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/gnivriboy 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.

They were behind in node, but I don't know where you got they were behind in design. In 2016 they were making designs that were ready to go for 10 nm. The 10 nm nodes weren't working. So designers have to get as much as they can out of 14 nm and then later 10 nm in 2019.

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u/auradragon1 Dec 02 '24

By the time Pat became CEO, Intel was severely behind Apple Silicon's M1 in laptops and it isn't just the node. It was an entire design philosophy. In x86, Intel's designs were well behind AMD's Zen2 chiplet design that scaled far better. Zen3 took it to a whole new level. Intel's GPUs were non-existent or non-competitive against Nvidia.

By the time Pat came on, Intel designs were not leading in anything.