6 ms·

An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

109 points by zdw 6mo ago

jmyeet 6mo ago
Intel really needs to be studied for how it's spiralled into a possibly terminal state of dysfunction. EPIC was Intel's first big folly that I remember and it almost killed the company. Years late, too expensive, motivated by Intel's desires rather than customer needs, software would've required significant rewrites at every level. The Gigahertz race (culminating in the Pentium 4) was near-fatal to AMD but then near-fatal to Intel and they only recovered because somebody went back to the Pentium 3 and bolted on AMD's x86_64 extensions. Still, for half a decade Athlon/Opteron were a huge problem for Intel.. But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork. Many (including myself) thought Pat's appointment was a good sign for Intel, being an engineer. From the outside it seemed like Intel was organizationally broken, having descended into fiefdoms that didn't communicate let alone cooperate. So this conversation is largely about what Pat's doing now rather than what happened at Intel. He's previously pointed the finger at Wall Street "short-termism" [1], for example. It's interesting that they talk about the relationship with the current administration being positive and receiving funding from the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was passed in 2022. But if we're looking ahead here, I'm a little disappointed China was only mentioned once at that was just with building solar capacity. I'm sorry but if you're in the chip space and not thinking about what China is doing, I don't know what you're doing. China has been restricted by the US from buying the best chips and buying the latest lithography technology. So they're making their own and it's happening way faster than I think many of these industry types are telling you it will happen. A few years from now when China produces EUV chips, I guarantee you'll read news articles about how this came out of nowhere and nobody expected it. [1]: https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-america-losing-the-chip-race/ https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-ame...
- rayiner 6mo ago
  > But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork. I'd love to see a post-mortem. Intel's 14nm came out with Broadwell in 2014, and it was their desktop/server node for seven years, until Alder Lake in 2021. But they got stuck on the micro-arch as well. They shipped what was essentially the same Skylake core for five years from 2015 to 2020.
IanCutress 6mo ago
Youtube version, with pushup contest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauujHpNpXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauujHpNpXY
- leosanchez 6mo ago
  For anyone reading. Gelsinger won the contest. He took ~42 pushups.
throwaway498213 6mo ago
[dead]
voxadam 6mo ago
I'm surprised that his fascination with "Christian AI" and the end of the world didn't come up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740664
- fooker 6mo ago
  Speaking of that, Anthropic is getting priests to try and teach Claude ethics https://observer.com/2026/03/the-catholic-priest-who-helped-write-anthropics-ai-ethics-code/
  - voxadam 6mo ago
    Who's going to teach the Catholic priests ethics?
    - fooker 6mo ago
      Claude :)
      - voxadam 6mo ago
        Circular ethics, how appropriate for an industry fueled by circular financing.
    - Xenoamorphous 6mo ago
      Grok.
  - huijzer 6mo ago
    What a joke. Anthropic could just train a few more times on the Bible. Matthew 22:36-40 (emphasis mine), "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Note the "as thyself" part. This part counters people who want to interpret "love" as "romantic love". Unfortunately, Catholic priests and many (fake?) Christians seem to not care about the "as thyself" part.
wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago
I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff from official Intel accounts.
- KK7NIL 6mo ago
  Source? I've only seen him post religious stuff on his personal social media.
  - wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago
    If you are the CEO of Intel then posting from your personal account is the same thing - you are the CEO - it's not private. This is just scratching the surface - his religious posts went on and on and on whilst he was Intel CEO. https://gizmodo.com/things-are-so-bad-at-intel-that-the-boss-is-posting-bible-verses-2000483248 https://gizmodo.com/things-are-so-bad-at-intel-that-the-boss... https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing-tough-time-ceo-is-now-quoting-bible-on-twitter-2577045-2024-08-05 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing... https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1hb1imh/former_intel_ceo_pat_gelsinger_calls_for_prayer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1hb1imh/former_intel... https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1891069258953576711 https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1891069258953576711 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1820503612591919375 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1820503612591919375 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1701081984943227367 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1701081984943227367 https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1820129317122080977 https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1820129317122080977
    - mort96 6mo ago
      This looks like a motte-and-bailey. Your original comment, the bailey: "he posted much religious stuff from official Intel accounts". This comment, the motte: "he posted much religious stuff". You could've just said, "I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff while CEO". That would've been a very defensible position. You didn't need the false part of posting from official Intel accounts. Or, if it was an honest mistake, you should've written something along the lines of: "Sorry, I misremembered, it was his personal accounts. But when you're a CEO, I don't think the distinction matters much; anything you post will be read as 'Intel's CEO says'".
Rahulghoti 6mo ago
[flagged]
scrlk 6mo ago
Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion. "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert Palmer, former DEC CEO)
- melling 6mo ago
  Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy. Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.
  - m132 6mo ago
    Was it Pat or Brian? If I recall correctly, it was under Brian when Intel had one of its worst periods of stagnation, when the 10 nm process all the bets were on turned out to be a non-starter, and when Meltdown and Spectre erupted. It's easy to overlook this because Intel had fairly no competition around then, but that doesn't mean the company was in a good shape. I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was chosen to clean up the mess when the whole place was already up in smoke and the smell was only starting to leak out. I liked his strategy, was disappointed to see him booted out.
    - osnium123 6mo ago
      BK really destroyed the company and Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision. Pat was the visionary who saw the value of the fabs but it took a long time to turn things around.
      - ksec 6mo ago
        >Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision Let's be fair to Bob, he has the vision, but dont know how to execute it because he lacks the technical knowledge. He was also the one who finally settled the argument I had for 5 years, if Intel were to made 250M Modem for Apple, where is the additional Capex for capacity expansion on their Fabs. The answer, only to be told by Bob in a 2020 interview was they never really planned for it.
818828383 6mo ago
[flagged]
- cindyllm 6mo ago
  [dead]
Zigurd 6mo ago
I got to meet several of Intel senior management when Andy Grove was CEO, Gelsinger was CTO, and Avram Miller was CFO and a pioneer in corporate VC. Even somebody universally acclaimed as smart and hard-working as Lip-Bu Tan will find it impossible to capture the magic of a team like that. Intel's current CEO was hired to explicitly not try to recapture that magic. The board thought Gelsinger's approach of do all the things was reckless. He was hired to take fewer risks, at the cost of putting a restoration of Intel's position in technology out of reach.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  You probably met Intel management when they were booming in the old days. LBT was hired to replace Pat because the board needed someone who didn't have the rose colored glasses that old Intel management had and actually see Intel what it is today: losing in everything. When LBT took over, Intel was on a path to bankruptcy. Although Pat wasn't solely responsible, he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy. Intel over the last 15 years missed the following booms: * Mobile boom * Missed on chiplets and allowed AMD to take the lead * Missed on EUV transition * Crypto mining boom * AI chips boom (A huge reason was Pat Gelsinger backed Larrabee, an x86 GPU, and failed to compete against Nvidia) * Missed storage boom by selling SSD/3D NAND division * Missing local LLM boom by not having an Apple Silicon, Strix Halo competitor * Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago Basically, if they reversed all their decisions in the last 15 years and invested wisely, they'd likely be worth 10x more today.
  - ksec 6mo ago
    > he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy. So currently the IFS has a few potential customers was because of LBT and not Pat? >* Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago Reckless in finance but also missing the Fab boom?
    - aurareturn 6mo ago
      IFS now doesn’t have a major customer but it seems like companies are at least taking them seriously now. LBT doesn’t have the same arrogance that Pat had when it comes to courting external customers. Yes, they over invested at the wrong time, cancelled fabs or delayed them. Had they saw the AI boom coming in 2023, he wouldn’t have cancelled.
shrubble 6mo ago
I always felt like they weren't properly paranoid in their decisions. For instance, when the AI boom was heating up and they were shipping the ARC GPUs, they could have taken some business simply by making a 48GB or 64GB VRAM version. There are some that are saying Panther Lake is a great CPU for laptops; will be a vindication of his 14A efforts if so.
BobbyTables2 6mo ago
I think every CEO should have the experience of posting a technical question to their company’s forums. Intel makes Broadcom start to look good.
johannschulz 6mo ago
[dead]

109 points by zdw 6mo ago

Intel really needs to be studied for how it's spiralled into a possibly terminal state of dysfunction. EPIC was Intel's first big folly that I remember and it almost killed the company. Years late, too expensive, motivated by Intel's desires rather than customer needs, software would've required significant rewrites at every level. The Gigahertz race (culminating in the Pentium 4) was near-fatal to AMD but then near-fatal to Intel and they only recovered because somebody went back to the Pentium 3 and bolted on AMD's x86_64 extensions. Still, for half a decade Athlon/Opteron were a huge problem for Intel.. But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork. Many (including myself) thought Pat's appointment was a good sign for Intel, being an engineer. From the outside it seemed like Intel was organizationally broken, having descended into fiefdoms that didn't communicate let alone cooperate. So this conversation is largely about what Pat's doing now rather than what happened at Intel. He's previously pointed the finger at Wall Street "short-termism" [1], for example. It's interesting that they talk about the relationship with the current administration being positive and receiving funding from the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was passed in 2022. But if we're looking ahead here, I'm a little disappointed China was only mentioned once at that was just with building solar capacity. I'm sorry but if you're in the chip space and not thinking about what China is doing, I don't know what you're doing. China has been restricted by the US from buying the best chips and buying the latest lithography technology. So they're making their own and it's happening way faster than I think many of these industry types are telling you it will happen. A few years from now when China produces EUV chips, I guarantee you'll read news articles about how this came out of nowhere and nobody expected it. [1]: https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-america-losing-the-chip-race/ https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-ame...

rayiner 6mo ago
> But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork. I'd love to see a post-mortem. Intel's 14nm came out with Broadwell in 2014, and it was their desktop/server node for seven years, until Alder Lake in 2021. But they got stuck on the micro-arch as well. They shipped what was essentially the same Skylake core for five years from 2015 to 2020.

IanCutress 6mo ago

Youtube version, with pushup contest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauujHpNpXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauujHpNpXY

leosanchez 6mo ago
For anyone reading. Gelsinger won the contest. He took ~42 pushups.

throwaway498213 6mo ago

[dead]

voxadam 6mo ago

I'm surprised that his fascination with "Christian AI" and the end of the world didn't come up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740664

fooker 6mo ago
Speaking of that, Anthropic is getting priests to try and teach Claude ethics https://observer.com/2026/03/the-catholic-priest-who-helped-write-anthropics-ai-ethics-code/
- voxadam 6mo ago
  Who's going to teach the Catholic priests ethics?
  - fooker 6mo ago
    Claude :)
    - voxadam 6mo ago
      Circular ethics, how appropriate for an industry fueled by circular financing.
  - Xenoamorphous 6mo ago
    Grok.
- huijzer 6mo ago
  What a joke. Anthropic could just train a few more times on the Bible. Matthew 22:36-40 (emphasis mine), "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Note the "as thyself" part. This part counters people who want to interpret "love" as "romantic love". Unfortunately, Catholic priests and many (fake?) Christians seem to not care about the "as thyself" part.

wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago

I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff from official Intel accounts.

KK7NIL 6mo ago
Source? I've only seen him post religious stuff on his personal social media.
- wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago
  If you are the CEO of Intel then posting from your personal account is the same thing - you are the CEO - it's not private. This is just scratching the surface - his religious posts went on and on and on whilst he was Intel CEO. https://gizmodo.com/things-are-so-bad-at-intel-that-the-boss-is-posting-bible-verses-2000483248 https://gizmodo.com/things-are-so-bad-at-intel-that-the-boss... https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing-tough-time-ceo-is-now-quoting-bible-on-twitter-2577045-2024-08-05 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing... https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1hb1imh/former_intel_ceo_pat_gelsinger_calls_for_prayer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1hb1imh/former_intel... https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1891069258953576711 https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1891069258953576711 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1820503612591919375 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1820503612591919375 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1701081984943227367 https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1701081984943227367 https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1820129317122080977 https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1820129317122080977
  - mort96 6mo ago
    This looks like a motte-and-bailey. Your original comment, the bailey: "he posted much religious stuff from official Intel accounts". This comment, the motte: "he posted much religious stuff". You could've just said, "I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff while CEO". That would've been a very defensible position. You didn't need the false part of posting from official Intel accounts. Or, if it was an honest mistake, you should've written something along the lines of: "Sorry, I misremembered, it was his personal accounts. But when you're a CEO, I don't think the distinction matters much; anything you post will be read as 'Intel's CEO says'".

Rahulghoti 6mo ago

[flagged]

scrlk 6mo ago

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion. "Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert Palmer, former DEC CEO)

melling 6mo ago
Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy. Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.
- m132 6mo ago
  Was it Pat or Brian? If I recall correctly, it was under Brian when Intel had one of its worst periods of stagnation, when the 10 nm process all the bets were on turned out to be a non-starter, and when Meltdown and Spectre erupted. It's easy to overlook this because Intel had fairly no competition around then, but that doesn't mean the company was in a good shape. I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was chosen to clean up the mess when the whole place was already up in smoke and the smell was only starting to leak out. I liked his strategy, was disappointed to see him booted out.
  - osnium123 6mo ago
    BK really destroyed the company and Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision. Pat was the visionary who saw the value of the fabs but it took a long time to turn things around.
    - ksec 6mo ago
      >Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision Let's be fair to Bob, he has the vision, but dont know how to execute it because he lacks the technical knowledge. He was also the one who finally settled the argument I had for 5 years, if Intel were to made 250M Modem for Apple, where is the additional Capex for capacity expansion on their Fabs. The answer, only to be told by Bob in a 2020 interview was they never really planned for it.

818828383 6mo ago

[flagged]

cindyllm 6mo ago
[dead]

Zigurd 6mo ago

I got to meet several of Intel senior management when Andy Grove was CEO, Gelsinger was CTO, and Avram Miller was CFO and a pioneer in corporate VC. Even somebody universally acclaimed as smart and hard-working as Lip-Bu Tan will find it impossible to capture the magic of a team like that. Intel's current CEO was hired to explicitly not try to recapture that magic. The board thought Gelsinger's approach of do all the things was reckless. He was hired to take fewer risks, at the cost of putting a restoration of Intel's position in technology out of reach.

aurareturn 6mo ago
You probably met Intel management when they were booming in the old days. LBT was hired to replace Pat because the board needed someone who didn't have the rose colored glasses that old Intel management had and actually see Intel what it is today: losing in everything. When LBT took over, Intel was on a path to bankruptcy. Although Pat wasn't solely responsible, he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy. Intel over the last 15 years missed the following booms: * Mobile boom * Missed on chiplets and allowed AMD to take the lead * Missed on EUV transition * Crypto mining boom * AI chips boom (A huge reason was Pat Gelsinger backed Larrabee, an x86 GPU, and failed to compete against Nvidia) * Missed storage boom by selling SSD/3D NAND division * Missing local LLM boom by not having an Apple Silicon, Strix Halo competitor * Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago Basically, if they reversed all their decisions in the last 15 years and invested wisely, they'd likely be worth 10x more today.
- ksec 6mo ago
  > he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy. So currently the IFS has a few potential customers was because of LBT and not Pat? >* Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago Reckless in finance but also missing the Fab boom?
  - aurareturn 6mo ago
    IFS now doesn’t have a major customer but it seems like companies are at least taking them seriously now. LBT doesn’t have the same arrogance that Pat had when it comes to courting external customers. Yes, they over invested at the wrong time, cancelled fabs or delayed them. Had they saw the AI boom coming in 2023, he wouldn’t have cancelled.

shrubble 6mo ago

I always felt like they weren't properly paranoid in their decisions. For instance, when the AI boom was heating up and they were shipping the ARC GPUs, they could have taken some business simply by making a 48GB or 64GB VRAM version. There are some that are saying Panther Lake is a great CPU for laptops; will be a vindication of his 14A efforts if so.

BobbyTables2 6mo ago

I think every CEO should have the experience of posting a technical question to their company’s forums. Intel makes Broadcom start to look good.

johannschulz 6mo ago

[dead]