It's a publicly traded company.First off Intel needs a new board of directors and a CEO with full control of the company breaking thru its existing political barriers. It’s going to hard. The foundry depends on 18A.
This is a surprise but not a complete surprise considering the history of the BoD's decisions over the past few decades.
We're likely witnessing the history of the fall of this company. Actually it has been set in stone years ago. Otellini started the whole failure of negotiations with Apple, because he had no vision, when it would have been obvious to any one of us. Maybe he did have vision, but wasn't enough to defeat his obsession with numbers, aka MBA. Specifically said that he didn't think the "volume would be there".
Then Kraznich was incompetence compiled with a healthy dose of psychopathy.
They already lowered their projections so this is already impossible.Hopefully 18A turns out as strong as he wanted it to
I think we'll see Pat's gambles pay off over the next 5 years.
They already lowered their projections so this is already impossible.
Gelsinger’s departure comes as Intel’s financial woes have been piling up. The company posted a $16.6 billion loss and halted its dividend in the most recent quarter, and its shares have fallen by about 60% since he took over as CEO.
Whats almost deliciously schadenfraudistic is Pat was a solid engineer back in the day.
Maybe he did have vision, but wasn't enough to defeat his obsession with numbers, aka MBA.
Then Kraznich was incompetence compiled with a healthy dose of psychopathy.
To expand on @johnsonwax post on Intel being a double-moat company, I'd make the case that Apple's inquire was the final turning point to that.It was not "obvious" to any of us. Anyone here who claims they knew back in 2005 when Apple was only rumored to be working on a phone that it would be a massive success is a liar. It is completely believable that he didn't believe the volume would be there from Apple making phones. When Steve Jobs said at launch he could see Apple eventually taking 1% of the cell phone market (meaning nearly 10 million phones a year) most people thought his reality distortion field was affecting him.
Intel wanted Apple to use x86, Steve Jobs said "absolutely not". That's why the negotiations with Apple failed. Intel wasn't a foundry and didn't have any aspirations of becoming one, not 20 years ago. So the only way a deal with Apple could have happened would be with StrongARM. The "x86 everywhere" sentiment within Intel was probably too strong for that to be an option. Plus they knew they would effectively become a foundry because Apple didn't want a CPU, they wanted a full SoC. Not sure if any of the StrongARM/Xscale lineup would have qualified.
We can fault them for not being serious about becoming a foundry in their first attempt, and they should have moved heaven and earth to secure Apple as a customer then when they were well known to be unhappy working with Samsung. If they'd teamed up with Intel instead of TSMC, the last decade would have been very different. Not sure we should blame the board, CEO, or VPs/upper middle management for that failure though.
The (only?) way forward?Spin-off manufacturing to a consortium comprising the most consequential customers like Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc., further backed by USG.Use proceeds to rebuild Product group as fabless company.
The first problem was that they knew it would not be ready on that date, not meet the intended specs, and usually wouldn’t be close. Design teams knew the other side was lying but what could they do? A few years later the process was indeed late, occasionally partially working, and met every letter of the law that governed bonus structures. Designers would then force a few working devices out to an OEM so that their bonuses, paid if device X shipped in quarter Y, did ship then. Sure yields were financially untenable but their new BMW had heated seats.
This isn’t to put the blame solely on the process side of the company, everyone lied. One great example was when Tim Cook met with Intel folk over their cellular modems. He directly asked someone I won’t name, “Will it be ready in time?”. The Intel exec said, “Yes”. He was lying, everyone on the Intel side knew he was lying but didn’t contradict the boss. From what we understand, Tim Cook also knew he was lying, and we know several Apple personnel in the room definitely knew it was well past a fib. If you have read this far, you understand how that program, and later the entire Apple/Intel relationship ended. It was for cause.
With that in mind, if you were aware of Intel and the issues they had in the 1990s, there were period where things taped out but didn’t post, errors upon errors, and at times they built up into critical pain points. Intel tasked a young engineer to fix the process, procedure not semiconductor, and he did. He put procedures in place to make sure the costly errors that were plaguing Intel could not happen or at least were either very rare and caught early on. Any guesses as to who that engineer was? Hint: His first name was Pat.
From that point on, Intel became an execution machine and it showed in marketshare, financial results, and just about every other relevant metric. Compare and contrast this to AMD in the Barcelona days. I won’t get into personal conversations but after the third attempt at launching a working version of that part, I had a conversation with the person in charge of that chip. I related the story about how Gelsinger put procedures in place to make sure things like what AMD was seeing didn’t reoccur. This person looked me in the eye and said, “We couldn’t have forseen these problems, they were human error”. At that very moment I knew AMD was dead, and they effectively were for a decade. What did AMD do? They promoted the guy. It wasn’t until a radical management change took place almost a decade later that the culture was forced to change and, well, AMD is now beating Intel like a drum.
To make matters worse for the company, the question that SemiAccurate has been debating with many financial folk for the past few years just came to the fore. “If not Pat, who?”. This isn’t a slight against Mr Zinsner or Ms Johnston Holthaus, it is rhetorical. The one name that the board was trying to get before they settled on Gelsinger is not going to leave her current company so that exhausts SemiAccurate’s list of qualified candidates. There may be others but, well, good luck to them. Sure Pat cleaned out the big skeletons in the closet, took the beating for the financial mess that wasn’t his doing, and cleaned up the culture, but was that enough for the next chump who steps in to the position to survive? We will see.
So that brings up the big question, what caused the board to fire Pat? Yes we know that officially he ‘retired’ but, well, he didn’t. They summarily canned him and didn’t have the guts to own up to it. Either way, why? Well after some digging, SemiAccurate was told the reason and it is, err, stupid.
Charlie has more thoughts:
Why Did Intel Fire CEO Pat Gelsinger?
Yesterday the Intel board did the idiotic and fired CEO Pat Gelsinger.www.semiaccurate.com
Given he seemed quite fond of Pat from the start (and definitely had some moles in Intel) worth reading
Note: The following is analysis for professional level subscribers only.
Well there is still relevant info there. Mainly that the board did fire him (which is the messaging already from quite a few places).I am not reading an ad for a full article.
Pat may well have had the right idea with the 5NI4Y strategy; however, it was more than a day late, and way more than a dollar short.Whats almost deliciously schadenfraudistic is Pat was a solid engineer back in the day. When he came back to Intel, he seemed like he was going to make some real changes...
One would think an Engineer would have had a real close look at what the competition was actually doing and not risk looking like an idiot for something that was a massive money saver and key to system/process wins like chiplets.
The rearview mirror comment was a bit sad as it was so obviously farcical even at the time. They really need/ed to bring in someone from outside Intel who hasn't coasted on past succes but comes from an industry/company that has had to fight to survive. Really might be too late for Intel to avoid the Xerox/Kodak end game.
Chips Act subsidies only stick if Intel retains majority of ownership and of voting rights.Looks like someone came out of retirement to post:
The (only?) way forward? Spin-off manufacturing to a consortium [...]