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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 i

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
    "Jensen Huang, the 61-year-old co-founder and CEO of Nvidia" ... There's a hint in there somewhere. How do you get a CEO to believe innovation is the best thing for them and the company? Even if you get them to believe that how do they get their company to innovate? Innovation is hard work. It involves failures. Just buy back your shares and make money. Then someone else comes and eats your lunch. That is how the world works.
  - markhahn 2y ago
    nvidia's success has nothing to do with bean counters - if nvidia even has them. bean counters are for industries like beans - where the market is stable and the only way to liberate shareholder value is to catch the stray beans. they are exactly the wrong answer when "disruptive innovation" is afoot.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Stagnant industries are stagnant because no participant can conceptualize anything different not because it's not possible.
    - tharkun__ 2y ago
      I should clearly mark my rhetorical questions better, lol! Yes that was my point. Take my upvote tho!
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.

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
  "Jensen Huang, the 61-year-old co-founder and CEO of Nvidia" ... There's a hint in there somewhere. How do you get a CEO to believe innovation is the best thing for them and the company? Even if you get them to believe that how do they get their company to innovate? Innovation is hard work. It involves failures. Just buy back your shares and make money. Then someone else comes and eats your lunch. That is how the world works.
- markhahn 2y ago
  nvidia's success has nothing to do with bean counters - if nvidia even has them. bean counters are for industries like beans - where the market is stable and the only way to liberate shareholder value is to catch the stray beans. they are exactly the wrong answer when "disruptive innovation" is afoot.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Stagnant industries are stagnant because no participant can conceptualize anything different not because it's not possible.
  - tharkun__ 2y ago
    I should clearly mark my rhetorical questions better, lol! Yes that was my point. Take my upvote tho!

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.