CEO Pat Gelsinger retired from the company after a distinguished 40-plus-year career and has stepped down from the board of directors, effective Dec. 1, 2024.
and
The board has formed a search committee and will work diligently and expeditiously to find a permanent successor to Gelsinger.
Wow, this is a really bad look for Intel. Gelsinger stepping down without Intel having a replacement! I always wonder when it doesn’t say why a CEO is stepping down suddenly without warning.
It’s notable that the announcement says nothing about Gelsinger having finished the part of the task he started on. It looks like they’ve lost confidence in Gelsinger (speculation). If that’s true, it also means they’ve probably lost confidence in the entire rescue plan he started on?
This is a huge bombshell, and not very elegantly executed IMO. Not just effective immediately, but effective YESTERDAY!?
Well, he tried doing nothing, now he’s all out of options?
Stock didn’t sink so at least investors and Wall Street think they’re headed in the right direction.
The biggest problem is that any change that would come from an engineering effort is going to take many many years to even have a shot at changing anything. Speeds can’t really get much higher and they can’t seem to crack making stuff smaller. There are limits to making stuff bigger.
Their video card division are essentially making $5 Walmart rotisserie chicken and $1.50 Costco hot dogs. They’re not fantastic, but they’re not bad and they’re extremely cheap.
They needed to make the next big thing three or four years ago to have it on the plate by now, assuming they don’t have anything viable in their skunk works at the moment that’s a very big ship to turn around.
So even if someone else walks in, what do they do? Fire sale inventory, put a bunch of dreamer engineers in places, hire a bunch of rock stars. Produce a new unicorn after operating for about 5 years during losses and a possible economic downturn.
I think it’s looking pretty grim even with the subsidies and a bunch of people who know what they’re doing.
Absolutely, but for some reason Intel has a history of failing in new areas. Their attempt with Itanium for high end was really bad, their attempt at RISC which mostly ended up in SCSI controllers was a failure too. Their failure with Atom not being competitive against Arm. Their attempts at compute for data-center has failed for decades against Nvidia, it’s not something that just happened recently. And they tried in the 90’s with a GPU that was embarrassingly bad and failed too.
They actually failed against AMD Athlon too, but back then, they controlled the market, and managed to keep AMD mostly out of the market.
When the Intel 80386 came out it was actually slower than the 80286!, When Pentium came out, it was slower than i486. When Pentium 4 came out, it was not nearly as efficient as Pentium 3. Intel has a long history of sub par products. Typically every second design by Intel had much worse IPC, so much so that it was barely compensated by the higher clocks of better production process. So in principle every second Intel generation was a bit like the AMD Bulldozer, but where for AMD 1 mistake almost crashed the company, Intel managed to keep profiting even from sub par products.
So it’s not really a recent problem, Intel has a long history of intermittently not being a very strong competitor or very good at designing new products and innovating. And now they’ve lost the throne even on X86! Because AMD beat the crap out of them, with chiplets, despite the per core speed of the original Ryzen was a bit lower than what Intel had.
What kept Intel afloat and hugely profitable when their designs were inferior, was that they were always ahead on the production process, that was until around 2016. Where Intel lost the lead, because their 10nm process never really worked and had multiple years of delays.
Still Intel back then always managed to come back like they did with Core2, and the brand and the X86 monopoly was enough to keep Intel very profitable, even through major strategic failures like Itanium.
Tbh it’s not 100% his fault the engineering competence began to visibly crumble under his leadership, but at the same time he absolutely stayed the course that his predecessors chose, which is what got them here in the first place. So yeah, he deserves to be excoriated for this stuff, but so do his predecessors.
he absolutely stayed the course that his predecessors chose,
Yes that part was always a bit confusing to me, because I couldn’t really see anything new in his strategy, except he was doing it harder. But isn’t that what it takes when you fall behind?
As much as I hate Gelsinger’s pompous bragging style, it’s hard to see what else they could do?
What they could have done is to try to reverse the hollowing out of their engineering divisions, and give them more agency and control in leadership. Finance types trying to min/max the P/E ratio is what got them where they are. Serious tech companies that do REAL engineering can’t really follow the norms that Wall Street loves these days and expect to remain technically cutting-edge.
Engineers are not really plug-and-play. Institutional expertise is a real and meaningful thing. They got here because their leadership has ignored those facts for at least a couple decades now.
Every time Intel makes a release when AMD is about to release their own competitive product, Lisa is seen sitting in a big comfy chair, next to a fireplace, calmly sipping tea at them.
tl;dw: Intel did a last minute reschedule of the embargo on their new HEDT lineup to lift hours before the new AMD Threadripper chips did the same. Those chips could barely keep up with AMD’s current offerings, and everyone involved knew that the new AMD stuff was going to crush it (which it did). Intel bumps the timeline so reviews have to go out (because reviewers have to get them clicks) without being compared to what’s actually going to be sitting on shelves alongside it. Linus sees what they’re doing and absolutely rips into them at the start of the video.
Absolutely, AMD was able to make Ryzen on the brink of bankruptcy, I fully expected Intel to make a comeback, with all the resources at their disposal.
But instead it’s been a long string of failures and at most half successes since 2016.
I have a bit of AMD stock, but still I don’t really want to see Intel fail.
True, Stellantis has done extremely poorly the past couple of years IMO. They have several brands that usually feature in the top 10 most sold car models here (Denmark). But currently they have zero models even in top 20. Their EV cars are underwhelming generally offered with too small batteries, and are almost complete failures in the market. There have been some seriously wrong administrative decisions at the top.
Some of the same can possibly be said about Intel, except Intel was already in trouble when Gelsinger took over, and he is still working on the plan he set out to execute. Switching him out now looks really bad. Of course it may be they have to, disregarding how it looks.
With Stellantis it seems more the logical thing to do. Because Stellantis is bleeding, and losing market share fast.
Edit:
Huge difference with Stellantis is that they are quite open about the performance of the company has been poor, and that’s the reason he retires abruptly.
Isn’t stellantis Chrysler? Listen I’m not a betting woman, but I feel like betting against Chrysler has been safe for most of my life, no matter how much I loved the 300M I inherited as a teenager.
Yes Chrysler is part of Stellantis, and once upon a time, way way back in what has since been called the 80’s, Chrysler was near bankrupt, but a savior came to Chrysler with the name Lee Iacocca. The mastermind behind Ford Mustang. And he came to Chrysler and saw all that was bad and fixed it. He undertook to finish a bold new type of car in the Dodge Caravan, which became hugely successful and saved Chrysler. Chrysler went on to become so successful they were even able to buy up other brands like AMC that also owned Jeep.
Ah well, as a European I know little about Chrysler today, but I have fond memories of once admiring mostly everything American, and Lee Iacocca and Jack Tramiel are probably the two business leaders I respect the most of all time.
Sorry to hear Chrysler is now considered safe to bet against. But sadly Stellantis has been shit for some years now.
Stellantis has many traditionally popular European brands, like Citroen, Peugeot, FIAT, Opel (Vauxhall in UK), Alpha Romeo and Lancia. And AFAIK all the brands are doing poorly.
Which means it was kind of effective Friday, either way it doesn’t change that it is very sudden.
If this was done properly, it should have been announced Friday at the latest.
and
Wow, this is a really bad look for Intel. Gelsinger stepping down without Intel having a replacement! I always wonder when it doesn’t say why a CEO is stepping down suddenly without warning.
It’s notable that the announcement says nothing about Gelsinger having finished the part of the task he started on. It looks like they’ve lost confidence in Gelsinger (speculation). If that’s true, it also means they’ve probably lost confidence in the entire rescue plan he started on?
This is a huge bombshell, and not very elegantly executed IMO. Not just effective immediately, but effective YESTERDAY!?
Well, he tried doing nothing, now he’s all out of options?
Stock didn’t sink so at least investors and Wall Street think they’re headed in the right direction.
The biggest problem is that any change that would come from an engineering effort is going to take many many years to even have a shot at changing anything. Speeds can’t really get much higher and they can’t seem to crack making stuff smaller. There are limits to making stuff bigger.
Their video card division are essentially making $5 Walmart rotisserie chicken and $1.50 Costco hot dogs. They’re not fantastic, but they’re not bad and they’re extremely cheap.
They needed to make the next big thing three or four years ago to have it on the plate by now, assuming they don’t have anything viable in their skunk works at the moment that’s a very big ship to turn around.
So even if someone else walks in, what do they do? Fire sale inventory, put a bunch of dreamer engineers in places, hire a bunch of rock stars. Produce a new unicorn after operating for about 5 years during losses and a possible economic downturn.
I think it’s looking pretty grim even with the subsidies and a bunch of people who know what they’re doing.
Absolutely, but for some reason Intel has a history of failing in new areas. Their attempt with Itanium for high end was really bad, their attempt at RISC which mostly ended up in SCSI controllers was a failure too. Their failure with Atom not being competitive against Arm. Their attempts at compute for data-center has failed for decades against Nvidia, it’s not something that just happened recently. And they tried in the 90’s with a GPU that was embarrassingly bad and failed too.
They actually failed against AMD Athlon too, but back then, they controlled the market, and managed to keep AMD mostly out of the market.
When the Intel 80386 came out it was actually slower than the 80286!, When Pentium came out, it was slower than i486. When Pentium 4 came out, it was not nearly as efficient as Pentium 3. Intel has a long history of sub par products. Typically every second design by Intel had much worse IPC, so much so that it was barely compensated by the higher clocks of better production process. So in principle every second Intel generation was a bit like the AMD Bulldozer, but where for AMD 1 mistake almost crashed the company, Intel managed to keep profiting even from sub par products.
So it’s not really a recent problem, Intel has a long history of intermittently not being a very strong competitor or very good at designing new products and innovating. And now they’ve lost the throne even on X86! Because AMD beat the crap out of them, with chiplets, despite the per core speed of the original Ryzen was a bit lower than what Intel had.
What kept Intel afloat and hugely profitable when their designs were inferior, was that they were always ahead on the production process, that was until around 2016. Where Intel lost the lead, because their 10nm process never really worked and had multiple years of delays.
Still Intel back then always managed to come back like they did with Core2, and the brand and the X86 monopoly was enough to keep Intel very profitable, even through major strategic failures like Itanium.
Tbh it’s not 100% his fault the engineering competence began to visibly crumble under his leadership, but at the same time he absolutely stayed the course that his predecessors chose, which is what got them here in the first place. So yeah, he deserves to be excoriated for this stuff, but so do his predecessors.
Yes that part was always a bit confusing to me, because I couldn’t really see anything new in his strategy, except he was doing it harder. But isn’t that what it takes when you fall behind?
As much as I hate Gelsinger’s pompous bragging style, it’s hard to see what else they could do?
What they could have done is to try to reverse the hollowing out of their engineering divisions, and give them more agency and control in leadership. Finance types trying to min/max the P/E ratio is what got them where they are. Serious tech companies that do REAL engineering can’t really follow the norms that Wall Street loves these days and expect to remain technically cutting-edge.
Engineers are not really plug-and-play. Institutional expertise is a real and meaningful thing. They got here because their leadership has ignored those facts for at least a couple decades now.
But think of the KPI’s and all other three letter acronyms!
Maybe Lisa Su goes to Intel 🙃
Every time Intel makes a release when AMD is about to release their own competitive product, Lisa is seen sitting in a big comfy chair, next to a fireplace, calmly sipping tea at them.
I don’t watch LTT anymore, but they do have my favorite example of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuaiqcjf0bs
tl;dw: Intel did a last minute reschedule of the embargo on their new HEDT lineup to lift hours before the new AMD Threadripper chips did the same. Those chips could barely keep up with AMD’s current offerings, and everyone involved knew that the new AMD stuff was going to crush it (which it did). Intel bumps the timeline so reviews have to go out (because reviewers have to get them clicks) without being compared to what’s actually going to be sitting on shelves alongside it. Linus sees what they’re doing and absolutely rips into them at the start of the video.
Maybe intel gets absorbed into amd after Lisa Su becomes ceo.
IDK if that’s meant as a joke, but I don’t see a single reason why she would do that. She is doing very well at AMD, and the pay is better at AMD.
Intel is receiving massive subsidies. If you think about it it is miraculous they managed to lose so hard to AMD with all those subsidies.
Absolutely, AMD was able to make Ryzen on the brink of bankruptcy, I fully expected Intel to make a comeback, with all the resources at their disposal.
But instead it’s been a long string of failures and at most half successes since 2016.
I have a bit of AMD stock, but still I don’t really want to see Intel fail.
Aren’t those subsidies for building new fabs? They aren’t able to use those funds for general operations.
Stellantis CEO just abruptly quit yesterday or day before too.
True, Stellantis has done extremely poorly the past couple of years IMO. They have several brands that usually feature in the top 10 most sold car models here (Denmark). But currently they have zero models even in top 20. Their EV cars are underwhelming generally offered with too small batteries, and are almost complete failures in the market. There have been some seriously wrong administrative decisions at the top.
Some of the same can possibly be said about Intel, except Intel was already in trouble when Gelsinger took over, and he is still working on the plan he set out to execute. Switching him out now looks really bad. Of course it may be they have to, disregarding how it looks.
With Stellantis it seems more the logical thing to do. Because Stellantis is bleeding, and losing market share fast.
Edit:
Huge difference with Stellantis is that they are quite open about the performance of the company has been poor, and that’s the reason he retires abruptly.
Isn’t stellantis Chrysler? Listen I’m not a betting woman, but I feel like betting against Chrysler has been safe for most of my life, no matter how much I loved the 300M I inherited as a teenager.
Yes Chrysler is part of Stellantis, and once upon a time, way way back in what has since been called the 80’s, Chrysler was near bankrupt, but a savior came to Chrysler with the name Lee Iacocca. The mastermind behind Ford Mustang. And he came to Chrysler and saw all that was bad and fixed it. He undertook to finish a bold new type of car in the Dodge Caravan, which became hugely successful and saved Chrysler. Chrysler went on to become so successful they were even able to buy up other brands like AMC that also owned Jeep.
Ah well, as a European I know little about Chrysler today, but I have fond memories of once admiring mostly everything American, and Lee Iacocca and Jack Tramiel are probably the two business leaders I respect the most of all time.
Sorry to hear Chrysler is now considered safe to bet against. But sadly Stellantis has been shit for some years now.
Stellantis has many traditionally popular European brands, like Citroen, Peugeot, FIAT, Opel (Vauxhall in UK), Alpha Romeo and Lancia. And AFAIK all the brands are doing poorly.
Yeah Chrysler shit the bed in the 00s and has more or less just been there for a while now
It might be bad but their stocks went up significantly today…
Intel’s stock, not Stellantis they are down bad.
Wow, so an unknown is better than Gelsinger!!
Yesterday was Sunday and the beginning of the month
Which means it was kind of effective Friday, either way it doesn’t change that it is very sudden.
If this was done properly, it should have been announced Friday at the latest.
They would not want to break the stock game for their friends
What was I thinking? 😋
But their stock is actually up a bit today!
Pat came back to intel to help turn them around. I doubt he was planning to stay there.
I am pretty sure the plan wasn’t to quit at 63, at what looks like halfway through his plan.