> It didn't' work, that's not a crime. He left because his plan didn't work. That's what happens to CEO's who try and fail to implement a business plan.
We don't know that it didn't work. We also don't know that selling it off would've been significantly better, so it's weird to pretend that keeping the foundry part of Intel was this big failure. Intel is a cargo ship that doesn't turn on a dime. But the board and investors don't have the patience for long-term strategy that could get Intel out of its downward spiral. The CEO leaving is just another symptom of that, and a sign that Intel is just continuing to dig its own grave, damn the consequences. Just look at all the other projects Intel has tried and failed in the past 20ish years. Zero patience for anything that doesn't bring in billions and isn't immediately successful.
We're all just waiting for Intel to give up on the Arc GPUs because of it.
> We're all just waiting for Intel to give up on the Arc GPUs because of it.
I'm sure all kinds of radical cost cutting is being proposed internally, but I'd be surprised if this was on the line. My thinking is that Arc GPUs are the "walk before you run" product that will lead to Intel producing AI accelerators, which is a reasonable bet re: a pathway to profitability.
A lot of projects are "walk before you run". Didn't stop Intel from killing them and wasting all their time, money and effort. That's Intel's problem. I don't want them to kill Arc. It's what they need long-term. I simply don't believe they have the persistence and long-term vision to keep at it despite lackluster sales and lack of interest.
"AI accelerators" are at peak profitability right now. Within a few years, certainly by 2030, chip optimizations and improvements will see Raspberry Pis or your phone doing AI work.
I expect we may even aee AI cores on phones, by 2036.
I think software optimizations are going to heavily impact gpu/ai-accelerator demand. It feels like we’re leaving the ‘brute force’ make it work era and entering the ‘make it work on my phone without killing battery life” era. I wouldn’t be shocked if within a few years there just isn’t the need for custom hardware at all.
Maybe you have insider knowledge but if you say you don't know - how do you know what the CEO leaving is a symptom of? (I don't know)
It's very easy to say that the CEO was trying for real and everyone else was against him as he is an engineer so it feels good to say it, but is there truth to the fact that it's just lack of patience and "shortsighted" thinking by the board, or is that just what people repeat because it sounds good to say?
So in my simple view, we have a guy that came in with an ambitious plan to burn many billions, fire a bunch of people and turn the company around. He did the first two but in 3.5 years couldn't do the actual goal, and was just starting to present some kind of phase two with more layoffs and potentially more burning of money. Plus all the million factors people on the outside wouldn't know. So what we know is the plan wasn't working yet at least, but who knows if it ever will.
it's only shortsighted if you interrupt a good plan, if you interrupt a bad one you are a visionary.
For a very long time, i.e. for a few years, the actual goal had been announced as planned to be achieved towards the end of 2025, when the CMOS fabrication process Intel 18A should become usable for the mass production of Intel server CPUs and laptop CPUs.
If Pat Gelsinger had remained the CEO of Intel, only in 1 year from now it would have become possible to decide whether he has been a good CEO or a bad CEO.
Now, after he has been ousted prematurely, nobody will ever be able to say with certainty whether Pat Gelsinger would have succeeded to redress the fate of Intel or not. Since he has become CEO, all the intermediate milestones towards the stated goal have been achieved in time, even if with various problems, which were nevertheless more or less predictable, because in the past Intel has never been able to do better than this when transitioning to new fabrication processes and new product architectures.
While he has diminished the earnings for shareholders, that was a very good thing to do, because before him Intel has wasted huge amounts of money by giving them to the shareholders instead of using them wisely to remain a competitive company.
Instead of looking at shareholder earnings, you should look at the revenues of the Intel employees. I do not know if this is true, but another poster on this forum has said that Gelsinger has given a raise after becoming CEO, attempting to correct the situation where Intel is well known as a company that provides inadequate compensations to its employees, and he had promised that he will try in the future to improve this. If that is true, it has been something much more valuable than attempting to please the shareholders who have lead the company towards losing its competitivity in the market.
I don't think anything you said disagreed with me. I agree giving more time could've resulted in a good outcome. But he didn't do it in the time he was given and they didn't want to give him more time. It's just what it is. My point is that without more information it is hard to know if it'd have worked out.
It's very appealing for an engineer as myself to root for an engineer CEO that comes back and turns it around, I know it's a story that everyone would love, that's why when the defence is only that, I suspect that people may just be romanticizing the situation the same way I would / do.
I'm also not sure someone saying "I need X time" means the board needs to treat this as some holy proclamation. A lot of the CEO job is also convincing the board and the markets that the change is coming and at 3.5 out of 5 years I guess the board still wasn't convinced and the markets certainly don't seem to be pricing in a turnaround.
5 node in 4 years. And we are just approaching end of 4 soon with 18A coming up. The first 4 node are already delivered on schedule. It remains to be seen where 18A will end up. But it isn't far off.
So I have no idea where "he didn't do it in time" came from.
...which means he was allowed to release maybe 1 if even that of Intel's bread and butter, CPUs. They have a lead time of somewhere between 3-5 years. And that's not including fab development, which takes even longer.
So was he "burning billions" or was he investing billions into what made Intel a dominant force in the first place? We'll probably never know, but 3.5 years isn't anywhere close to long enough in this industry.
Investment of cash without profits to make those investments is still a burn…
Pat still deserved longer. Intel is basically a storied brand that needs to be run like a startup because all of its legacy revenue products/models are dying.
On the other hand it's around 7% of a regular person's career. I didn't intend the number to have some ulterior motive as I don't know how long it should take, it is what it is. But it was long enough for the board.
The explosive growth of so many tech companies has set the bar for everything in some investors minds. If it doesn’t go absolutely vertical it is a failure.
Unfortunately this rules out everything that involves anything physical (factories, cars, planes, fabs, etc.) and anything requiring research.
In the end it leads to an economy that chases fads and devolves into a pure casino.
The top businesses required many years, decades even, of heavy investments into physical infrastructure, including the things you listed plus data centers and global networking over land and under oceans.
Ironically I think this is the nail in the coffin.
Pushing the whole company towards 18A as soon as possible made a lot of sense. Arc made a lot of sense (as it becomes competitive when you get to 18A). We’re not there yet.
Sacking the CEO, throwing him under the bus, and then publicly demanding salary back just reflects really badly on Intel.
I don’t know the details of what’s happened behind the scenes and if there was any impropriety, that being said:
Intel under Pat was in a bad place, but it wasn’t a public clown show.
They want to keep extracting profits, knowing that when (not if) things go dogshit (even more so than today), the public will bail them out. Since this CEO worked on other stupid things like long term technical viability, instead of pursuing the higher priority (investor returns), he was shown the way out.
2008 was an eye opening year for a lot of rich people.
Do you think Intel would have done better with him than without him?
Because they were basically doing nothing for 5-10 years. How long do you think it would take to fix a company like that? I mean I'm not necessarily defending Gelsinger but throwing away the entire board and most of upper management would have been be the first step if they were about changing anything..
Well yh, when you're being paid a normal wage. In USA that sounds like maybe $200k for proven senior engineers? So, just return anything they took above that - which I'm guessing is going to round to the full wage.
Honestly, I don't really understand why the people are taking so much more than their share even when successful.
We don't know that it didn't work. We also don't know that selling it off would've been significantly better, so it's weird to pretend that keeping the foundry part of Intel was this big failure. Intel is a cargo ship that doesn't turn on a dime. But the board and investors don't have the patience for long-term strategy that could get Intel out of its downward spiral. The CEO leaving is just another symptom of that, and a sign that Intel is just continuing to dig its own grave, damn the consequences. Just look at all the other projects Intel has tried and failed in the past 20ish years. Zero patience for anything that doesn't bring in billions and isn't immediately successful.
We're all just waiting for Intel to give up on the Arc GPUs because of it.