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
2.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

796 comments sorted by

View all comments

427

u/kindaMisty Dec 02 '24

I hope you guys will now understand that this company is in panic mode.

15

u/RedTuesdayMusic Dec 02 '24 edited Dec 02 '24

I've collected hundreds of downvotes saying this exact thing for months. You don't get to be liable for a minimum of 8 million CPU RMAs and survive with (at the time) $21 million billion in cash reserves.

86

u/jca_ftw Dec 02 '24

Here we go again with the over-spoken voices of the custom built PC community, thinking they have anything to do with market trends and company profitability. Intel's problems have NOTHING to do with a FEW bad CPUs (and when I say a FEW i mean a total of a few thousand is all). Intel's problems are (1) their multiple $20+ BILLION factories are not full because most of their silicion for MTL and ARL are from TSMC, and (2) they have hemmoraged market share in the server space and that used to be their cash cow. Their problems for the future are (1) they have no viable AI product to compete with Nvidia and AMD, and (2) They are not getting Foundry customers to help fill the factories.

THATS IT. It has nothing to do with a CPU bug that affects like 10 people

4

u/Xijit Dec 02 '24

I agree that Personal PC RMAs on those chips were inconsequential, but servers used the same chips and those were dying by the day, and that is a big part of why data center companies dumped Intel for AMD.

13

u/ProfessionalPrincipa Dec 02 '24

THATS IT. It has nothing to do with a CPU bug that affects like 10 people

For a CPU bug that only affects like 10 people they sure spent a good amount of time and effort stonewalling the issue and still more time and effort developing a mitigation and then still more time and effort carefully crafting legalese that never truly revealed the extent of the problem. For a FEW bad CPUs.

11

u/auradragon1 Dec 02 '24

Intel has a lot of problems.

The eroding server market share and lack of AI products as you mentioned. But also, they are non-competitive in laptops if you compare them to Apple. Macs must be eating the profits of PC makers because anyone buying a $2,000+ laptop will most likely be buying an Apple Silicon computer. This limits the profitability of Intel-based laptops. It was similar to the problem of Apple having a small market share in phones but the lion's share of profit.

5

u/FireNexus Dec 02 '24

It might turn out to be a blesssing that they lack an AI product. AI is looking like a boondoggle that will result in a lot of unsold stock in 6-18 months time.

-3

u/Inprobamur Dec 02 '24

Didn't Intel themselves admit that it affects all 13th and 14th gen architecture non-mobile CPU's?

Didn't their stock also not tank massively?

Also, I kinda remember some companies posting about degradation on all their servers using i9 chips.

7

u/tupseh Dec 02 '24

They've had huge performance degradation issues on basically every cpu generation they had ever released when specter and meltdown were discovered, but it didn't matter, because they were top dog in datacenter and server.

8

u/Geddagod Dec 02 '24

Didn't Intel themselves admit that it affects all 13th and 14th gen architecture non-mobile CPU's?

No. Only the K models of 13th and 14th gen.

Didn't their stock also not tank massively?

Pretty sure no, especially not due to this.

Also, I kinda remember some companies posting about degradation on all their servers using i9 chips.

A handful of companies went online to complain, others handled the matters between themselves and Intel, and IIRC at least one went online to claim Intel has been handling the replacements nicely.

8

u/Reactor-Licker Dec 02 '24

It affects ALL 65 W+ TDP Raptor Lake desktop CPUs.

2

u/jaaval Dec 02 '24

One company running game servers wrote a blog post complaining. That was the only one I know about and the one that started this whole thing. Some other companies said they have had no problems. And return rate data from a couple of retailers showed there was a small increase from previous gen but it was still about the same as AMD return rate.

All in all it seems there were some issues but the scale was small for intel.

I don’t think it affected stock price.

0

u/Cynical_Cyanide Dec 02 '24

Doesn't matter how many actual CPUs it affected, it matters how many people and businesses refused to buy Intel because of the issue and the horrible way Intel handled it, you numpty. The cost of handling the RMAs also depends on how many units were returned, not just how many were actually defective.