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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Retires Amid Company's Decline

sw1tcher said:
Brian Krzanich is an engineer. Look at what happened with Intel when he was CEO.

Pat Gelsinger is also an engineer.

Tim Cook has an MBA from Duke University.
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I’m not talking about a single role, I’m talking in general. MBAs need to learn to listen to engineering teams. A big issue at Intel was the engineering teams screaming that they’re being leap frogged by competition yet MBAs were all “we’re the top dog, we don’t have to worry”.

And then Intel got leapfrogged. This isn’t unique to Intel either, MBAs are all about profit over innovation and think they know more than the real experts in the room.
 
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This was inevitable. Intel is going to be mentioned alongside Kodak in the future...

Gengar said:
Ran that company into the ground. He won’t be missed.
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Nah, he rode it into the ground but it's trajectory was set long before he took the controls. His job was to try to appear calm to the public while the company futilely tried to adjust course. Not his fault it wasn't possible. I think he kept the stock up better than others might have and he got the CHIPS money delivered. Once that came through though, the board needed a scapegoat.
 
Intel is pretty far behind, as I understand it, especially in laptop chips. Their desktop CPUs have JUST started to become good with the 14900K. AMD was, and possibly still is, ahead of them in the desktop realm, and Apple is ahead in the laptop realm.
 
rp2011 said:
The most amazing part is, how do you blow a monopoly so bad. It was just them and Windows. Yet another example of a coma my too cozy milking a bread and butter product instead of innovating. Seems to happens every time.
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Because it wasn’t a monopoly. Better tech became available and the standard bearers have to respond or fail. Which is how it should be. :)
 
nStyle said:
Ultimately no one wants Intel to fail (okay I'm sure someone out there does)...more competition is better.
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Competition is better ONLY if the competition competes. Just existing does nothing for anyone (except the execs and the board which will still see big payouts).
 
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Unregistered 4U said:
Competition is better ONLY if the competition competes. Just existing does nothing for anyone (except the execs and the board which will still see big payouts).
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Intel is not just existing...their products are in your local Walmart. Whether you specificially find them competitive is irrelevant...they are still competing.
 
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Unregistered 4U said:
Because it wasn’t a monopoly. Better tech became available and the standard bearers have to respond or fail. Which is how it should be. :)
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It’s always been a monopoly. They own X86. And if they hadn’t slept on it they wouldn’t be in this mess.
 
I wonder what this guy’s golden parachute is worth. At the helm during the decline but likely gets $milions for screwing it up.
 
shadowboi said:
And 7 years ago no one believed me when I said that Apple will transition to their own fast and silent processors and that would mark end of Intel. People literally said I am an idiot. And now look where we are…
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lol. Those people are still correct too. Intel's problem has VERY LITTLE to do with Apple.

AMD's data center revenue just passed Intel for the 1st time EVER (Q3 2024 revenue). ARM server chips are also eating Intel market share. Now factor in the AI boom where GPU's are far more important.

AMD and Nvidia are doing great in the server space, doing great overall. Apple silicon isn't hurting them one bit.

Stop drinking so much Apple Kool-Aid, it causes brain rot.
 
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chrono1081 said:
Intels downfall is a prime example of people listening to MBAs over engineers.
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Any support for that statement? I think the cause of Intel's downfall is the same as any good tragedy: hubris.

Itanium was an engineering failure, not an MBA problem, and that's just the biggest example of repeated failures to prepare for the future. Apple, on the other hand, has always kept an active plan B in the lab to be ready to switch over when needed. An MBA would see the value of risk management, but an engineer would typically view that as wasted resources on an inferior technology path.

They've been set up for failure for a couple decades now but blind to it because they were running on inertia long after the thrust gave out. I've commented before about how Intel needed their process dominance to compensate for their weak architecture and as soon as they lost leadership on process they were open to collapse, and their dismissal of the embedded market allowed Apple to eclipse their R&D spending and show that Arm was a viable competitor to x86. Qualcomm repeated the feat on the PC side of the fence and Microsoft couldn't ignore the trend.

Intel's problem was its belief that they were indispensable and overvaluing their own legacy by insisting that everything be fully backwards compatible to the dawn of the microprocessor. They had the rest of the market convinced of that too, until now. The spell's been broken and the consequences have been swift to come.
 
IG88 said:
lol. Those people are still correct too. Intel's problem has VERY LITTLE to do with Apple.

AMD's data center revenue just passed Intel for the 1st time EVER (Q3 2024 revenue). ARM server chips are also eating Intel market share. Now factor in the AI boom where GPU's are far more important.

AMD and Nvidia are doing great in the server space, doing great overall. Apple silicon isn't hurting them one bit.

Stop drinking so much Apple Kool-Aid, it causes brain rot.
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I disagree. Apple was the first company in a long while to be able to spend more on semiconductor R&D than Intel could, and that allowed them to bring to market a device that served as the existence proof of a better way. Apple doesn't compete with Intel but that doesn't matter-- Apple Silicon proved you could run heavy work loads faster and more efficiently on Arm than x86. Then, just to drive the point home, they showed that you could emulate x86 on Arm about as fast as x86 could run it natively. That just chummed the water for actual Intel competitors to step up. Nvidia is doing great in the server space, but they aren't x86 based either, are they? AMD is managing to out innovate Intel in their architecture while benefiting from TSMCs process. I expected to see AMD release an Arm series of products alongside their x86 line a while ago and I'm surprised they haven't yet-- I still suspect they'll do it before Intel does though.

M1 didn't doom Intel, but what M1 represented did. It just happened to come at a time when Intel was dealing with a whole series of historic mistakes-- the inability to improve their manufacturing process, a lack of serious attention to massively parallel GPU processing, the AI surge that rode on the GPU processing wave. The M1 just underlined the point that what the world thought Intel was still the best at, making good and fast processors, they were no longer the best at.

This isn't a story of Apple standing over a fallen enemy with arms raised in victory, but it is a story of how advances by one business can expose weaknesses in another and set the conditions for those weaknesses to be exploited. Apple isn't the whole reason Intel collapsed, maybe not the main reason, but they had much more than "very little" to do with it. And they were certainly well timed to undermine whatever faith the market had left in Intel's strategy, technology, and management.
 
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Unregistered 4U said:
Competition is better ONLY if the competition competes.
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I've been trying to explain that since people praised the Zune as much needed competition to the iPod.

Maybe another way to put this is to say competition is only effective if the weaker competitor fails. There has to be stakes for competition to matter.
 
So what happened to Intel? It went from being a chip leader to being MIA in a period of sky high chip demand. Wierd.
 
Art Mark said:
If you don't steal marketshare from yourself with new products another company will take it from you
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This. So much this. As a consultant, I work with a lot of companies who totally fail to recognise this. They worry about where they should develop and that they might come up with something that will cannibalise sales in another part of their business.

Do it already. Because if you don't, you'll wake up tomorrow and find someone else already has.

And then, even when they see the start of this happening but still have time to do something about it, arrogance kicks and they convince themselves "that company will never succeed". And then they do.

Intel needs a hefty slice of humble pie. Or maybe Apple pie...
 
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nostradumbass said:
True. Just because Intel lost customers to AMD and Apple Silicon doesn’t mean we lose our minds like those loons fighting over toilet paper during covid. It’s not the end of the world. Kodak still exists and still has a solid stable base serving its traditional customers even if it is much smaller than before.
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I don't think x64 is going away any time soon. Let's be realistic. Most of the planet is running x86/64 and changing out all those machines for Arm or other architectures isn't done overnight.

But that doesn't mean Intel won't go away soon. Their value is dropping like a stone. OK, so again, be realistic. Not that soon, for sure. But Intel really isn't looking great...
 
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Having worked for a few IT manufacturers, and seen their rise and decline, my first thought is always for the employees.

When your manager tells you what a great product “our” company makes, start working on your résumé.
 
chrono1081 said:
I’m not talking about a single role, I’m talking in general. MBAs need to learn to listen to engineering teams. A big issue at Intel was the engineering teams screaming that they’re being leap frogged by competition yet MBAs were all “we’re the top dog, we don’t have to worry”.

And then Intel got leapfrogged. This isn’t unique to Intel either, MBAs are all about profit over innovation and think they know more than the real experts in the room.
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I personally agree!
It has been under Cook's tenure that (maybe not all, but for the sake of the exercise nearly all) of Apple's products have skyrocketed. I appreciate, there are other factors influencing cost, however (speaking in terms of AUD as I cannot comment in other countries) when your phone, laptop, etc cost more than a second hand car - something is wrong. I don't think anyone could convince me that a lot of that isn't profit against innovation.
 
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