/leadership/pat-gelsinger.html
- KptMarchewa 6y ago
  I've understood it as a critique of a previous CEO, not the new one.
AlphaSite 6y ago
Wasn’t he Andy Groves Protege?
rossdavidh 6y ago
Disclosure: I worked at AMD for about a decade, although that's a while back now. It is traditional in semiconductor companies (or was, anyway) to have a triumvirate: 1) the "outside" guy (sales, know the customer) 2) the "inside" guy (operations, now the employees) 3) the "tech" guy Any of these three can run the company, but whichever one it is, they need to have the other two near at hand, and they need to listen closely to them. The problem comes when, as at Intel and perhaps also at Boeing, you have options (1) or (2) in charge, and they're not listening to the person who is position (3) in the triumvirate, or they don't have a triumvirate at all. If the person in position (3) is in charge (as at AMD currently), they will still need to have experts in (1) and (2), and they will need to listen to them.

dave_aiello 6y ago

The world really needs a company like Intel to succeed, if only to take some of-- let's say-- the geographic concentration risk out of such a high percentage of the cutting-edge device manufacturers depending on TSMC's fabs.

albertopv 6y ago

Intel is still making tons of money, so there's still time and Pat seems the right choice. Competition is good and Intel could still be competitive.

marcusklaas 6y ago
For sure. Considering from what depths AMD has managed to recover, people are much too eager to count out Intel.

fxtentacle 6y ago

To me, that move makes a lot of sense. But judging from the other comments, I'm the only one with that assessment. I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes Intel dominate certain industries is software. And it has been for some years already. If you need really fast mathematical number crunching, e.g. high frequency trading or realtime audio filtering, then you need MKL, the Intel math kernel library. If you want to further reduce latency with parallelism, you need TBB, the Intel thread building blocks. Raytracing? Intel embree. Once you are locked in that deeply, the raw Intel vs AMD performance becomes meaningless. You only care about how fast the Intel libraries run So a CEO with experience building high performance low level software seems like an amazing fit. Edit: And I almost forgot, the Intel compiler used in pretty every PC game to speed up physics. Plus some people have seen success replacing GPUs with icc+avx for huge deployment cost savings in AI.

danpalmer 6y ago
To me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure. Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing well. The next ~30% of their business is servers, where there may be a significant number of HPC clients, but the bulk of this is again likely to be VMs running non-Intel specific software, and this market is starting to realise that Intel is nothing special here. Looking at their revenue breakdown, I struggle to put more than 20% into the things that you mention they are great at. Should they focus on this? It would lose them much of their market cap if they did.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment. In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users. And the 30% that you mention that run VMs... Wouldn't they be pretty happy if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better? I agree that for the work that I do, AMD is as good as or better. But people doing highly parallelizable tasks like compiling are the minority.

amelius 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Gelsinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Gelsinger Not sure what to make of the fact that he wrote two books on balancing work and family life, and makes me wonder if this is the general that will win the silicon war. Time will tell, I suppose.

mepian 6y ago
This article doesn't do him justice, he was one of the key people behind the 386 project which saved Intel during its first major crisis. After that, he went on to become the lead of the 486 project and kept moving up on the management ladder until the Larrabee fiasco.
- ghaff 6y ago
  That is so typically Wikipedia. 10,000 word articles on trivial subjects and basically a stub listicle for an article on the longtime CEO of one of the largest (but "uncool") software companies in the world.
  - NonEUCitizen 6y ago
    You are free to edit and expand the article.
    - Der_Einzige 6y ago
      No he isn't, someone will instantly undue the changes unless he's a respected member of the wikipedia politburo. Found this out the hard way when I tried to edit some articles about Max Stirner. They don't even like small changes by randoms...
- thunkshift1 6y ago
  Why was larrabee considered a fiasco?
  - daniel-thompson 6y ago

JoshTko 6y ago

Pretty damming to Bob Swan when a $200B market cap company jumps +8% on news that you are stepping down.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Pretty sure he gives zero fucks about this considering the juiciness of his golden parachute. The only gig where you get rewarded handsomely even if you fail.
- astlouis44 6y ago
  This x 1000.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  But us customers can watch Intel succeed again, rather than squander 7 years.
__turbobrew__ 6y ago
Is there any security to short Bob Swan? Seems like a good bet.

PedroBatista 6y ago

The trillion dollar question is: Is the board leaning into the usual MBA moves 101 and turn Intel into a "services company" gradually going fabless and milking those sweet patents OR will they put the work boots on and start building an actual tech company with the people who actually can save them on the payroll? cutting on the usual contractors meat grinder and invite the vast armies of middle-management and marketing drones to leave?

quercusa 6y ago
Or are they looking for that one acquisition that (this time!) will fix everything?
- CalChris 6y ago
  Arguably a re-aquisition. Gelsinger was at Intel for 30 years.
  - nwsm 6y ago
    They didn't mean Gelsinger as the acquisition. The question is what direction Gelsinger will take them, with one option being to acquire some company or companies to bootstrap a new path forward.
- nikanj 6y ago
  Time to sign your startup in for the lottery. Your company might be the next Pure Digital or Autonomy Corporation!
mepian 6y ago
Pat Gelsinger fits the second option better, he has an actual engineering background and worked on some of the most important Intel products early in his career.
- CalChris 6y ago
  Swan was utterly the first option.

atlgator 6y ago

Pat completely missed the boat on building a VMWare cloud when AWS started taking off. Can't say I'm enthused for Intel.

hodgesrm 6y ago
He recovered from the mistake. The drop in VMW share price on news that he's leaving shows what the market thinks of his affect on VMW value.
- hntrader 6y ago
  CEO departures almost always cause a drop in the share price, usually not because the CEO is considered great but investors perceive it to signal private information about the state of the company
ghaff 6y ago
He didn't become CEO of VMware until 2012 which is 6 years after AWS launched. Even if VMware had decided to directly go after AWS, they would have started way behind. Also, for good reasons and bad, it's unclear to me that would have been a great move. IMO, you can look to other trends they could have latched onto more quickly that would have been better fits.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

Gelsinger was pushed out as CTO after horribly failing to address AMD's competitive threats. I have no idea how he wormed his way back in, but this does not bode well for Intel's future: Gelsinger is proof of the "Peter Principle", being promoted too high. EDIT: I was a bit harsh, toned it down. EDIT 2: This is probably petty, but I can't ignore the fact that there was a significant hubbub at Intel regarding him using the "Dr" prefix. He scrubbed it from his bio and internal pages when it was pointed it out didn't come from an accredited university and that it was honorary. He also caught flak internally for having the pope bless a wafer for Intel's future success. It was very weird, especially given the high percentage of Muslim engineers at Intel, and its focus on neutrality.

jhloa2 6y ago
Any references on the Pope blessing a wafer? I really want to see this but can't find it
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  Nope, I can't find it on Google. Nada. Even on Wayback. It may have been internal but I definitely remember it. It was pope Benedict.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  seconded. that's insane.
eco 6y ago
Silicon wafer or communion wafer?
- scandox 6y ago
  Jesus was carbon based ... As far as we know.
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    The Church of the Silicon Jesus. I like it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hodgesrm 6y ago

The interesting question is what this means for VMware. Besides Pat's departure, Rajiv Ramaswami left to lead Nutanix. They have multiple holes to fill.

cletus 6y ago

Intel is in shambles. The whole 10nm thing is a fiasco at this point. Who could've pictured 10 years ago that Intel would've even considered outsourcing their fabrication? Intel's core strength was their seemingly unassailable lead in chip design and fabrication. From various articles over the years it seems that what's happened to Intel internally is fairly typical: internal fiefdoms, empire-building, turf wars and the like. This is something you have to actively prevent from happening. This is going to take someone with deep experience in fab engineering to figure out, not a bean counter. And it should probably involve a massive house cleaning of middle management. And no the answer isn't just another reorg. Unless you actively prevent it reorgs become a semi-constant thing. Every 3-6 months you'll be told how some VP in your management chain you've never heard of let alone or met now reports to some other VP you've never heard of or met. There'll be announcements about how the new structure is streamlined and better fits some new reality. And 6 months later you'll go through the same thing. This is a way of essentially dodging responsibility. Nothing is in place long enough for anyone to be accountable for anything working or not working.

ksec 6y ago

"Notable absent from that list is he fired Pat Gelsinger. Please just bring him back as CEO." - [1] 2012 on HN, when Paul Otellini Retired. "The only one who may have a slim chance to completely transform Intel is Pat Gelsinger, if Andy Grove saved Intel last time, it will be his apprentice to save Intel again. Unfortunately given what Intel has done to Pat during his last tenure, I am not sure if he is willing to pick up the job, especially the board's Chairman is Bryant, not sure how well they go together. But we know Pat still loves Intel, and I know a lot of us miss Pat." [2] - June, 2018 "This is the same as Intel pushing out Pat Gelsinger. The product people get pushed out by sales and marketing. Which are increasingly running the show at Apple." [3] 30 Days ago. And numerous other reference since 2009. Many more around various other forums and twitter. I am getting quite emotional right now. I cant believe this is really happening. ( I am wiring this with tears in my eyes! ) I guess Andy Bryant retired makes the decision a little easier. And Pat has always loved Intel. I guess he is pissed those muppets drove it to the ground. This is 12 years! 12 years to prove a point! Consider 4 - 5 years of work in lead-time since he left in 2009. That is 2014. Guess what happen after 2014? May be it is too little too late? Or May be this will be another Andy Grove "Only the paranoid survive" moment? The King is Back at Intel, despite being a fan of Dr Lisa Su, I am little worry about AMD. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804875 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17391707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17391707 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25435150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25435150

heyheyhey 6y ago
Wow, I'm impressed by your persistence. Have you worked with him or know him personally?
- hangonhn 6y ago
  I worked at VMware when Pat first became the CEO. Pat is very much an engineer. If you ever wanted an engineer as your CEO, then that's Pat. That comes with some goods and some not-so-greats. Pat isn't very inspiring, at least not when he first became CEO. But I always got the feeling that he genuinely love engineers and is more comfortable around them than anything else. I once hosted a fun little engineering challenge (building bridges out of spaghetti). It wasn't a fancy event -- just a bunch of engineers having fun. Pat actually agreed to come by to hand out the awards at the end. I left VMware partly because I've been there so long and partly because I wasn't excited about it anymore. I felt its best days were behind it. Well, Pat proved me wrong by a wide margin. If no-nonsense engineering is what you need to win, then Pat is the right person for the job. It's a good day for Intel I think.

MangoCoffee 6y ago

https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/294637-2020-was-a-mess-for-intel/ https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/294637-2020-was-... >A few years ago, back in 2016, Intel did a “RIF” (reduction in force) of about 11%. Intel had previously done a significant reduction way back in 2006 of about 10% >In an industry that runs on “tribal knowledge” and “copy exact” and experience of how to run a very, very complex multi billion dollar fab, much of the most experienced, best talent walked out the doors at Intel’s behest, with years of knowledge in their collective heads bottom line: Intel created the hole by itself and jump into that deep end.

nikanj 6y ago
Management rule of thumb: For every % you cut from the bottom, you lose from the top. Cut 10% of workforce, and 10% of your best people say "yes" to the next headhunter trying to poach them.
- belval 6y ago
  It's actually more complex than that, when a big company wants to reduce workforce they will fire the bottom and offer retirement packages to their oldest employees which are above or near retirement age, sometime as much as a full year of salary. The intuition is that older employees cost more and by cutting them you can reduce your payroll more significantly while doing what looks like smaller employee cuts from the outside. This is often viewed favourably by investors because on paper it doesn't seem as the company is stalling (head count is still high, costs are down). The obvious issue is that these older employees are not easily replaceable and you end up losing more velocity in the long run than originally anticipated. The above is more applicable to traditional blue-chip businesses where workforce movements are more limited. For software engineering (which Intel is not really) your assumption is correct and once cuts are announced a lot of your great engineers will jump ship.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Those older employees better be replaceable! Many will be gone in a few more years because they retire anyway, so you should have a plan in place to save their knowledge. The above applies to everyone. When I was an intern the company folklore was full of horror stories because the last guy knew anything about a very profitable product died suddenly. (the product was for mainframes: clearly near end of life, but it was still mission critical for major customers and got had to get minor updates) I've also known important people to find a better job. Even when an offer of more money gets them to stay, my experience is they always wonder if they made the right decision and so are never again as good as they were before. Moral of the story: don't allow anyone in your company to get irreplaceable. This is good for you too: it means you won't stagnate doing the same thing over an over.

mathattack 6y ago

Wow! Big musical chairs.

downrightmike 6y ago

Hopefully Pat fires all the consultants and puts engineers into positions that can actually make Intel succeed long term.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

one loser for another loser

jack_riminton 6y ago

First job should be to acquire Jim Keller’s new startup and get him back

throwawayriver 6y ago

All those hundreds of millions of dollars Intel shelled out over the past five years for SJW and "diversity" initiatives are finally paying off!!!

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I think you're raising an interesting point regarding the CEO's focus vs. company performance. Friendly advice from someone who's learned this the hard way: If you edit your comment so that it's tone is a bit more friendly, it's more likely to foster a real discussion.

jeffrogers 6y ago

Can't wait to see which celebrity they bring on to be the next innovation leader...

gavin_gee 6y ago

where does Intel go from here? we are in the tech wave of propriety chips vertically integrated. cloud providers building their own CPU designs for their service offerings, consumer computer providers integrating cpu, hardware, and software (Apple). Isnt Intel going to continue to get squeezed out of the market?

rayiner 6y ago

He joined Intel at 18 with an associate’s degree from a trade school (Lincoln Tech). Amazing.

person_of_color 6y ago
Only in America.
- tryptophan 6y ago
  You're getting downvotes, but it's true. The rest of the world is a lot more obsessed with credential-ism and pedigree.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Even Silicon Valley in 2020.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Is, what? Obsessed with credentials? It really isn't (but I can't tell if I'm just misreading you and don't want to belabor it).
      - rayiner 6y ago
        I meant Silicon Valley 2020 is more focused on credentials than it was when Pat Gelsinger was starting out.
        tptacek 6y ago
        Maybe? I don't know what it was like when Gelsinger started. But it's the least credential-driven high-status professional market in the country, and maybe the world. It's hard to start your career with a first job at Google without a top 10 CS degree, but that might be the only example; it can be your second job without one.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Here's a fun fact (and I suspect shows what a loser I am :-)) Pat Gelsinger and I were colleagues at Intel in the early 80's. We both worked in what was called "MIPO" (Microprocessor Operation) but I was in Systems Validation and he was on the customer facing side with field engineering. My career went off through a variety of engineering roles, his went into management and up. When he joined EMC, I told him I had always thought he would have been Intel's CEO. He told me, "Hey, maybe I still will be :-)" That was like 10 years ago, and here he is. There are a lot of things you can say about Silicon Valley, but one of the more interesting aspects of it for me has been how "small" it is in terms of people have an oversized impact. I have never been one of those people of course, just a part of the entourage. But it has been interesting to watch and learn from folks who are good (and bad) role models.

LogicX 6y ago
Pat went to my high school and computer science program. It’s in a small rural, Pennsylvania farming town - pop 2000. Somehow we got an amazing math teacher turned CompSci and he turned out world class students - we always ranked high enough each year to compete internationally in ACSL. A few years back when the teacher retired, we all gathered together to thank him, including Pat! World-class guy, and makes us proud! So great to share a story with students, who come from nothing, how you can leave our hometown and eventually be the CEO of Intel. Wishing Pat the best of luck in his new role!
- BatteryMountain 6y ago
  A single good teacher can make all the difference in the world.
  - bipson 6y ago
    Which is kind of sad, isn't it? Doesn't that mean that a lot of people will never be on the receiving end just because they did not win the teacher-lottery (arguably the chance of getting such a teacher is rather slim)? Shouldn't our systems be more robust? (Not talking about normalizing these effects down, but creating a better environment for everyone, using these effects en masse)

737min 6y ago

Great to see a technologist back in charge of Intel. This was a company that was founded and CEO’ed by top-tier engineering elite. AMD’s CEO is an MIT PhD with long track record of technical achievement earlier in her career. Intel needs the same.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

arminiusreturns 6y ago

Was Pat the one responsible for the near complete degredation of VMWare support over the last X years? I had enough interactions with it to finally get that they were funneling the low paying support contracts to a completely different set of crappy support people, but if you payed the premium you got something much better. Maybe it was prior to him and things have gotten better though.

Bendub1 6y ago

Finish him

mmargerum 6y ago

“We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino" makes, Gelsinger told employees. "We have to be that good, in the future” Sounds like old guard thinking to me