Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger
Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger
CEO Pat Gelsinger retired from the company after a distinguished 40-plus-year career and has stepped down from the board of directors, effective Dec. 1, 2024.
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The board has formed a search committee and will work diligently and expeditiously to find a permanent successor to Gelsinger.
Wow, this is a really bad look for Intel. Gelsinger stepping down without Intel having a replacement! I always wonder when it doesn't say why a CEO is stepping down suddenly without warning.
It's notable that the announcement says nothing about Gelsinger having finished the part of the task he started on. It looks like they've lost confidence in Gelsinger (speculation). If that's true, it also means they've probably lost confidence in the entire rescue plan he started on?
This is a huge bombshell, and not very elegantly executed IMO. Not just effective immediately, but effective YESTERDAY!?
Tbh it’s not 100% his fault the engineering competence began to visibly crumble under his leadership, but at the same time he absolutely stayed the course that his predecessors chose, which is what got them here in the first place. So yeah, he deserves to be excoriated for this stuff, but so do his predecessors.
he absolutely stayed the course that his predecessors chose,
Yes that part was always a bit confusing to me, because I couldn't really see anything new in his strategy, except he was doing it harder. But isn't that what it takes when you fall behind?
As much as I hate Gelsinger's pompous bragging style, it's hard to see what else they could do?
Stellantis CEO just abruptly quit yesterday or day before too.
True, Stellantis has done extremely poorly the past couple of years IMO. They have several brands that usually feature in the top 10 most sold car models here (Denmark). But currently they have zero models even in top 20. Their EV cars are underwhelming generally offered with too small batteries, and are almost complete failures in the market. There have been some seriously wrong administrative decisions at the top.
Some of the same can possibly be said about Intel, except Intel was already in trouble when Gelsinger took over, and he is still working on the plan he set out to execute. Switching him out now looks really bad. Of course it may be they have to, disregarding how it looks.
With Stellantis it seems more the logical thing to do. Because Stellantis is bleeding, and losing market share fast.
Edit:
Huge difference with Stellantis is that they are quite open about the performance of the company has been poor, and that's the reason he retires abruptly.
Maybe Lisa Su goes to Intel 🙃
Maybe intel gets absorbed into amd after Lisa Su becomes ceo.
Every time Intel makes a release when AMD is about to release their own competitive product, Lisa is seen sitting in a big comfy chair, next to a fireplace, calmly sipping tea at them.
I don't watch LTT anymore, but they do have my favorite example of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuaiqcjf0bs
tl;dw: Intel did a last minute reschedule of the embargo on their new HEDT lineup to lift hours before the new AMD Threadripper chips did the same. Those chips could barely keep up with AMD's current offerings, and everyone involved knew that the new AMD stuff was going to crush it (which it did). Intel bumps the timeline so reviews have to go out (because reviewers have to get them clicks) without being compared to what's actually going to be sitting on shelves alongside it. Linus sees what they're doing and absolutely rips into them at the start of the video.
Well, he tried doing nothing, now he's all out of options?
Stock didn't sink so at least investors and Wall Street think they're headed in the right direction.
The biggest problem is that any change that would come from an engineering effort is going to take many many years to even have a shot at changing anything. Speeds can't really get much higher and they can't seem to crack making stuff smaller. There are limits to making stuff bigger.
Their video card division are essentially making $5 Walmart rotisserie chicken and $1.50 Costco hot dogs. They're not fantastic, but they're not bad and they're extremely cheap.
They needed to make the next big thing three or four years ago to have it on the plate by now, assuming they don't have anything viable in their skunk works at the moment that's a very big ship to turn around.
So even if someone else walks in, what do they do? Fire sale inventory, put a bunch of dreamer engineers in places, hire a bunch of rock stars. Produce a new unicorn after operating for about 5 years during losses and a possible economic downturn.
I think it's looking pretty grim even with the subsidies and a bunch of people who know what they're doing.
I think it’s looking pretty grim
Absolutely, but for some reason Intel has a history of failing in new areas. Their attempt with Itanium for high end was really bad, their attempt at RISC which mostly ended up in SCSI controllers was a failure too. Their failure with Atom not being competitive against Arm. Their attempts at compute for data-center has failed for decades against Nvidia, it's not something that just happened recently. And they tried in the 90's with a GPU that was embarrassingly bad and failed too.
They actually failed against AMD Athlon too, but back then, they controlled the market, and managed to keep AMD mostly out of the market.
When the Intel 80386 came out it was actually slower than the 80286!, When Pentium came out, it was slower than i486. When Pentium 4 came out, it was not nearly as efficient as Pentium 3. Intel has a long history of sub par products. Typically every second design by Intel had much worse IPC, so much so that it was barely compensated by the higher clocks of better production process. So in principle every second Intel generation was a bit like the AMD Bulldozer, but where for AMD 1 mistake almost crashed the company, Intel managed to keep profiting even from sub par products.So it's not really a recent problem, Intel has a long history of intermittently not being a very strong competitor or very good at designing new products and innovating. And now they've lost the throne even on X86! Because AMD beat the crap out of them, with chiplets, despite the per core speed of the original Ryzen was a bit lower than what Intel had.
What kept Intel afloat and hugely profitable when their designs were inferior, was that they were always ahead on the production process, that was until around 2016. Where Intel lost the lead, because their 10nm process never really worked and had multiple years of delays.
Still Intel back then always managed to come back like they did with Core2, and the brand and the X86 monopoly was enough to keep Intel very profitable, even through major strategic failures like Itanium.
Pat came back to intel to help turn them around. I doubt he was planning to stay there.
I am pretty sure the plan wasn't to quit at 63, at what looks like halfway through his plan.
Losing 16 billion dollars totally has nothing to do with this at all. Its time for Pat to pursue some creative hobbies at home, enjoy his retirement, and be with his family. There are no American troops in Baghdad, everything is fine, Intel is fine, and will soon be back to doing great things. Just ask Userbenchmark, Intel products are the best in class and highly sought after. nVidia has no real advantage in the AI race, and Intel is just dominating.
That 16 billion is just a brief hiccup, company is totally about to do great.
Maybe now they can forget all the expensive chipmaking and get back to their core business of stock buybacks.
While we're at it, let's go back to 10nm chips too. That's Intel's bread and butter. Phones get bigger every year. Why not transistors too?
userbenchmark should not be trusted.
So what IS their strategy now?
Some of Pat's initiatives were good (stay the course with Xe and fabs, which take a long time to pan out), but they kept delaying everything!
Yet Intel is kind of screwed without good graphics or ML IP.
If they spin off the fabs, I feel like they are really screwed, as they will be left with nothing but shrinking businesses and no multi year efforts to get out of it.
Like... Even theoretically, I dont know what I would do to right Intel as CEO unless they can fix whatever is causing consistent delays, and clearly thats not happening. What is their path?
If they spin off the fabs, I feel like they are really screwed
One of the stipulations of the $8B in CHIPS Act funding that they just recieved last month was that they not separate their fabrication business from the parent company. That's unlikely to happen now unless it gets separated at a bankruptcy auction.
unless they can fix whatever is causing consistent delays
Yup, that's their #1 goal right now. If I were CEO, I'd cut/sell any part of the business that doesn't directly support CPU and GPU sales, which is basically what Intel is doing. My priorities would be:
- rescue server CPU business - this is their main money printing machine, and while they may lose to ARM in the future, they need a cash cow in the medium term
- get a competent server-oriented GPU product out - they're late to the game, but they can bundle them w/ their server CPU contracts to get some market share; overwhelm these corporate customers with first class driver support
- get something to compete w/ Apple's M1 - this means super low-power CPU that can scale to gaming workloads, and capable-enough graphics (something a bit better than AMD's APUs); sell this near cost to keep a foot in the door in the mobile space
- sell domestic fab capacity - now is the time to get Sony and Microsoft on board with their next gen consoles, and it might not be too late for Nintendo
I would essentially ignore desktop workloads and solve workstation workloads w/ server chips. To me, those sound like the highest margin businesses that they could potentially still capture, and at least 1 & 2 are a bit less sensitive to being behind on their fab process (corporate contracts respond pretty well to bundle discounts).
This probably wouldn't work though, especially since I'm an outside observer with zero industry experience. But I think a good CEO would do something along those lines, which seems to be what Pat Gelsinger was going for as well.
They tried all this:
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Not sure about this, but it appears AMD is simply out designing them. Some concepts like the many-little-core SKUs seem promising, but ultimately the EPYC MCM design is fundamentally very good here. And... Delays. Delays are killing them here.
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This was Xe-HPC, the Falcon Shores APU, the Falcon Shores GPU, Gaudi... They're so late to everything it didn't work and it appears they've basically given up on the whole line besides consumer inference products, which is also kinda meager atm. And even AMD is mightily struggling here, with hardware that is straight up bigger/faster than Nvidia.
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An M Pro esque chip was also in the plans, but seemingly canceled? Or way behind AMD, at least. And OEMs have repeatedly rejected their GPU heavy designs like Broadwell eDRAM and the AMD collab chip, as they're kinda idiots and Intel is at their mercy. And the laptop chips they are selling now are basically their best shot at an "M" chip and arguably one of their most decent products.
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They tried, and no one bit. Who can blame them, given Intel's history of delays?
Its all the delays! Its destroying them.
I mean I'd guess I'd press on with Xe if I were CEO, but if they can't launch anything on time what does it matter?
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Almost certainly too late to get Nintendo. According to Nvidia insiders, their work for the Switch followup SoC has been done for ages, and they're a bit puzzled that Nintendo hasn't released it yet. The reason seems to be unfavorable exchange rates between the Yen and USD, and Nintendo's board of directors has worked themselves into analysis paralysis over the "best" time to release.
If I were CEO, I’d cut/sell any part of the business that doesn’t directly support CPU and GPU sales, which is basically what Intel is doing.
That's pretty much what they did. They sold off most of the "other" stuff, like their modem division, shut down their SSD division, sold part of Mobileye shares in the IPO, and reportedly Intel is looking to sell part of Altera, their FPGA division.
Flail until the light leaves their eyes.
Mmm, I hope the fab survives on their own...
So what IS their strategy now?
I think they need to bet the company on regaining their previous lead in actual cutting edge fabrication of semiconductors.
TSMC basically prints money, but the next stage is a new paradigm where TSMC doesn't necessarily have a built-in advantage. Samsung and Intel are gunning for that top spot with their own technologies in actually manufacturing and packaging chips, hoping to leapfrog TSMC as the industry tries to scale up mass production of chips using backside power and gate all around FETs (GAAFETs).
If Intel 18A doesn't succeed, the company is done.
Man I hope Battlemage is an actually profitable launch, or at least not a massive loss. Otherwise who knows if the next CEO will axe their GPU line. People liked to fearmonger them killing Arc before, with with a new change in management I can actually see that happening.
Its a lower midrange only launch like it appears to be, it will be extremely unprofitable. AMD may even eat large chunks of this market with the Strix Halo APU, which could be similar to the B570 with no need for a discrete GPU.
Theres actually a big and growing demand for ANY high VRAM GPU for the LLM crowd (that AMD is ignoring for inexplicable reasons beyond Strix Halo) but it appears Intel can't even compete there. No 256 bit APU, their GPU is 192 bit so capped at like 24GB...
Intel is totally missing the boat honestly. Their mobile i9 with the built-in GPU can share DDR5 with the video card.
You can put 96 gigs of RAM in a small form factor and load in a monster model. It's not super fast, But it works, and it's a lot faster than not offloading layers off the CPU.
They should be selling nuk sized PCs with built-in graphics and 128 gigs of the fastest RAM they can put on the boards.
I hope Intel gets their act together soon. We can't have a monopoly on chips on the CPU or GPU space.
It’s baffling how fast they fell, since they had a monopoly for ~20 years.
They had untouchable market dominance from the mid 80's through the mid 2010's, so probably closer to 30 years.
AMD and Apple caught up on consumer PC processors, as the consumer PC market as a whole kinda started to fall behind tablets and phones as the preferred method of computing. Even in the data center, the importance of the CPU has lost ground to GPU and AI chips in the past 5 years, too. We'll see how Intel protects its current position in the data center.
I'm personally excited about the actual engineering challenges that come next and think that all 3 big foundries have roughly equal probability of coming out on top in the next stage, as the transistors become more complex three dimensional structures, and as the companies try to deliver power from the back side of the wafer rather than the crowded front side.
Samsung and Intel have always struggled with manufacturing finFETs with the yields/performance of TSMC. Intel's struggles to move on from 14nm led to some fun memes, but also reflected the fact that they hit a plateau they couldn't get around. Samsung and Intel have been eager to get off of the finFET paradigm and tried to jump early to Gate All Around FETs (GAAFETs, which Samsung calls MBCFET and Intel calls RibbonFET), while TSMC sticks around on finFET for another generation.
Samsung switched to GAAFET for its 3nm node, which began production in 2022, but the reports are that it took a while to get yields up to an acceptable level. Intel introduced GAAFET in its 20A node, but basically abandoned it before commercial production and put all of its resources into 18A, which they last reported should be ready for mass production in the first half of 2025 and will be ready for external customers to start taping out their own designs.
Meanwhile, TSMC's 3nm node is still all finFET. Basically the end of the line for this technology that catapulted TSMC way ahead of its peers. Its 2nm node will be the first TSMC node to use GAAFET, and they have quietly abandoned plans to introduce backside power in the generation after that, for their N2P. Their 1.6 nm node is going to have backside power, though. They'll be the last to marker with these two technologies, but maybe they're going to release a more polished process that still produces better results.
So you have the three competitors, with Samsung being the first to market, Intel likely being second, and TSMC being third, but with no guarantees that they'll all solve the next generation challenges in the same amount of lead time. It's a new season, and although past success does show some advantages and disadvantages that may still be there, none of it is a guarantee that the leader right now will remain a leader into the next few generations.
The competition for CPUs can be AMD vs ARM vs RISC-V. It doesn't have to be between two x86 giants.
That's better, not necessarily for instruction set reasons, but because ARM and RISC-V are more open to multiple companies stepping in to produce chips.
Eh, a lot of big players have backed off from custom ARM CPU cores. So the question is how many even have the muscle to compete?
Double so for RISC-V.
Especially one just a small naval visit from China.
Damn. I actually thought he might turn things around back when he was brought in. Their engineers have let them down, how did they fall so far behind after being so far ahead just 15 years ago?
It was 8 years ago. AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and Intel had been propping them up for years so they wouldn't have to deal with the government going after them for having a total monopoly. If Zen had been a failure AMD wouldn't have survived. I figured Intel had advanced stuff in the pipeline that they were just sitting on waiting for AMD to force their hand (because they were dicks like that). I was wrong.
Hey man, they just renamed their newest chips to have a completely different confusing naming scheme! What more innovation do you want?
I think we all thought that tbh. Intel let their hubris get them and this is the result.
They don't have innovation anymore, I don't know what they're doing and I don't think they do either.
I wish AMD would catch up in the GPU side of things so it wasn't such a monopoly with NVIDIA but I guess we'll see, I mean they did knock Intel down eventually so who knows maybe it's possible.
That would have gone truly horrible if AMD did go bankrupt, that would have been a really dark timeline for all of us.
It's a story that's been repeating for decades now. Company creates a new market with new useful tech, run by engineers passionate about the tech, experiences exceptional growth, becomes large corporation, much larger than any competition. Uses relative wealth to keep competition from catching up. Eventually saturates market to the point where market growth doesn't finance the growing R&D expenses (which were tuned assuming previous rate of growth would just continue). At some point, profit increases start coming from business/marketing side of things more than engineering side, resulting in MBAs and marketers getting more promotions and eventually control of the company. Then tech stagnates because they don't think investing in R&D is as worthwhile. Also aren't able to prioritize what R&D is still happening effectively because they don't really understand the tech as well as engineers. But they tread water and even increase profits because they dominate the market.
Until competition that is engineering focused (often also made up of former engineers from the dominant company) catches up or creates a new market that makes theirs start going obsolete. Suddenly trouble, then they either pivot to quietly supporting businesses that continue using their products, or gets in trouble with the law because of increasingly anticompetitive practices.
Xerox could have owned the PC market but thought they could continue being a household name sticking with copiers. IBM outsourced everything and people eventually realized they didn't need IBM.
FoxconnFairchild had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company. And now Intel coasted while AMD floundered and was completely unprepared for TSMC and AMD to make large technical leaps and surpass them.We're raking in money, why spend on R&D?
Damn, this guy is utterly fantastic at ruining huge tech firms.
Eh, he was handed a company in a bad strategic place and he did not fix it.
Lisa Su was in a similar position when she took over AMD, but she managed it. While I don't want to put too much emphasis on the CEO alone, AMD's turnaround is quite remarkable. They very easily could have collapsed at one point.
He was handed a company in a horrible strategic place and he did the right things to fix it. Reinvest in process technology mainly. Those investments do not bear fruit overnight. They take years. Whoever replaces him could basically be a stuffed suit and will probably have some success if only from his investments starting to pay off. It's too bad he didn't get a few more quarters to see it happen.
A I!