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2 days late, but my 2 cents: > Can't win over AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom as fab customers Not surprising, and arguably not to be expected. His 5 nodes in 4

2 days late, but my 2 cents: > Can't win over AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom as fab customers Not surprising, and arguably not to be expected. His 5 nodes in 4 years plan ends in 2025, and only then is the fab "good enough" for external customers. Specifically, they want to see how well Intel's own product on 18A performs before committing. So the real test is in 2025-2026. > Fab cancellations and delays, wasting a ton of money The cancellations and delays are on the expanded fab roadmap that he introduced. Compared to before he joined, the fabs are in a much better place. Essentially, this is complaining that he committed to opening 5 new fabs and only opened 3 (or whatever the number is). > Not hiring the right people to steer Intel's internal fab culture to external quick enough Perhaps. 5 nodes in 4 years, which Intel may actually achieve, is unprecedented, though. No other company has done it (and likely never will again - it's crazy expensive). So at least as far as execution goes, the fab is in much better shape than when he joined. > Not simplifying product roadmap. Definitely agree. > Didn't stop paying dividends until August 2024 They cut them significantly in early 2023. Yes, they should have done it all earlier, but keep in mind that the board needs to approve it. Or at least, not fire him for doing it. On the plus, he did stop stock buybacks almost immediately after joining. > 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 I'm sure he knew the products were inferior. What his failure was is to see that the overall PC market would drop significantly. As an example, in one year it dropped globally 25%. Intel's share dropped 33%, with AMD picking up the remaining 8%. That extra 8% for AMD was something like a 30-50% increase in sales. > He hired 20% more workers since he joined but 54% less revenue Totally agreed. What's worse, after the 5% cuts in 2022, Intel was back at the same headcount before the current layoffs. How do you lay off 5% of the company, claiming you need to save money and in 18 months grown the company to the same level? If you want to see his positives, look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42336143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42336143

aurareturn 2y ago
Reasonable takes. I think the employee count blowup was his biggest mistake because it shortened Intel's runway towards being an external fab company. Lip Bu Tan, who was on the Intel board, recently resigned because he did not agree with Pat's employee count plan and company culture. Tan was likely right. Specifically, they want to see how well Intel's own product on 18A performs before committing. So the real test is in 2025-2026. Another mistake of Pat's is that he did not split the company fully. AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm aren't voluntarily going to fund a competitor by using Intel fabs. Furthermore, Intel not splitting means there will always be small conflicts of interests with Intel designs teams. Pat wanted the cake and eat it too. He wanted to compete with TSMC in addition to Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Qualcomm. Now Intel is at risk with competing against neither group. I think not having any major external customer signed onto 18A in 2024, approaching 2025, is a huge failure on Pat's part.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > I think the employee count blowup was his biggest mistake because it shortened Intel's runway towards being an external fab company. It was a mistake, but in terms of runway, would not have made a large difference. The capital costs of running a fab dwarf the cost to pay salaries. That's why they still do fabs in the US - outsourcing to another country doesn't save much money. > Another mistake of Pat's is that he did not split the company fully. I don't know that anyone knows what his plans were on this. Internally within the company (and perhaps externally), he was clear on a few things: - If Foundry cannot become profitable, he'll shut the fabs down and kill Foundry altogether. - The Products side will be charged market rates, and they can choose if they want to use Intel's fabs or TSMC - If an external company is willing to pay more than Intel Products, they'll prioritize the external company. So he was trying to set it up so that it was effectively two separate companies. I guess it was either harder than expected, or there was significant pushback. When he joined, the two sides were heavily intertwined. His goal for 2023 was to get things separated enough so we could get separate P&L statements for Foundry and Products. He achieved it - but I don't know if it could have been done quicker. The other (obvious) reason he didn't want to break the company up: Intel Foundry is unprofitable. They need the revenue that the Products brings in to keep it alive. The goal was to hit profitability in 2027-2028, when there are enough customers. Splitting it up now will kill Foundry altogether (and now with the CHIPS act, they are not allowed to kill Foundry). As for the concern about funding competition - not sure how much that is true. The vast majority of TSMC's customers (including AMD) do not want to use the leading edge node. It's more expensive, and has higher quality problems. They are happy to let Apple take it. Likewise, the narrative was that most of these companies will prefer not using Intel's latest node, and would be happy to let Intel use that capacity. So I think the plan was to make 18A mature, move to 14, and then external customers will use the mature 18A node.

aurareturn 2y ago

Reasonable takes. I think the employee count blowup was his biggest mistake because it shortened Intel's runway towards being an external fab company. Lip Bu Tan, who was on the Intel board, recently resigned because he did not agree with Pat's employee count plan and company culture. Tan was likely right. Specifically, they want to see how well Intel's own product on 18A performs before committing. So the real test is in 2025-2026. Another mistake of Pat's is that he did not split the company fully. AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm aren't voluntarily going to fund a competitor by using Intel fabs. Furthermore, Intel not splitting means there will always be small conflicts of interests with Intel designs teams. Pat wanted the cake and eat it too. He wanted to compete with TSMC in addition to Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Qualcomm. Now Intel is at risk with competing against neither group. I think not having any major external customer signed onto 18A in 2024, approaching 2025, is a huge failure on Pat's part.

BeetleB 2y ago
> I think the employee count blowup was his biggest mistake because it shortened Intel's runway towards being an external fab company. It was a mistake, but in terms of runway, would not have made a large difference. The capital costs of running a fab dwarf the cost to pay salaries. That's why they still do fabs in the US - outsourcing to another country doesn't save much money. > Another mistake of Pat's is that he did not split the company fully. I don't know that anyone knows what his plans were on this. Internally within the company (and perhaps externally), he was clear on a few things: - If Foundry cannot become profitable, he'll shut the fabs down and kill Foundry altogether. - The Products side will be charged market rates, and they can choose if they want to use Intel's fabs or TSMC - If an external company is willing to pay more than Intel Products, they'll prioritize the external company. So he was trying to set it up so that it was effectively two separate companies. I guess it was either harder than expected, or there was significant pushback. When he joined, the two sides were heavily intertwined. His goal for 2023 was to get things separated enough so we could get separate P&L statements for Foundry and Products. He achieved it - but I don't know if it could have been done quicker. The other (obvious) reason he didn't want to break the company up: Intel Foundry is unprofitable. They need the revenue that the Products brings in to keep it alive. The goal was to hit profitability in 2027-2028, when there are enough customers. Splitting it up now will kill Foundry altogether (and now with the CHIPS act, they are not allowed to kill Foundry). As for the concern about funding competition - not sure how much that is true. The vast majority of TSMC's customers (including AMD) do not want to use the leading edge node. It's more expensive, and has higher quality problems. They are happy to let Apple take it. Likewise, the narrative was that most of these companies will prefer not using Intel's latest node, and would be happy to let Intel use that capacity. So I think the plan was to make 18A mature, move to 14, and then external customers will use the mature 18A node.