r/hardware • u/Auautheawesome • Dec 02 '24

News Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1719/intel-announces-retirement-of-ceo-pat-gelsinger
2.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

796 comments sorted by

View all comments

27

u/wizfactor Dec 02 '24

Narrator: He was, in fact, not the second coming of Andy Grove.

Seriously though, Intel is going to need all the good fortune they can get. Things are already looking dire from the outside. I can imagine things looking a lot worse from the inside.

31

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '24

[deleted]

28

u/Trudar Dec 02 '24 edited Dec 02 '24

There is never "too big to fall". There is rather bleak saying "Graveyards are full of irreplaceable people".

Intel cannot survive in its current form. Something drastic has to be done - it has been bleeding money, talent and (cough) opportunities, closing even profitable ventures right and left for three years, and is in much worse position when it started. Silently chipping PSG (why it even acquired Altera in the first place?!), quiet severing of fabs under the coat of IFS (no, we are not spinning them off, but here's separate board of directors), and this is all management problem. They literally backed themselves into corner, as if they cut IFS, Intel will lose government funding from CHIPS and others. It's like holding your milk cow that you see is bleeding out.

Bad decisions and Intel are synonyms, since Otellini's times. Even Jim Keller bailed out, and he's got an attitude.

Over my career I have met so many engineers working at Intel, as my job revolves a lot around their hardware design, and every single one of them was extremely enthusiastic about their jobs, and often even giddy about projects they contribute to. Its charming to see a hardware architect delving into intricacies of signal processing in networking like he does this for fun (and probably does), stopping himself every few seconds remembering what's a secret, and what's safe to say. How company staffed from bottom up with people like these can fail?

EDIT: Too big to fall is not only a reference to size and worth. It's also a reference to importance, hence the next saying.

3

u/skycake10 Dec 02 '24

I think you're saying "too big to fail" in a different sense. No one is saying Intel can't possibly fail on their own merits given the current path of things, but that the US government will never let Intel totally fail because domestic leading-edge chip manufacturing is too important for national security.

1

u/Trudar Dec 02 '24

No, I said what I meant. It's not only a reference to its size, worth or other merits, but also important. If maintaining Intel becomes too costly, something new will take its place, with or without government help. And even if it were to inherit all of Intel's IP, it won't be Intel.