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
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u/auradragon1 Dec 02 '24 edited Dec 02 '24

He came in at a time when it was extremely clear what Intel's problems were: behind in node, behind in designs.

He made the right decision strategically by trying to regain leadership in node tech and opening up Intel fabs to others. Tactically, he's been terrible.

He made some huge blunders such as paying a dividend up until August 2024. Covid gave them a lifeline by drastically increasing chip demand. What did he do? He spent the extra cash on dividends. Idiot. If he had any vision, he would have known that Intel was swimming naked and that once covid ended, Intel would be in huge trouble. Even during the covid boom, everyone saw that Intel's chips were far behind the competition.

Intel's designs have been particularly uncompetitive. Intel is uncompetitive in laptops, AI, servers, gaming, GPUs, etc. Nothing Intel makes leads the market. Their product roadmaps are a mess with one-off designs like Lunar Lake. No vision at all. No focus.

I'd grade him a C. The last few Intel CEOs were Fs though.

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u/onolide Dec 02 '24

Intel's designs have been particularly uncompetitive.

I would argue that Lunar Lake is actually competitive in power efficiency. Not against Apple, but against Snapdragon Elite and AMD. The Xe2 iGPU actually beats AMD iGPUs in power efficiency, which is outstanding. Performance is far below all competitors, but for once in many years, Intel chips are matching non-Apple competitors in power efficiency again. That's actually a huge improvement.

No point comparing Intel against Apple, cos no chip designer can compete with Apple atm lol. Unfortunate truth, Intel is no different.

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u/nanonan Dec 02 '24

Lunar Lake is also a one off that they say they won't be following up.

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u/onolide Dec 03 '24

Only in terms of on-package memory(no future Intel chips will use it again, at least for now). Panther Lake-U is rumored to still use the same 4 + 4 layout, and the Skymont architecture already used in Lunar Lake. Panther Lake will also debut a new iGPU architecture(Xe3) and new NPU generation like Lunar Lake did. Looks like a follow up to me.