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Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel

• louwrentius 2y ago
  It’s by Brian Cantrill and also discussed in the latest 0xide podcast (basically the same story)
• deleted 2y ago
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• chmoore889 2y ago
  I feel like I'm seeing a lot about how Gelsinger's decisions were the wrong move for Intel, but I don't see what he direction he should have taken the company instead. What is (or was when Gelsinger became CEO) the move for Intel to get back on top?
  • Dalewyn 2y ago
    >I feel like I'm seeing a lot about how Gelsinger's decisions were the wrong move for Intel The narrative machine for Intel is in full force given how much monies is in play, I wouldn't take anything that seriously. >What is (or was when Gelsinger became CEO) the move for Intel to get back on top? Whatever it takes to drive stonks up up up, obviously. If there was one thing Gelsinger could legitimately be blamed for, it is that he wiped out Intel's market valuation. Nothing else matters, because his "interim" replacements are both beancounters whose literal job is to drive stonks up up up.
    • tharkun__ 2y ago
      because his "interim" replacements are both beancounters whose literal job is to drive stonks up up up. That seems like the opposite of what I've heard before and what NVDA have been doing. Is NVDA's stock soaring because the bean counters stifled any innovation before it could happen in order to drive the stonks up? Bean counters can bring stock value up temporarily. The trick is to get out before shit hits the fan. For a comparison, see Boeing. Where shit is hitting the (turbo) fan right now as well.
      • Dalewyn 2y ago
        The difference between Nvidia and Intel is that Nvidia still has its founder at its head. A founder interested in seeing his company instead of just stonks go up up up. I have no doubt Nvidia will start losing its way when Huang retires, like almost all other founder-less companies such as Intel.
        • dangus 2y ago
          I don't disagree with you that Nvidia has good leadership, and that Intel has bad leadership, but I take a bit of issue with this pedestal that founders are placed on. Being a founder doesn't magically make you the best person for the job of CEO of a company. Huang happens to be a very good leader, but a lot of founders become a drag on their companies later on. It's just an anecdote, I worked for one place where the company truly outgrew the founder's abilities. He was just some guy with an art degree who was at the right place at the right time with his dorm room business idea. I would argue that his lack of ability and experience squandered a lot of the later stage growth opportunities that could have made the company into a billion dollar public corporation. I think about a company like WeWork, that's a company that would not exist today if the founder was not kicked out. Some companies like McDonald's would never have expanded to be a household name if their founders were still in charge.
          • Brian_K_White 2y ago
            Their point wasn't that founders are somehow wiser. The assertion was merely that founders care about the company. Their decisions may be no more prescient than anyone else's, but their decisions are reliably in different directions than anyone else's. Their goal is different, the direction they always aim is different, and that consistent aim has an effect over time regardless what mistakes and misfortunes happen along the way. If you have a specific and clear goal on the horizon and are always aiming for that even though you have to deal with obstacles closer in front of you, over time you still get somewhere. If your goal is just chasing whatever random butterflies float by, you get nowhere.
      • YZF 2y ago
  • rhelz 2y ago
    Well said. Everybody makes mistakes. How many mistakes do you think you have to make in order to build something like Tesla, or SpaceX? Larabee was a mess....anybody who as actually been involved with designing a chip which breaks new ground (and is not just repackaging of somebody else's IP) knows that designing and taping out ANY AND EVERY chip is a big mess. It is not easy to tell heaven from hell on this one--and arguably, Intel's management at the time made the wrong call. Pretty much every decision they were making at the time was the wrong decision, which is why Intel is in the state it is in. When I worked at Intel, Robert Noyce had unfortunately died, but we still had Andy Grove on the business end and Gordon Moore on the technical end. All three of those people are not just good, not even merely great. They were the kind of transcendent geniuses who rewrite the world, and which come along once every 2 or 3 hundred years. Impossible to replace. AFAIAK, If Gelsinger couldn't fix Intel, it was irreparably broken by the time he got there. We should celebrate him for having the courage to try to fix what 4 previous CEOs couldn't fix. I understand that it's painful when one of your suppliers has financial difficulty and has to exit a business you depend on. I feel ya. I hope that nobody will be writing blog posts about the OP's decision to partner with Intel in the first place, pointing to it as one of the fatal mistakes made by the company and their leaders.
    • riwsky 2y ago
      Intel never wrote posts of the sort oxide wrote here, that’s the point.
  • bsder 2y ago
    > but I don't see what he direction he should have taken the company instead. Software and design support. As pointed out in the article. Intel is genetically incapable of valuing anything other than "The Fab(tm)". VLSI designer ... second class citizen. Software ... second class citizen. etc. The ARC graphics card series is an exemplar of the problem. It was always going to be a market disaster. Fine, accept it. However, Intel should have pushed a couple of cards for free to every single HPC/AI grad department in the US. And perhaps even tossed in a $50K grant to boot. That's, what, $50K*100=$5 million max and a thousand graphics cards? Sure, the top 10-20 departments are well-funded and still going to use Nvidia--the rest will chew on your graphics cards. In return you get a legion of grad students developing software for your hardware. And you will quickly get feedback as to what you need to fix for v2. However, you have to value software for that idea to penetrate. And Intel just ... doesn't.
    • almostgotcaught 2y ago
      > In return you get a legion of grad students developing software for your hardware. That would be worthless. It's so weird that people think academia is contributing in any meaningful way to the top lines or bottom lines here. You're free to look at the commit history of PyTorch/TF/Triton/HF/llama/whatever and judge for yourself.
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        > It's so weird that people think academia is contributing in any meaningful way > PyTorch/TF/Triton/HF/llama/whatever and judge for yourself. Where do you think the creators of most of these current models came from and started their careers? More critically, the ecosystem the arose for these to exist was subsidized by research for decades.
      • physicsguy 2y ago
        That’s so misguided it’s unreal. I’ve worked at several companies where there have been decent HPC/GPU codebases and at all of them the staff working on that have largely come out of academia in one way or another.
  • dangus 2y ago
    There's just two things Intel should have been focusing on, and that's getting their fabs back to being competitive with TSMC, and getting their chip designs back to being the best IP in the world. There is no reason why TSMC should be leading Intel on fabrication by so much. Intel has had a crazy amount of time to restructure and refocus when we consider how long their x86 intellectual property lead kept them afloat with their subpar fabrication and delayed manufacturing process updates. They spent many years having faster chips than anyone else despite having subpar fabrication. But now, they can't really escape the fact that ARM is exploding and AMD has the most flexible x86 platform where as each year goes by the number of use cases where Intel is the best choice diminishes. If you play games, the x3D chips are basically the only sensible choice. If you are looking for servers, AMD is consistently 10% cheaper in all the cloud platforms. If you want a mobile system, anything involving ARM and/or TSMC will get you better battery life. The fact that fabless players in the market like AMD and Apple can outpace Intel in so many product lines is, frankly, embarrassing. While I think that other processor design shops selling off fabrication divisions made sense, I think that Intel as a company basically makes no sense if they can't get their fabrication shit together. Because if Intel can't fabricate bleeding edge chips what's the point of using their IP?
    • MBCook 2y ago
      I was listening to a discussion about this today, latest Accidental Tech Podcast. The biggest problem Intel has at the moment seems to be they can’t split up and they can’t work together. If you keep both the fab and the design, you have problems. The thing that makes Intel all the money is their CPUs, and because of the state of the fab many of them are made at TSMC. But TSMC isn’t too keen on giving a good deal to someone who wants usurp them. So Intel is paying more per chip than they would if they just spun off the fab. If they did that, they could have higher margins/lower prices. But if you spin off the fab, can they actually get enough business to be able to survive? They’re not on the leading process. They need a massive investment to catch up. Despite their geopolitical importance it seems like they would basically need a real continuing subsidy just to exist, which is effectively being provided by the CPU design side of the business right now right? It’s a real damned if you do damned if you don’t kind of thing. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. Splitting them up kind of seems like the better idea but I don’t know if Intel’s ego could take that. They were the fab company. Their advantage let them survive multiple large mistakes that could’ve killed other companies. Now they’ve all piled up. PS: the CHIPS act money says it goes to Intel. It sounds like if they try to split they may lose it, so would first have to convince the government to let the fab part keep it
  • sberens 2y ago
    From the post: * Signal Intel is in it for the long term, specifically kill the dividend. * Be more customer centric/rebuild customer trust, specifically publicly acknowledge the 10nm slip. Though it seems customer trust in Intel has eroded to the point where only actions will change customers' perception of Intel — I'm not sure what Intel could have communicated to Tofino/Oxide that they hadn't already.
    • Pet_Ant 2y ago
      In the article they say they promised future development on Tofino and then didn't even follow through with their own EOL policy.
• hofstede 2y ago
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• AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Larrabee might be a disaster, but sometimes it takes a while to get things going. What other market was Intel chasing that would have yielded a large new market? Oh right, Mobile CPUs. I mean besides that? An actually well-done Linux distro that helped showcase Intel's hardware without waiting for Windows to release 9x+1. Ok, besides that? Good laptop hardware. Ok Ok Ok. But it still stands, even if 1.0 and 2.0 are a disaster, iterate and work on it. The big problem is that Intel is a quarterly earnings focused company. Well, and even if Gelsinger is good, the middle management is pretty clearly totally dead sea. If middle management is bad, they can't attract talent, and can't retain talent, and can't support talent. Without talent, no vision or execution. Intel doesn't value intellectual labor. It's the bottom line with the company. An arrogant technically competent leader is still better than the alternatives. That said I have no direct or even indirect interaction with Gelsinger. All my strong opinions are derived from 30 years of being in software and PCs.
  • rhelz 2y ago
    Anybody who has actually worked on a ground-breaking CPU--a really new design, with a radically new architecture--and not just recycled/repackaged third-party IP--knows that it is always a total disaster. It is always at risk of being shut down by a nervous board. Of course, until the day that it is not. Intel's management arguably made the wrong decision when they shut down Larrabee. Lets face it, at the time they were not making very many good decisions, which is why Intel is in the mess its in now.
• x3n0ph3n3 2y ago
  I continue to blame both he and Michael Dell for the demise of VMware. So many bad acquisitions and failures to innovate (ESXi for ARM anyone?)
  • rhelz 2y ago
    Docker had nothing to do with it?
    • dangus 2y ago
      Right, nobody truly can save VMWare from becoming obsolete. Cloud computing and containerization has basically killed the value proposition of VMWare. The fact that VMWare didn't become the market leader in cloud computing like AWS says a lot.
      • Spooky23 2y ago
        It’s the Kodak phenomenon. A software company like VMware would have had a hard time doing the capital investment necessary to be AWS, while simultaneously cannibalizing your real business. That’s why VMware tried to pivot to sticky stuff like EUC and dev platforms.
        • throwaway48476 2y ago
          Either you innovate and cannibalize existing business or squeeze existing customers and ride the decline. Broadcomm is the latter.
        • dangus 2y ago
          IMO I just don't think it would have been anything closet to being as difficult as a Kodak phenomenon for VMWare. AWS started quite small with just one service and it was funded by an extremely low profit margin e-commerce business. If VMWare had the product vision at the right time they could have been AWS.
          • 2y ago
• roenxi 2y ago
  This isn't a space I pretend to understand in detail, but Cantrill's objections to Larrabee here seem confusing. With hindsight, Intel abandoning Larrabee has been a disaster and they should have sustained the effort to develop a great GPGPU chip. Without taking any position at all on Gelsinger's execution his strategic vision seems to have be supported by what happened in practice after his attempt. If Intel had been practising making discrete GPU from 2009 to 2024 instead of giving up then it does seem quite reasonable that Nvidia would be a quarter of its size. One of the obvious mis-steps Intel made over the last 20 years was failing to keep trying Larrabee-style chips until they figured out how to make them work. Ok version 1 might be a disaster and version 2 might be bad. But we're looking back over almost 20 years! There was a lot of room to figure out how to be good and tap in to the huge new market that was opening up.
  • ekeane 2y ago
    Intel has a habit of coming up with great ideas, then deciding that they aren't immediately successful or immediately 60+% gross margins, so it clearly isn't worth following up. Intel's R&D department is a grave yard of great products murdered at the alter of Gross Margin. Larrabee is one such product. It wasn't immediately great, and didn't immediately promise great returns, and didn't quite have a market yet, so it was killed. I can't imagine where Intel would be in the AI world if they had the foresight to stick with Larrabee.
    • brookst 2y ago
      Yep. Intel has no patience. They have high margin businesses throwing off lots of cash, so the finance-driven culture says “why waste money on risky new things that can’t possibly equal that level of profitability in the short term?” Somehow they forgot that all of their highly profitably businesses were risky bets at one time.
      • josephg 2y ago
        Right. Google has the same problem. Any time they create a new product, it’s a coin flip on whether or not it’ll still be around in a year or two. I’ve steered multiple companies away from Google’s offerings because I just don’t think you should trust that any of their newer products will still be around in 5-10 years. Good on them for sticking with their promises for firebase. But it’s a pity about stadia. Don’t bet your business on a flip of the Google coin.
• CodeHorizon 2y ago
  Bring back Pat. Was Pat perfect, no. But Pat acknowledged Intel’s problems - something Otellini, Krzanich, and Swan never did. These CEOs, all non-technical, focused on dividends, buybacks, and next-quarter results while Intel fell behind in advanced nodes and innovation. Gelsinger inherited a disaster: 10nm delays, TSMC pulling ahead, and no GPU strategy. He had the courage to cut buybacks and slashed dividends. He poured billions into fabs in Arizona, Ohio, Germany, and Ireland. He delivered Intel 18A, powered on first silicon, released PDK 1.0 for Microsoft, and secured Microsoft and Amazon as customers. There were even rumors Apple might join. Contrast this with Nadella at Microsoft back in 2014. He didn’t reboot the company by tearing everything down. Instead, he built on Ballmer-era wins like Azure, Office 365 while shifting Microsoft’s focus to the cloud. Gelsinger had to start from scratch in many ways, tackling years of neglect while facing harsher challenges. Yes, Intel’s stock dropped $150 billion, but Gelsinger was upfront - it wouldn’t turn around before 2025. He was trained by Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, and while some saw him as arrogant, that confidence came from decades of technical leadership. The real issue? The board. Full of people like Boeing execs. They don’t get engineering. Trusting them to fix Intel is like hoping a plane door won’t pop open mid-flight. They’re the ones who should be replaced.
  • ekeane 2y ago
    I was inside since Otellini (left last year). Otellini at least 'stayed the course' reasonably well. I never felt like the company was going to GROW, but at least not die. BK is who did his best to sink the company, multiple mis-guided layoffs, bad top level hirings, and stupid direction changes every time he read a new news article. Don't even mention his absurd AMA on reddit where he couldn't stop using the ellipse and laughing like a 14 year old girl. Bob Swan wasn't the guy who could right the ship. He was another Otellini type guy, someone you bring in to not mess stuff up. Pat was a great pickup for Intel, and his return was my first time hoping that Intel could actually survive and grow. Unfortunately, he came by too late. Foundry STILL hadn't really made progress, and the rot in the rest of the company had set in too far. The brain drain from BK was still being felt everywhere. Frankly, I still feel like Pat was the right guy, 10 years too late. He joined to right the ship, but by the time he came aboard, the ship had already hit the iceberg, and the bow was 30 feet in the air. And now he's being blamed for the ship sinking.
• hnburnsy 2y ago
  He was frequently on CNBC discussing Intel's prospects. At first I thought it was great for transparency, but it eventually became 'The lady doth protest too much, methinks.'
• spicymaki 2y ago
  This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Any interesting new innovation from Intel gets snuffed out due to the fact it takes time to get to market. The success of x86 was blinding. Intel was impatient, so it killed products in their infancy (which leads to customer mistrust).
  • ekeane 2y ago
    Intel did a great job coming up with great ideas before everyone else, then killing them off once someone decided they weren't going to immediately make 60% gross margins. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly the company managed to throw away good ideas because it could only make 40% gross margin, or was going to take another few years to develop a market.
    • jiggawatts 2y ago
      Google has the same disease.
      • dangus 2y ago
        What disease is that? Making more money every year? Google revenue has only declined twice, and never by more than 3%. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...
        • YZF 2y ago
          Intel also had revenue growth until they didn't. That said Google could be doing worse. They at least have something around phones and AI. They're trying to attack some new markets. Google was structured so shareholders have no power but share price is still something that is going to drive decisions and hasn't been that amazing recently.
          • dangus 2y ago
            Intel has actually had many quarters of declining revenue, Google has been far more consistent in the last 15 years. Intel has had over 20 quarters where revenue declined since 2010 and they are spread out across 2010-2024, while Google only lost revenue in two quarters. I would argue that Intel's poor performance is quite detached from Google's consistently exceptional performance. Heck, they aren't even in the same business (primarily hardware vs. primarily media (advertising) and software). Google is: - A member of the smartphone app store duopoly - A member of the cloud compute big 3 - Nearly a pure monopoly in Internet search in Western countries - Has a higher office productivity software marketshare than Microsoft Office - Internet cable TV provider with the highest subscriber count I'd like to understand how it "hasn't been that amazing recently."
• nimish 2y ago
  Gelsinger did not entirely do what needed to be done: cut the fat, _encourage_ the lean -- rebuild the culture of growth that made Intel strong. Re-light the fire. Perhaps he wished us to identify the real culprits: the negligent board. Or, he DID do what was right -- take the brunt of the blame for the hard things, and set the stage for the next act. While gracefully giving a middle finger to the board. Let them eat their stock price they so desperately cling to as a talisman
  • tverbeure 2y ago
    Call me hopelessly naive, but other than hiring and firing the CEO, can a board really be blamed for a corporate culture and technical failings? Other than the CEO, I don't think I can name a board member of any company I've ever worked for and neither can I come up with an example about how they impacted the company.
    • markhahn 2y ago
      Intel's board certainly has a lot to do with things like acquisitions, whether the company goes into certain fields. Foundary is a good example: either it was a good idea (and Pat definitely got it going with EUV), or it's a bad idea (and the board's to blame for letting the company work in that direction years ago). It's pretty common for a board to trigger big restructurings - especially of firings, killing of product lines, divestiture.
    • DebtDeflation 2y ago
      All sorts of strategic decisions (M&A, new product direction, entry to new markets, significant financing events, vendor purchases above a certain $ threshold, even the hire of new executives above a certain level) require the CEO to get board approval.
    • nimish 2y ago
      > can a board really be blamed for a corporate culture and technical failings Who else is responsible for the DIRECTION of a company but the board of DIRECTORS?
• dehrmann 2y ago
  The money quote: > Intel needed a leader that could confront this cultural problem directly — who could work to undo an accretion of generations of entitlement — but if Gelsinger’s narrative for himself was any indicator, it felt like he would instead be feeding the company’s worst impulses about its own exceptionalism
  • rhelz 2y ago
    That's a very cheap shot. And highly inaccurate. Nobody working at Intel has thought they were entitled for a very long time.
    • adamc 2y ago
      The original article made a pretty good case for thinking Gelsinger's ego was a problem.
      • throwaway48476 2y ago
        I read it as he was trying to be the CEO intel needed in 2010, not 2024.
        • dehrmann 2y ago
          Leaders are always fighting the last war.
• ghaff 2y ago
  Knowing both Pat and Bryan pretty well professionally, I'm not sure what the right answer here was. I did a "scare them" presentation to the senior Intel sales force a long time ago but it was mostly about multi-core Opteron. (And, I suppose it's long enough ago now, to say that Pat told me Gates was basically afraid of Windows requiring multi-core performance.) Intel probably needed to get into GPUs (or other AI-enablement) seriously earlier but I'm not sure how predictable that was. I did tell AMD a long time ago to head off in directions Intel's inertia wouldn't let them. But so much is about execution. ADDED: And, yes, Pat was an Intel insider but I think he was still a pretty good choice for the job. Not sure who else I would go with.
  • MBCook 2y ago
    > Intel probably needed to get into GPUs (or other AI-enablement) seriously earlier but I'm not sure how predictable that was. You certainly couldn’t know AI was coming. But GPUs have been a thing since the 90s. And they only kept getting better. They were also the only thing other than CPUs that gamers would pay a high margin on. Nvidia and AMD both made plenty of money on them. Intel had it easy. They had the best fab and could’ve easily bundled things for system integrators, netting lots of sales. Instead they had no external GPU and the integrated one when they finally added it was a joke for a very long time. Their newest efforts sound like maybe they’re at least reasonable (though they don’t compete at the top end) but that’s like 15 years too late at least. I don’t know. Seems to me like it would be a pretty obvious money making venture for them, and if they had gotten over the nonsense of Larrabee/making it out of x86 seems like they should’ve been able to have a really good chunk of the market easily. The big win no one could’ve predicted is that if you had a good modern competitive GPU five years ago, then you were well positioned to pivot some for AI. At a minimum they would have a horse somewhere near the race.
    • lmm 2y ago
      In the old days gamers paid extra for sound cards etc., all these multimedia addons gradually got commoditised. I don't think it would've been a completely crazy bet to assume the same was going to happen to the GPU.
• black_13 2y ago
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• 0xcoffee 2y ago
  I find it interesting that the X2 chip they are using as Tofino's successor, made by Xsight. One of the investors of Xsight is Intel Capital. So seems Intel had a hedge against themselves.
  • subarctic 2y ago
    Maybe that was a reason to kill Tofino?
    • bcantrill 2y ago
      Ha, no definitely not. Intel Capital invests in lots of things, and doesn't throw its weight around like that at all.
      • sgerenser 2y ago
        Iirc Bryan mentioned that Intel capital also invested in Oxide itself, despite the fact that they’re using AMD cpus.
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  • defrost 2y ago
    > the total destruction of Emeryville, CA during the BLM riots of 2020. It was totally burnt to the ground. The entire 6 square kilomtres burnt to a crisp and no mention on the wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeryville,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeryville,_California The Emeryville Eye mentions a night of looting (probably opportunistic rather than planned by protest organizers) but doesn't mention any fires burning (a) building(s) to the ground.
• chambers 2y ago
  I think there's merit to the argument that Gelsinger was unwilling to kill the culture to save the business. Intel and he seemed trapped by pride, nostalgia, complacency, and fear. But some of the points feel a tad personal. I've found Pat and Bryan to be similar as professionals, so I'm not sure how much of this is a mote in one's eye, and a beam in the other's.
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  • wpm 2y ago
    Prove it.
• aurareturn 2y ago
  Here are Pat's public failings: * Can't win over AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom as fab customers * Fab cancellations and delays, wasting a ton of money * Not hiring the right people to steer Intel's internal fab culture to external quick enough * Not simplifying product roadmap. No one knows what the lake code names are. Expect 30% of roadmap to get cancelled. 30% get delayed. 30% switch node tech. Compare this to the simplified AMD roadmap, which is easy to understand and makes sense. * Didn't stop paying dividends until August 2024 * He cut fab funding to pay dividends in 2022 [0] * Didn't see that Intel was swimming naked during the covid boom and that after the boom, Intel would be in huge trouble due to inferior products * He hired 20% more workers since he joined but 54% less revenue * Intel still has more employees in 2024 than in 2019. Instead of trimming fat, he added more fat. Sure, Intel was on the decline no matter who stepped in as CEO in 2021. However, Pat definitely accelerated the decline and made a mess of things with little progress in any area. Gelsinger was a failure all around and it's time someone with no ties to the original decades-long Intel IDM strategy step into the role. Intel needs an outsider who can come in and objectively see the current situation - not the rosy glorious Intel of the past. [0]https://semianalysis.com/2022/07/29/intel-cuts-fab-buildout-by-4b-to/ https://semianalysis.com/2022/07/29/intel-cuts-fab-buildout-...
  • computerdork 2y ago
    Kind of disagree. Have read on forums that by all accounts, the tech in the 18A process is amazing (Gate-all-around transistors, backside power-delivery, 3d packaging tech...), and that they are on the path to catchup/pass TSMC in terms of chip-fabrication performance/power-expenditure in a year or two. Yeah, this is an amazing achievement for such a large company. But have also ready that to make this profitable is like a 5-8 year plan, not something that is profitable in 3. To me, this is his biggest mistake, he needed to keep the ship sailing at least somewhat smoothly while waiting for this big gamble to pay off. And eventhough I do agree with you that he made a lot of mistakes, still he got the the most important issue right, regaining manufacturing leadership.
    • newswasboring 2y ago
      I would love to see a source for you first paragraph.
• osnium123 2y ago
  Because Intel fired Gelsinger, I suspect that in 18 months, there will be no US based foundry doing advanced logic technology development. Maybe that’s better for the industry because all the money will be concentrated on one or two competently run foundries (TSMC and Samsung) but it’s unfortunate for Intel fab employees who have both ultra specialized skills and will be stigmatized for coming from a failed semiconductor manufacturer.
  • chickenbigmac 2y ago
    Could you explain stigma? I don't understand why skilled workers would be looked down upon for business decisions out of their hands, being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Aren't there smaller fabs that would appreciate their skills?
    • osnium123 2y ago
      I think the concern would be that Intel fab employees would bring bad habits with them which would ruin the effectiveness of smaller fabs.
    • osnium123 2y ago
      In addition smaller fabs tend to have broader/less specialized roles. For example an integration engineer at an analog fab would have much broader scope than their counterparts at Intel and thus the Intel engineers would/could struggle to adapt.
  • islewis 2y ago
    > Maybe that’s better for the industry because all the money will be concentrated on one or two competently run foundries How would this be better for the industry?
    • osnium123 2y ago
      You are paying for two TD teams rather than three TD teams so the costs are amortized better. It also means that employees are more likely to stick to one employer which leads to more preservation of knowledge, etc.
• martinpw 2y ago
  Articles like this are so easy to write after the event. It would be a lot more compelling of an article if it had been published a year ago and had instead predicted what was going to happen given what the author claimed was obvious at the time. Fact is Intel was in a really tough situation and Pat seemed to many (including many here) like the best candidate at the time to be able to turn things around, with the acknowledgement that the situation was dire and there might be nothing anyone could do to save it.
  • bcantrill 2y ago
    There are reasons I didn't write this a year ago (perhaps obvious ones?), but yes, it was pretty clear. And in fact, in going back through my own timeline, I found a DM between my co-founder and me on March 23, 2023 in which I predicted that Gelsinger would be fired on November 1, 2024 -- and my co-founder predicted March 1, 2025.
    • notthetup 2y ago
      And you didn't mention this in the tech predictions episode of 2023 for Oxide and Friends?! You missed a great one!
    • CodeHorizon 2y ago
      Claiming a prediction after the fact is convenient. It’d be more impressive if these predictions were shared beforehand, Bryan.
      • bcantrill 2y ago
        Sorry, are you accusing me of lying? I mean, I do have the receipts here...
        • trogdor 2y ago
          I don’t think they are accusing you of lying. >It’d be more impressive if these predictions were shared beforehand It’s hard to disagree with that. Based on your comment above, it sound like “the receipts” are messages between you and one other person. Messaging a prediction to a friend is very different than publishing it for the world to see.
• fsckboy 2y ago
  >the biggest mistakes in the last two decades at Intel (namely, its failures in mobile CPUs and discrete GPUs) the biggest mistake in the last two decades at Intel is coming in second on x86
• Upvoter33 2y ago
  I've been reading lots of hindsight-is-20/20 articles about Intel; add this one to the mix. Intel's real trouble, to me, was that x86 simply became less important in the world, and they had a hard time finding other things to do. Honestly, what has Intel done well that isn't x86?
  • wmf 2y ago
    I wonder if they would be fine if they admitted that they are the x86 company and canceled/divested everything else. The x86 market is large and Intel could have 90% of it.
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• 1123581321 2y ago
  The dividend elimination would have to have been agreed upon during the hiring of Gelsinger, when the board was selecting its strategy. I don’t think it was ever an option until it was seen as necessary.
• dog436zkj3p7 2y ago
  I liked Pat and I think he should've been given a longer leash, but I feel the commenters here have been looking at the situation through rose tinted lenses, probably because Pat's PR very effectively presented him as an engineer and not a bean counter. In reality, his tenure was filled with disasters and not much measureable upside: 1) while expected, the process node issues haven't been resolved. Instead Intel had to rely on TSMC to push out a semi-competive mobile platform. 18a and other processes have been delayed and 20a outright cancelled under the guise of rapid 18a progress (how rapid can the progress be, when 18a was just delayed again?). And this is just what we know externally, the board must have much better info anyway. A far cry from the promised "5 nodes in 4 years" and more than remeniscent of the situation in the decade+ before. 2) Pat single handedly directly harmed Intel's bottom line on almost day 1 by trash talking Taiwan and partner TSMC (which was supposed to be their lifeline to gain access to competitive process nodes) in a tactless attempt to attract US government support. This resulted in TSMC cancelling the massive ~40% wafer discount for Intel's chips. 3) in line with his Larabee lineage, Pat invested significant resources into Gaudi AI accelerators and Arc discrete GPUs. Both uncompetitive, released borderline unusable with pathetic software support and on the verge of cancellation from day 1, which killed what little enthusiasm they might attract. Even the much smaller (employee # wise) AMD has been able to push out serviceable AI/GPU software and competitive DC cards for training and has been riding the AI wave on Nvidia's coattails; Intel just looks completely lost. 4) arrow lake, released years into his tenure, is characteristaly delayed, overpriced and uncompetitive. Software issues pushed the needle for the launch towards disaster. 5) raptor lake instability/degradation scandal and months long lies and embarrassing messaging from Intel's side making people literally avoid buying Intel CPUs 6) Epyc Turin just annihilated the most recent Xeon gen, making Intel further uncompetitive for DC/HPC on the CPU side for at least another year, but probably more. 7) lack of any timely decisive and proactive moves which Intel desperately needs. I can't identify a single area where Pat pushed hard and fought against the inertia. He might've been more honest about Intel's financial woes (through his unnecessary constant presence on business news channels), but if the situation was so bad, why did he do nothing but complain? Why did it take so long for him to cut the dividend or lay people off? If he cut the dividend on day 1 and made Arc his Manhattan project, he would be much more palatable, even if the project missed the AI wave. Instead, he seemed to spend time clamoring for political attention while projecting the exact image of Intel in 2010s: excuses, delays, and underwhelming products. In totality, whatever Pat's been doing hasn't resulted in any real, tangible results. If anything, Intel's disasters have accelerated in frequency and scale under his helm and they've been losing ground at an accelerated rate everywhere, possible unrecoverably (mobile, graphics, desktop, DC/HPC). Of course, turning Intel around is a massive undertaking and as always, there have been glimpses of promise and innovation. But it doesn't feel fair to cherry pick the rare positives from the sea of negatives and assign them to Pat. Still, it's completely possible that the results of his work were just not seen yet and he should've been given more time - at this point, we'll never know.
• aaron695 2y ago
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• ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard- working, and decent. In this interview, Gelsinger is asked to describe the difference of a CPU and a GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK72E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK72E His answer is that the CPU is capable of doing general computing, while a GPU is made for very specific tasks. Is that in line with being technically sharp? To me, this answer seems to miss the mark.
  • MobiusHorizons 2y ago
    I think the quote [1] is technically on point: > A GPU is really built for a very specific class of workloads. Generally those have been called thoughput workloads. So it does lots of floating point processing and matrix operations. So it's very dedicated for things like graphics, matrix, and now has worked out to be uniquely good at things like AI. This is all very true. He does seem to underplay the usefulness of GPU in HPC style workloads, but that is inferable from the throughput and floating point and matrix. [1]: https://youtu.be/d07wy5AK72E?si=XfjMotKH5xf0ti9m&t=35 https://youtu.be/d07wy5AK72E?si=XfjMotKH5xf0ti9m&t=35
    • ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
      Parallelizable workloads are going to be the vast majority of computational workloads in the future. Therefore, calling them a "very specific class of workloads" misses the mark in my opinion.
      • MobiusHorizons 2y ago
        Unless you are talking about ai workloads I would absolutely not agree. GPU style compute is throughput optimized to the point that makes it nearly useless for latency sensitive compute except in very narrow cases like graphics that can be made embarrassingly parallel. But you could never run an os scheduler or a file server or a database on a gpu with anything like competitive performance. The memory latency and branch penalty are just too high for anything where the sequence of operations isn’t highly predictable and repeated for a large number of items. Something as simple as searching for an item in a data structure is hard to do efficiently on a gpu. Basically anything with an if statement that depends on data is going to be incredibly slow compared to a cpu.
• andrewstuart 2y ago
  The constant Bible quotes on Twitter in his official capacity as Intel CEO was a little jarring.
  • throwaway48476 2y ago
    I don't care for it but at least it's something besides an empty suit.
• ot 2y ago
  Arrogance being one of the main criticisms in the article is a little ironic, coming from bcantrill.
  • sgt 2y ago
    I think you're confusing arrogance with confidence. Directness and openness paired with underlying respect for others can reflect confidence, not arrogance. Tackling difficult conversations or addressing challenges head on may be seen as "close to arrogance" but they are in fact a net positive for everyone.
  • depr 2y ago
    As a long-time watcher and enjoyer of his presentations, he has a long history of building (often) superior products to the mainstream alternatives, and passionately explaining why they are superior. The alternatives still end up being more popular, and there is no denying that there's sometimes an air of "those fools with their eBPF, while we have dtrace/ZFS/zones/etc" which toes the line of arrogance. I think it's pretty hard to have a career where you are constantly involved with software that is better technically, and have worse alternatives constantly "winning", and not be a little arrogant sometimes.
  • justin66 2y ago
    He described his response to watching a video where Gelsinger behaved as if his own work at Intel consisted of interesting successes and the company's failings were due to other people. What's ahem ironic about okay I'm just going to stop
    • bcantrill 2y ago
      Definitely not a totally unfair criticism (though do keep in mind that I was not at an executive at Sun, whereas Gelsinger was Intel's CTO), but I did try to be forgiving of that as confidence. It was his line about NVIDIA that I felt to (well) over the line. You certainly won't find me saying that "AWS would be a fraction of its size if Oracle hadn't cancelled Sun's cloud initiative" or whatever the equivalent might be.
• openrisk 2y ago
  One can get lost in details about characters, corporate cultures and malfunction. The very big picture seems to be that the company that for decades defined what computing looks like could not cope with the end of the exponential era that it embodied. After the fact even outsiders know that in the post-exponential era there are two games in town: fiddling at the high end with complex to build and code parallel/vector units and similarly fiddling at the low end with very low-power units for ubiquitous mobile, iot etc. These bifurcations were no secrets or sudden events, but had long and observable incubation. Missing both those megatrends when you are the superpower at the very center of the industry seems (on the surface) like remarkable incompetence but that is maybe too easy. The high-end is particularly intriguing because Nvidia'approach feels more like a monster created by Intel's failure to deliver what the world needs than the optimal design for high-end computing. Understanding the deep causes of this falling from grace would invaluable for those wondering what the dizzying technology ride has in store for us.
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• skirge 2y ago
  "I want to be rich" culture. Which worked very well for years.
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• hunglee2 2y ago
  Gelsinger was the right guy, who even made the right calls. Setting Intel up as a rival to TSMC was the right idea - the issue was failure of the CHIPS Act to release expected funding combined with Raimondo's constantly changing export controls. This starved Intel of cash from funding which didn't arrive, whilst at the same time killing Intel's China business, which was 30%+ of Intel's revenue. Gelsinger's main mistake to was overestimate US Govt ability to conduct effective industrial policy. But he was right to roll the dice on it
• tippytippytango 2y ago
  What is in Intel’s culture, vision and values that is needed in the current marketplace? What is unique and valuable about their perspective that no one else can provide?
• ksec 2y ago
  Even though I respect Bryan Cantrill a lot. It is interesting in that I found myself disagreeing with almost all things said in the post. May be some should read my previous rant on Andy Bryant and Intel's board as well as Investors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42334697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42334697 >Gelsinger’s narrative of his time at Intel seemingly just went from strength to strength. Worse, in his own story, the bad things at Intel always seemed to happen when he wasn’t in the room or otherwise over his objections — and the good things always when he was called in to save an effort from failure. People may read this as arrogance. Except time and time again it was proven to be true. It wasn't his own subjective version of history. It is quite literally proven with time that he was the only one fighting inside Intel against most of Intel's strategic decision. He was battle tested and also the reason why he left ( or forced out ) because the board and then CEO disagree with most of his direction. >with no mention of Intel’s gross architectural missteps with respect to 64-bit that allowed (and even demanded!) AMD Opteron in the first place. And he was the one who disagree with Itanium but it was done by different team, different vision, different needs, mostly because the board and CEO wanted to conquer the so call "Enterprise" market. And Guess who was put in charge later to pick up the mess. Oh he said it already. >how could Intel expect outsiders to trust them to learn from their mistakes if it wouldn’t even publicly acknowledge what those mistakes were? Surprisingly they actually did but media wouldn't even cover it. Bob Swan publicly stated "all" the problem over the years. Including Capex issues which I have been banging on about since 2015 and may be part of the reason why I got death threats from Intel Fan Boys ( Apart from TSMC over taking Intel ). Bob actually did a great job layering the foundation for Pat. >And this gets to Gelsinger’s first real, unequivocal mistake: he didn’t eliminate Intel’s dividend. I am not alone in this view; Ben Thompson of Stratechery too. He wasn't allowed to. That was the board's decision. He has hinted numerous time this is war time and he wanted to cut the dividends. Again blame the board and investors. And Pat is exactly "THE" War Time CEO we are all looking for. There is no better Commander in Chief to lead the war for Intel. Except the Senate and politicians or who ever at Rome would not agree on the budget or how desperate the scenario is. How you expect to win a battle when your reinforcement is constantly cut and half of your battle is with Rome / Intel itself. > the newly-christened Intel Foundry Services (IFS) This is actually second or arguably in my view third time Intel tried with their Foundry services. Which makes this even worst because they learned absolutely nothing from the first two failure. Yes, in many cases failure doesn't necessary turned into experience without the proper leader or manager turning it into lessons. >the culture at Intel didn’t really seem amenable to the level of customer engagement that foundry customers (rightfully) expect. They improved a lot this time around. It isn't perfect. But out of the two ( or three ) time Intel did only this time around they are actually doing something and learning. Remember the amount of crap SemiAccurate said certain Teleco equipment provider will go bankrupt because Intel couldn't deliver their 10nm ( or was it 14nm ) Foundry. 5 node in 4 years? That plan ends with 18A and they have been executing on the first 4. Even as someone who trust Pat a lot since the early days of Intel I thought that was too much to pull off, given the current intel situation and still having to play with the board. But he did. For Fuck Sake, he did it. Up to the first 4 node and we are not far from the final. 18A is already in customer's hand and Intel is working their ass off to prove the world wrong. Amazon and Microsoft are already on it. And yes it will likely be producing Hyperscaler CPU on ARM rather than x86 but so what. The Foundry needs volume to win. >but Intel promptly turned around and introduced the Pentium-M line Do we need to mention who was behind Pentium-M? >Similarly, is Intel assuming that TSMC is unable to build fabs in the US or that the US government wouldn’t see such fabs as addressing geopolitical concerns? The whole point isn't not allowing TSMC to built fab in US. The point is "Leading Edge Node" in US soil. And with TSMC that isn't and wont ever happen. Not due to politics but other logistics, operation and economics issues. If US government ever want Leading Edge Node on US Soil, not just the Fab but the actual Technology know-how as well, they will need to hand out money. Would it not be better to hand it out to Intel rather than TSMC? >Tofino was clearly living on borrowed time, and we were disappointed I dont know much about Tofino. But Pat cutting off everything other than x86 CPU, Foundry investment and ( perhaps ) GPU is definitely the right move. And perhaps the only move for Intel. Pat was the right CEO, and perhaps the only CEO who could save Intel. My only question is how could I set a motion to fire everyone on the board and sue all the Funds handing out Board Membership like some Gala tickets. Edit: I just want to add another thing. People often ask why certain company, organisation or parties can survived as long as they are given as how much crap everything goes inside. You will almost always certainly find someone making an heroic effort fire fighting everything every time shit hits the fan and he is very successful with it. More often than not his services is taken for granted. And isn't often appreciated enough. I have seen this across many different companies in different industries. And it is why the Entrepreneurial spirits is alive and well. There is still insane amount of inefficiency in the world that is up for many to explore and grab.
• arunc 2y ago
  > Worse, in his own story, the bad things at Intel always seemed to happen when he wasn’t in the room or otherwise over his objections — and the good things always when he was called in to save an effort from failure. Sounds like spoken by my current boss. During a 1on1, he took up the topic of me apologizing to the team for something I overlooked. He said, in his exact words, "when things go wrong, a smart leader should blame their team and when things are in their favor they should take credit for that. That's how you grow as a leader in organization, in this corporate ladder. You should learn. Long way to go". I was like, "no way he said that!". I trusted the wrong person and joined this organization! (Sorry about the rant)
  • atoav 2y ago
    These words should follow that guy like a curse.
    • blitzar 2y ago
      They should - but they are more likely to be the byeline in their best selling biography charting their meteoric rise to the top.
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• andy_ppp 2y ago
  In the end fabs work because of certain experts who know thousands of little tricks to make processes work. If I was Intel hiring the right people from TSMC would be the first thing I’d look into to get 18A back on track. I’m sure Intel can find the right people and pay them enough to move to Arizona.
• InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  I have no idea if Gelsinger was right for Intel. What I do know is that it took Lisa Su, one of the most effective CEOs of any major companies today, ten years to turn around AMD. Unless there were some really obvious internal signs of trouble that we are not aware of, kicking him out after just four years seems like a bad idea.
• Insanity 2y ago
  People seem super divided on Pat. I read both very strong “he is right for intel” to “he fcked up intel”. I don’t know enough about CEOs and the corporate workings of Intel, or their product line (looong time AMD user). But what I guess is telling is that a few years ago gaming PCs started talking about AMD builds.. with even AMD GPUs. Intel didn’t have a competing GPU so I wonder if they were hurt by this. I’m guessing prebuilts would get a good deal if they went fully AMD vs a hybrid system. Anyway, there is probably a ton of problems deep down that I am oblivious to - a single misstep doesn’t ruin a company as old as Intel… . :)
• sheepscreek 2y ago
  As an engineer and a longtime Intel shareholder, I can tell you that I cheered for Pat. Unfortunately, the situation demands urgency because of how well the competition is performing. The scope for mishaps and missteps is greatly diminished. They can’t afford to make any mistakes like they did with the 14th gen CPUs. The GPU rollout has been too slow and their ability to compete with Nvidia for AI training/inference is mostly non-existent. They have been outcompeted and outclassed by Nvidia and AMD who don’t own fabs but are eating Intel’s lunch. On top of that, now they’ll have to also compete with Amazon that is developing very compelling for AI and CPU server alternatives. Apple has already cut them out completely from the CPU side, and is now looking to build their own cellular modems - replacing Intel and Qualcomm ones in their devices. Both retail and corporate customers are confused about their value proposition in this market. I don’t know what Intel needs, but it isn’t Pat or we would felt the sentiment change and improve, but it hasn’t.
• nsteel 2y ago
  I don't want to be harsh but suppliers killing the product you're trying to build around isn't that unusual. It's horrible, and you should 100% stop working with them next time, but it happens. I'm really not surprised they killed Tofino. It's a cool architecture but I don't think there's an interesting market for Intel here, at this time. And if we remove the Tofino stuff from this article, is there much left...? I don't think killing Tofino is particularly relevant to Gelsinger being "wrong" or "right" for Intel.
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• throwaway48476 2y ago
  Intel underinvested and made the wromg investments for years. (x86 phones, optane etc). Global foundries tapped out of competing at 7nm because it was too capital intensive. Pat knew that to compete would take hundreds of billions with a payoff years away. That's just the way the industry is but they didn't give him enough time. Intel under pat didn't take seriously the threats either and acted like a big company instead of a scrappy startup. They didn't fight for the customer and deliver value. Notable examples are feature locked CPU's and SRIOV disabled GPUs and low VRAM.
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• lvl155 2y ago
  US agencies should allow AMD to bid on Intel at this point. I actually think the combo would benefit US security interests.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  What I think happened is that the big investors gave Pat some years, and maybe extended for once, but he didn't manage to turn the ship around (i.e. making enough $$). I think the next step is to figure out if there is a buyer or a group of buyers. Intel might have a future if we are not living in the late Capitalism, but realistically it's better to break it down and send the engineers to other companies that can better take care of them. I think that was the thought of the big investors. People might blame the board but essentially they can't fight the investors.
• KoolKat23 2y ago
  https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1865783256551133472 https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1865783256551133472 A very interesting but strange tweet. In some ways I think it says a lot, in others perhaps not.
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• vismit2000 2y ago
  A broader take: https://finshots.in/archive/are-ceos-always-to-blame-for-a-companys-struggles/ https://finshots.in/archive/are-ceos-always-to-blame-for-a-c...
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