Damn, this guy is utterly fantastic at ruining huge tech firms.
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.
and
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!?
Maybe Lisa Su goes to Intel 🙃
IDK if that’s meant as a joke, but I don’t see a single reason why she would do that. She is doing very well at AMD, and the pay is better at AMD.
Intel is receiving massive subsidies. If you think about it it is miraculous they managed to lose so hard to AMD with all those subsidies.
Absolutely, AMD was able to make Ryzen on the brink of bankruptcy, I fully expected Intel to make a comeback, with all the resources at their disposal.
But instead it’s been a long string of failures and at most half successes since 2016.
I have a bit of AMD stock, but still I don’t really want to see Intel fail.
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.
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?What they could have done is to try to reverse the hollowing out of their engineering divisions, and give them more agency and control in leadership. Finance types trying to min/max the P/E ratio is what got them where they are. Serious tech companies that do REAL engineering can’t really follow the norms that Wall Street loves these days and expect to remain technically cutting-edge.
Engineers are not really plug-and-play. Institutional expertise is a real and meaningful thing. They got here because their leadership has ignored those facts for at least a couple decades now.
But think of the KPI’s and all other three letter acronyms!
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.Isn’t stellantis Chrysler? Listen I’m not a betting woman, but I feel like betting against Chrysler has been safe for most of my life, no matter how much I loved the 300M I inherited as a teenager.
Yes Chrysler is part of Stellantis, and once upon a time, way way back in what has since been called the 80’s, Chrysler was near bankrupt, but a savior came to Chrysler with the name Lee Iacocca. The mastermind behind Ford Mustang. And he came to Chrysler and saw all that was bad and fixed it. He undertook to finish a bold new type of car in the Dodge Caravan, which became hugely successful and saved Chrysler. Chrysler went on to become so successful they were even able to buy up other brands like AMC that also owned Jeep.
Ah well, as a European I know little about Chrysler today, but I have fond memories of once admiring mostly everything American, and Lee Iacocca and Jack Tramiel are probably the two business leaders I respect the most of all time.
Sorry to hear Chrysler is now considered safe to bet against. But sadly Stellantis has been shit for some years now.
Stellantis has many traditionally popular European brands, like Citroen, Peugeot, FIAT, Opel (Vauxhall in UK), Alpha Romeo and Lancia. And AFAIK all the brands are doing poorly.Yeah Chrysler shit the bed in the 00s and has more or less just been there for a while now
It might be bad but their stocks went up significantly today…
Intel’s stock, not Stellantis they are down bad.
Wow, so an unknown is better than Gelsinger!!
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.
userbenchmark should not be trusted.
My comment was dripping with sarcasm, I refer to them as “Loserbenchmark” most anytime they come up. Complete toolbag shill assholes over there, lol.
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?
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.
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
And even AMD is mightily struggling here, with hardware that is straight up bigger/faster than Nvidia.
The problem has always been software support. If Intel wants a piece of the AI pie, they need fantastic software support. AMD has always been a bit lackluster here, whereas Intel has done a pretty decent job in the past (esp. on Linux, their drivers rock), so they would need to double down if they truly want to get after it.
Intel is at their mercy
Then Intel should make their own laptops and prove the model.
it appears AMD is simply out designing them
I don’t think so, they’re just better at improving margins. Intel was able to keep up for a while despite not keeping up w/ the fabs, so I think their designs are absolutely fine. They’re not cheap to manufacture like AMD’s are, but they are really good.
Its all the delays! Its destroying them.
Exactly. They need to double down on something instead of faffing about with different ideas. Their money maker is server chips, so that should be top priority. Their next biggest is probably laptops, and AMD is getting massive inroads here due to Intel sucking on their fabs. Catching up on servers should be easier than catching up on laptops, because corps can be bought w/ value, whereas the CPU makes up a much smaller portion of overall laptop price, so they have less leeway here.
But yeah, they need to fix the delays. Get the fabs on track and get steady CPU production in their core markets. And do that without giving up on GPUs, because that needs to be in the future plans since people are generally moving away from CPUs to GPUs for compute.
Everything else Intel does can be scrapped for better software. Really good software can do a lot to make up for lagging hardware, so make sure that is top notch while you’re fixing the hardware delivery.
The problem has always been software support. If Intel wants a piece of the AI pie, they need fantastic software support. AMD has always been a bit lackluster here, whereas Intel has done a pretty decent job in the past (esp. on Linux, their drivers rock), so they would need to double down if they truly want to get after it.
Actually AMD is pretty okay for running LLMs and other ML workloads. Many libraries now explicitly target rocm, you can just plop down vllm or the llama.cpp server and have it work with big models out of the box. There are some major issues (like flash-attention), but its quite usable.
Intel though? Their software is a mess. You have to jump throigh all sorts of hoops, use ancient builds of pytorch, use their own quantizations and such to get anything working, fix Python errors, and forget about batched enterprise backends like vllm. And this is just their IGPs and Arc, forget trying to use the vaunted NPUs for anything.
This could change if they actually had a cheap 48GB GPU (or a big APU) for AI devs to target… But they don’t. And no one is renting Gaudi to build in support because its not even availible anywhere.
EDIT: oh, and one weird thing is the volume of Intel software support is high. Like they have all sorts of cool libraries, they make contributions to open projects… But its all disjointed and fragmented. Like theres no leadership or unified push, just random efforts flailing around.
Exactly.
Intel is shooting itself in the foot by going halfway. If they want to compete in the AI space, they need to go all-in w/ a solid software and hardware combo. But they don’t.
They have the capability, they’re just not focused. A good CEO should be able to provide that focus. Maybe they should hire Lisa Su. 😆
Speaking as an holder of AMD stock since ot was $8, and an all AMD CPU user, IMO Lisa Su is either an absolute idiot or colliding with her cousin, the CEO of Nvidia.
All they had to do was lift vram restrictions on consumer GPUs (so their OEMs could double the VRAM up) and sick like four engineers on bugs blocking the AI space, and they would be dominating the AI space and eating Nvidia’s pie…
And they didn’t. Like, its two phonecalls, thats it.
Intel had monumental problems it has to solve and struggles, but AMD has tiny ones they inexplicably ignore. Its mind boggling.
-
Flail until the light leaves their eyes.
A I!
