I don’t know about his investments, but one fact is clear: he was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which has just pleaded guilty to federal charges for exporting technology to China. That alone should make him ineligible to lead a company with major government contracts.
If he resigns (and he will), the board should go with him.
The Board is a disgrace. For all his fault, Gelsinger had Intel at least on a path back, yes, it's going to take a lot of money because the past two decades have been missed opportunities.
And not only did the Board not do their proper due diligence on Tan, but just let him toss Gelsinger's plan out? Shareholders should sue every one of them.
"Should not be" is too harsh, you should have diversity on a board, not only people from that single industry, but maybe you mean "too many". Presumably the investor-appointees have broad experience with many other companies. The type of people who should know how to hire a CEO.
> Presumably the investor-appointees have broad experience with many other companies
Investors have experience "managing" money to themselves. What is controversial about this? It's like saying pilots have experience flying planes. These investors have a lot experience financializing everything about a company.
We know where that leads, and it's not to success ... well, except for the investors with inside information that get out at the right time.
How effective would Gelsinger be at returning after the then previous CEO took the company in a totally different path and practically trashed Gelsinger’s original plan?
I highly doubt the US government will let Intel sink. I think one way or another they will bail them, either by emergency funds or through government contracts, and keep the lights on until they turn things around. For the same reasons they didn’t let Boeing die out.
> For the same reasons they didn’t let Boeing die out.
Right — so that extends the time window for pillaging, and means that you can raid future taxpayer money, not just current assets. But there’s still no “turn around,” it’s just different flavors of getting paid massively to go down with the ship.
Can you imagine the look you'd get if it was 1998 and you told me that AMD would have over twice the market capitalization of Intel in the next few decades? In 1998 Intel was 50x larger by market cap than AMD.
It is a company that has been catastrophically mismanaged.
AMD was in critical trouble just ten years ago - if Zen 1 had failed AMD would have faced bankruptcy. Probably a good reason why they're so behind on the software side.
So AMD going from that to 2-3x intel's market cap is just... not quite as impressive as Apple's turnaround, but certainly in that direction.
Fixing how? His first major act is to fire 20% of employees, refocus on old technology (smt) and deprioritize next gen (14a) process development. This is tantamount to surrendering as a leading foundry.
Fixing the willful ignorance that the market structure today is very different from 20 years ago. Process leadership and volume leadership are tightly coupled, and no integrated chip company will again have volume leadership. Intel's historical margin power built on a combination of monopoly on performance (in some markets) and superior economies of scale, that's not coming back. The question is not whether they can get fabs up and going with process nodes competitive with TSMC, the question is whether doing it actually leads to any kind of success given the costs involved. The key question is what the basis is for competition going forward, and what Intel's strengths are in that context.
To paraphrase, Intel has to go of the notion that for Intel to win AMD and TSMC have to lose. The strategy that follows from that might involve some painful choices.
This is such an obvious gap in the market for GPUs right now. Nobody wants to make an affordable card with a ton of vram. 32GB isn't even enough. Someone needs to make 48 or 64gb gpus for reasonable prices. Surely GDDR isn't that expensive. AMD and nVidia margins must be insane.
This doesn't seem like a bad idea but let's follow it a few steps. If a key tactic is to take share by shipping LLM-friendly consumer GPUs, one question is would this work. Setting aside the technical issues, they'd certainly sell some. They'd be limited by software, that's still much better on Nvidia, so it would be people with a near-term need for inference at lower cost than Nvidia's going rate. Two things to think about:
1) How might Nvidia etc respond? They've made one-off SKUs for crypto, they could certainly respond quickly with a part that matched on memory but had much better software (meaning, more compatible with tools and better performance. AMD doesn't have the software, but their hardware is find and they could similarly up on-board memory. So Intel would really have to compete on price.
2) Ok, now we've found some 2nd or 3rd place success in a business built on logic fabbed at TSMC and DRAM from Samsung or Micron. If this is the future, why have fabs or any of the associated R&D?
I don't know what the right answers are but maintaining Intel at anything resembling its current size seems like a pretty tough puzzle.
I like this point. Maybe needs pci4 + large vram + mid line gpu + cheap cpu. The cpu could maybe go scatter/gather/atomics like nics so getting data into and out of gpu is offloaded from the mb cpus doing app work.
What's your source for that? All I've read is that he recognizes that Intel has not had been selling competitive amounts of product in the core areas where Nvidia and others are making most of their money. You could debate why that is but it's certainly not that they've been ignoring AI.
I like your points a bunch. Now what needs some emphasis is customer satisfaction. Usually in near monopoly situations customers hang on longer than might otherwise be natural. They get disaffected first, and then after another 3-7 years it starts showing itself unflinchingly in financials. Vitually every major company overhaul involves getting back to customers.
Going forward, our investment in Intel 14A will be based on confirmed customer commitments. There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense. We will build what our customers need, when they need it, and earn their trust through consistent execution.
He said he’s only building out 14a capacity as needed. A fab is $20 billion a pop. TSMC has 500 customers to pay for each fab. Intel has Intel. Every new generation is increasingly expensive. Intel needs to find other customers
Why don’t you already understand this??? You are misleading everyone.
Lets not be hasty in condemning him - some "cross pollination" is probably standard in this business. I'm sure there are plenty of Chinese high-tech companies, with CEOs named something like Jack Smith, or Andrew Callahan, that were caught exporting technology to the USA.
