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Intel CEO Paul Otellini to Retire in May
- Aardwolf 14y agoSo according to Moore's law, he should have seen things get 106528681 times more transistors at Intel!
- monopede 14y agoMoore's law: Transistor count doubles every 18 months. Assuming 40 years at the company (it's a bit less) that's: 2^(40/1.5) = 67,108,864 The 62 Core Xeon Phi has 5 billion transistors. Divided by that number is: 149. That's a bit low. The Intel 8080 that came out in 1974 (when he joined the company) had 4,500 transistors. Looks like Moore's law has been slowing down a bit in recent years. Probably due to the focus on reduced energy usage. EDIT: It works out if you replace "18 months" by "24 months". Revised value: 2^(38/2) = 524288. Impressive still.
- Aardwolf 14y ago2^(40/1.5) is 106528681, just like I posted... Which calculator are you using? Does it use a Pentium CPU with the famous division bug perhaps? :)
- mtgx 14y agoA good time for him to leave before the downwards trend of Intel becomes more obvious, and people start blaming it on him. I hope he leaves the board of Google, too, because I don't like how he has influenced some of Google's decisions in the past few years, to use Intel chips instead of ARM in their new devices, and every single one of them turned out to be the wrong decision.
- andyjohnson0 14y agoWhich "new devices" are you referring to? As far as I know the Nexus One and Nexus 4 use Qualcomm CPUs, and the Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, and Nexus 10 all use ARM CPUs. Edit: Thanks to those who pointed out that I'd forgotten the Chromebooks and Google TV. Given the limited extent to which Google have marketed these devices, I'm not sure whether they can be said to have failed yet. And even if they have failed, it is not clear that this was due to using Intel components.
- bryanlarsen 14y agoBut those were successful devices. He's talking about Google devices that failed, in part because they used Intel CPU's. Devices like the original Google TV.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoand Chromebooks.
- 4ad 14y agoHow do you know it failed because of Intel CPUs?
- mtgx 14y agoAll the unsuccessful Chromebooks and the Revue Google TV. Both of those have only recently started to pick-up when they started using ARM chips. And now Google is repeating the mistake by starting to put Intel chips in its Motorola devices. This is also a very bad strategic mistake because if Intel succeeds in mobile, and becomes popular, who do you think it will help most? Google? No way. That situation would help Microsoft, because they can start using the x86 chips that got popular on Android to promote their x86 tablets and hybrids, where Microsoft has a real strength because of legacy apps. So Google is now pushing Intel chips into the market, and gaining who knows what, because I don't see any benefit for them, but definitely helping Microsoft in the long term. If Intel survives, Microsoft survives. You'd think Google would realize that and doesn't want that. Google has absolutely no need for Intel in the future, even for their data centers. Microsoft's future pretty much depends on Intel and x86 chips. I don't understand why Google isn't taking full advantage of this weakness of their competitor, and instead it's trying to put Intel back in the game.
- lewisflude 14y agoThat's a very long time to work for one company! Wish him the best.
- andyjohnson0 14y agoNit pick: The article says he's been at Intel for "nearly 40 years". According to Wikipedia he joined the company in 1974 [1]. Still a long time though. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini#Employment_at_Intel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini#Employment_at_Int...
- lanstein 14y agoIs 38 not nearly 40?
- andyjohnson0 14y agoMy point related to the title of the HN item, which is "Intel CEO Paul Otellini retiring in May after 40 years with company". This is different to the title of the original article, which doesn't mention the duration.
- arrrg 14y agoHuh, when someone says nearly forty years (in connection with human lifetimes) I assume the margin of error is at most a year. Human lives are too short and years too long.
- komlon 14y ago'You Know What They Say About Assumptions, it makes an ass outa u and me' tldr; you're an ass.
- ksec 14y agoNotable absent from that list is he fired Pat Gelsinger. Please just bring him back as CEO.
- bryanlarsen 14y agoWhat a legacy -- he retires the same day that Intel wins. AMD just ceded the high margin CPU business to concentrate on the volume CPU business. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804602 Otellini's successor will be playing a different game, fighting ARM rather than AMD.
- khuey 14y agoWhich is the game Intel should have been playing for the last N years.
- bryanlarsen 14y agoReports are that the Razr i based on an Intel processor is competitive -- similar performance & power usage to an S4 with twice the number of cores. The pre-game warmup is complete. Now the game starts.
- ajross 14y agoRight, they're playing the game and have competetive parts. What the ARM-is-the-future people fail to recognize is that the x86 world isn't remotely dead. Relative to consumer SoCs, Intel makes shockingly high margins on its desktop and server silicon. It simply doesn't make sense for them to be making high volume embedded chips unless they have excess fab capacity (which they don't). The Medfield chips are performance-competetive with existing parts, though they aren't stand-outs. But even if, say, they had a mythical chip that would get lets-just-say-for-argument 2x the performance of Tegra 3 or A6 at 50% of the power draw, they would still not be manufacturing it in volume, for the simple reason that Ivy Bridge cores make a whole lot more money for them than a Tegra-killer would. So from an investor's perspective, Intel is doing exactly the right thing. Stay in the game, don't cede the market. Make sure your products are competetive, but don't walk away from easy cash either. Long term, their success will be driven by the value of their SoC products as the desktop world dissolves. But current market penetration isn't a good indicator of what the likelihood of that value will be.
- geebee 14y agoI do remember feeling a little disappointed when Paul Otellini was announced as CEO. Paul's an impressive guy, and a local boy, but he is an econ major/MBA, and I always find it a little depressing to learn that a venerable tech company will now be led by someone without a strong engineering or science background. Actually, I think "first non-technical CEO" probably deserves a notch on a technology company's time line. It doesn't mean that the company won't succeed, but it is a sign that it has become a different type of company (this may be more a reflection of this change than a cause). But unlike some other high profile flame-outs, it sounds like Otellini was a success at the helm.
- wtvanhest 14y agoThe first non-tech CEO is usually a strong sign that a company has grown from a startup with a single product focus to a long-term viable business with a diversified product portfolio. (Think GE, AT&T, Boeing etc.) For people in the HN community, this is mostly horrific because it represents everything they avoid. However, for almost everyone else out there that is working for the purpose of simply providing for their families, the stability and strength of a diversified company is typically a major positive. The thing that is always missing from the HN discussions about how bad MBAs are for a company etc. is that at the extremes of business, business becomes highly technical and requires someone who is technically proficient at business. Knowing how to create the next high end transistor technology which maintains Moore's law is amazing, but that person is highly unlikely to keep a company of Intel's size successful.
- geebee 14y agothat person is highly unlikely to keep a company of Intel's size successful. Perhaps so... particularly in the moment. To me, it's more a question of whether that CEO is a person who once would have known how to create the next high end transistor (or whatever technology innovation is central to the business) and is still able to have that conversation as an engineer/scientist. For instance, I doubt Andy Grove, at the end of his tenure, would have been able to do that kind of tech work in the moment, but he had a PhD in engineering and had a very deep knowledge of the technology as well as the business. He did make some very typical-of-engineers mistakes when intel decided to raise its consumer profile. And I'm not trying to bring up a debate around Andy Grove's management style (though of course, people are free to comment what they like). But it's hard to say he didn't keep the company successful, even at a very large scale. Otellini was a successful CEO, but (I actually don't know this for sure) did he ever have the ability to do the core tech work behind intel's product? I suppose that in this era of high profile non-tech CEO flameouts (HP, Yahoo), Otellini may actually be a counter-example that a non-technical CEO can still be quite successful.
- ISL 14y agoBummed to see that the financial achievements were noted before the technical ones (and that the true technical achievements were relegated to a single bullet point). This is hard to do at scale: "* Achieved breakthrough innovations, including High-K/Metal gate and now 3-D Tri-gate transistors; and dramatic improvement in energy efficiency of Intel processors"
- cjdrake 14y agoI work for Intel, and I congratulate Paul on his tenure. On the whole, I would say most of my engineer colleagues approve of Paul's leadership, MBA or otherwise :). It will be interesting to see if Intel's next CEO decides to take any exciting new turns. Particularly with respect to the PC market, we live in interesting times.