[HN Gopher] Intel's board, and an example of when boards and sho...
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Intel's board, and an example of when boards and short-termism fail
Author : LarsDu88
Score : 329 points
Date : 2024-12-06 00:44 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fabricatedknowledge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fabricatedknowledge.com)
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Just thought this article really drives home how a behemoth
| company like Intel in the midst of a turnaround can be completely
| kneecapped by a board of directors (virtually none of whom have
| any semiconductor experience!)
| scrubs wrote:
| See comments in
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42321673
|
| Re c-suite
|
| And for a positive counter example think Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
| (1993 - 2002) when ibm was in a jamb.
| trimbo wrote:
| Gerstner saved a brand name by destroying a tech company and
| making it a consulting company. I'm not sure the same is
| possible with Intel.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think that undersells IBMs continued technical
| achievement in the mainframe space. It's a niche business
| but the folks who need it _really_ need it. Sure fine it 's
| not their growth sector, software (thanks mostly to
| RedHat), but they managed to keep a really cool and unique
| segment of engineering going despite commodity hardware
| eating the world.
| scrubs wrote:
| Gerstner left ibm far better than when he found it. That's
| the main point.
|
| Now generally speaking most American OEMs lost their
| manufacturing chops since 1985 when software began eating
| everything.
|
| Today, tech companies need to decide: did that go too far?
| Should we reincorporate physical r&d, and down size
| manufacturing supply chain bringing it back inside?
|
| Those are legit questions. Summarily stating ibm is just a
| consulting company doesn't get us anywhere.
| btilly wrote:
| IBM had three problems at that point.
|
| The first was a culture of speaking to the expectations of
| senior executives, and following strategies that made no
| sense.
|
| The second was that they were on all sides of all technology
| disputes - and so everyone hated them.
|
| The third was that they were under an antitrust consent
| decree.
|
| Basic software expertise wasn't going to help with any of
| this. The third was going to solve itself in time. The second
| was good old accounting. The first, well,
| https://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post does
| a good job of describing what IBM was doing wrong.
|
| By the time Open Source became a thing, IBM clearly had
| figured it out. The golden rule is this, people are willing
| to pay a certain amount for a solution to their problems.
| People don't care how their budget is divided. So if the
| complement to your solution is open source, you can charge
| more for the proprietary bit. Better yet, the open source
| thing with a bunch of support has a better shot than a
| completely proprietary stack. So open source the complement
| to your real product.
|
| Gerstner somehow "got it". And it showed. This is why IBM
| supported Linux, Apache, etc in 1998/1999. Letting Microsoft
| lose the standards battles.
|
| But do I see you saying that standards are a software issue?
| Maybe, but they also mattered to American Express. Which is
| where he came from. So he was equipped to understand the
| issue.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| That Usenet post was a fascinating read. I've only
| encountered OS/2 once in the wild, and it was in a lab
| being used to operate a very specialized piece of
| equipment, and it was circa 2005 so it was all ancient
| relics. Oddly, the lab members spoke highly of the user
| experience in OS/2 but I never got to mess with it.
| HdS84 wrote:
| I have seen it at s friend when it was new. Multiple DOS
| boxes where nifty. I think it also was less prone to
| crashes from faulty applications.
| btilly wrote:
| I learned a lot from that post. It is where I got a lot
| of ideas that I still use to understand the world today.
| scrubs wrote:
| You make good points, and provide good details. Thank you.
| I'll add around that. Based on a book or two I read on IBM
| at the time under Gerstner,
|
| - talked to the top 50 or 100 customers to learn what IBM
| was good at, and sucked at. From this he learned that IBM's
| weird nomenclature and incompatibility with other LANs,
| disks, etc.. sucked. He learned IBM was a bit lost in its
| own world. Perhaps more critically written as entitled. IBM
| worked on fixing it. On the good side he learned customers
| like IBM for consulting/out-sourcing of projects. Whether
| apps, LANs, O/S, storage one at a time or all at the same
| time, IBM did it all and decently well. Customers had one
| guy to thank (when things good) or yell at (when things
| went wrong). Customer's prefer that over dealing with 4
| different specialist companies they then had to corall onto
| the same page with attendant billing isssues. Insane costs
| for mainframes was another "IBM sucks".
|
| - These points taken together is why Gerstner decided to
| not split IBM up, which is what the out-going CEO (Akron?)
| suggested. At the time specialist firms in printing, disk,
| LANs, etc were progressing faster than IBM. It was thought
| splitting IBM and selling off divisions might make those
| divisions more competitive and allow what remained to be
| more profitable.
|
| - Learned that IBM had some good ideas that died in
| corporate American BS of meetings. Example: IBM had a
| manufacturing plan to reduce the costs of mainframes. When
| he found out never done, he got that going, and did
| something about removing the cruft of Corp America politics
| and nonsense that chokes out good ideas.
|
| - IBM also got lucky that the internet era (think B2B)
| needed high capacity HW. Mainframes were key. They had the
| horsepower. IBM moved MSRP down, and made a lot of money at
| the same time.
|
| - Gerstner was firm but fair. When he came in he said IBM's
| financial situation was dire. He said there'd be layoff's
| but once done, IBM would tend to not do more. So whoever
| was left was wanted, and was needed to make IBM better.
| That was both a like of remaining employees, a warm thanks
| to those who were left, and a warning, and an attempt to
| remove fear of firings in the future. Be here and be real
| or get lost. He sold off art, and real-estate to raise
| cash.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Positive counterexample? So you want Intel to go from a
| semiconductor manufacturing and design firm into a consulting
| and outsourcing company?
| scrubs wrote:
| No. I want ibm to be a better ibm for its customers, and
| ditto for intel. Intel clearly is more about manufacturing
| than ibm. Put another way, dropping hw and hw manufacturing
| at Intel for something else is net worse.
| sitkack wrote:
| Most bureaucratic woes can be attributed to abysmal board
| oversight, profit and non-profit alike.
| Loughla wrote:
| And when CEO or presidents are allowed to snow the board via
| force of personality and (for lack of a better way to say it)
| good old boy mentality.
|
| I've lived through it at multiple organizations.
|
| It's the worst death for a company.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Intel without a foundry has no strategic value to the people of
| the united states.
|
| Intel is pretty obviously dependent on taxpayer subsidies right
| now.
|
| So they're going to get rid of the foundry?
|
| Big brain plan over there.
| NortySpock wrote:
| I was going to say, the fab is capital-intensive but at least
| has value as an asset so long as you can keep it printing out
| chips profitably, which is more likely in a trade war where
| certain foreign chips are banned...
|
| As for what chips you print on them... x86, ARM, RISC-V, GPUs,
| NPUs, RAM, FPGAs, PLAs, print whatever the market asks for...
| It's not like there's fundamental superior value in x86 as an
| intellectual property, just inertia.
|
| But local manufacturing gets protected in a trade war, because
| you'll need it if push comes to shove. Intellectual property
| just gets stolen and copied.
| henriquez wrote:
| I'm sure the Intel board members will be drying their tears with
| hundred dollar bills when their assistants tell them about this
| article. I don't remember a time when Intel either had a strategy
| or the strategy wasn't short-sighted.
| njtransit wrote:
| There's an implicit assumption in the article that, because
| Gelsinger was technically competent, he was going to be a great
| CEO of given enough time.
|
| Personally, I've heard nothing but bad things from Intel during
| Gelsinger's tenure. He had some lofty ideas, but he clearly
| wasn't executing well with Intel's bread and butter business.
|
| Also, I'm not sure good engineers always make good managers.
| Management is all about delegation. The skillset is really about
| identifying talent and trusting them to do things competently so
| you don't have to worry about the details. That's pretty much the
| antithesis of engineering, where you like thinking through the
| specific details of how things will work. And of course,
| engineering is only one part of brining products to market.
| jackyinger wrote:
| If you care to read the article you'll find evidence of Pat's
| competence.
| Zigurd wrote:
| There's a strong case to be made that Intel CEO is the worst
| job in tech, and also the most complex, and it also has
| mediocre upside. Which prompts the question: Is there someone
| better than Pat Gelsinger who actually wants that job?
| rsanek wrote:
| $50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take
| eric-hu wrote:
| That's a lot of money to you and me, but we're not in the
| running for a CEO position at Intel. For the people who
| might be, I wouldn't be surprised if that's peanuts.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| It's also, weirdly, not going to make a lot of difference
| to the person earning it.
|
| If you're next in line to that, you can already afford
| literally everything. Or stop working tomorrow and still
| afford _almost_ everything.
|
| So it's about whether or not it's a good job to work in,
| and one that will enhance your reputation and status.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| IIRC 10 year old report states 100 million usd net worth
| is enough to buy whatever you want.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Depends on your appetite of course. But I think it's safe
| to say that if you're not satisfied at $10m net worth,
| you're never going to be, and you'll just keep on chasing
| til circumstances force you to stop.
| njtransit wrote:
| 50M in salary is actually quite high. The S&P 500 average
| is less than 20M. I've seen companies half the size of
| Intel pay their CEOs ~11M.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It is high. And it is wrong. See details here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42341514
| alecco wrote:
| When you can get fired by the board within 6 months, it
| matters. This could be a death blow gig for a competent
| career CEO.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > $50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take
|
| OK. Rule of thumb. Any sensationalist headline about CEO
| making $N dollars is always wrong.
|
| The real details are in the Proxy statement they are now
| required to file. As an example, when Pat signed on, his
| compensation package was worth over $160m. How much did he
| actually get? $10M. Why? Because the rest of the package
| was contingent on high share prices (I think $80 was the
| lowest target). He got none of it.
|
| And the punchline: His total payout during his whole tenure
| is $46-49M. That's over almost 4 years. And includes his
| sign on bonus and severance bonus.
|
| So yes, your claim of $50m yearly salary is ludicrous.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-
| massive-14...
| nimish wrote:
| Incredible that they set his performance targets on stock
| price and not on market share and technological
| superiority.
|
| Priorities and incentives matter
| rvba wrote:
| Guy praying on twitter does not sound like some scientist to
| me, although article says he did 486
| Zigurd wrote:
| He's religious but that shows publicly only on his personal
| social media posts once a week, where he posts a bible verse.
| That's unusual in the tech industry. For some people like for
| example, Cathie Wood, conspicuous religiosity is a red flag.
| But I've never seen any evidence that Pat Gelsinger has any
| problems like that.
| tgma wrote:
| Lots of top tier scientists have been religious. Knuth is
| too, for instance. It strikes me as strange that believing in
| "simulation theory" has become cool and acceptable in tech
| circles, but somehow traditional popular religions are
| frowned upon. Feels dogmatic to believe so strongly that
| scientists necessarily have to be in direct contrast with
| religion.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >It strikes me as strange that believing in "simulation
| theory" has become cool and acceptable in tech circles
|
| It has? I like to bring it up in comments sometimes, and I
| see other people do too, but this doesn't mean anyone
| actually "believes in it". Imagining it as a possibility is
| not at all akin to a religious belief, where you have a
| strong, _dogmatic_ belief in something despite a total lack
| of evidence (or even evidence to the contrary).
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _a religious belief, where you have a strong, dogmatic
| belief_
|
| "Strong" belief is probably overselling the strength of
| the belief of an average religious adherent. A whole lot
| of people have doubts, only go to church a few times a
| year, etc. There are a lot of people for whom Pascal's
| Wager is persuasive, who stick with a religion despite
| severe doubts _" just in case."_
|
| In either the case of traditional religion or simulation
| theory, you have people with varied levels of conviction
| believing in something for which there isn't empirical
| evidence. As an atheist, I consider simulation theory to
| be one of the many manifestation of the innate religious
| tendencies in humans. It lacks a supernatural component
| _per se_ (that 's debatable, it depends on what is meant
| precisely by _super_ natural), but it's a framework
| commonly used to construct many of the same spiritual
| systems traditionally seen in religions _(our reality was
| intentionally created, we have a purpose to the creator,
| we 're being watched, we're being judged, etc)_
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Also, I'm not sure good engineers always make good managers.
|
| I worked at Intel when Craig Barrett was CEO. He was also a
| former engineer, and he was a terrible CEO. Intel got involved
| in a bunch of stupid stuff during his tenure, like the P4
| Netburst architecture, the RAMBUS fiasco, and lots of side
| businesses that didn't pan out. Otellini took over and fixed
| things by going to the Core architecture, IIRC.
|
| I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper
| managers) is the exception, not the rule.
| tgma wrote:
| > I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp.
| upper managers) is the exception, not the rule.
|
| Good managers are exceptions, period. Still, good engineers
| are leaps and bounds more likely to be effective as managers,
| even if they make managerial mistakes. This is probably even
| more true for high level executives than line managers.
|
| There's a common bigco school of thought that does not say
| this explicitly, but believes "nerds are bad managers," so if
| you are good at engineering you're less likely to be good at
| management, so let's go hire pro managers (that end up being
| schmoozers and less technical). In my experience, the less
| technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management.
| packetlost wrote:
| I had a conversation today about that topic sorta. I find
| the abstract tradeoffs of writing software (ie. efficiency
| vs flexibility) to be inherent to company social structures
| as well. I suspect the intuition that engineers build up of
| knowing when to favor either side is applicable, just with
| different error signals.
| YZF wrote:
| There are a lot of similarities between software and
| organizations. But being a CEO also requires people
| skills. Many of us software folks have good intuition
| about how to make technical projects successful but the
| way to get there often involves getting other people to
| cooperate. AKA leadership. That's the tough one.
|
| That said I agree that a CEO of a company like Intel has
| to be technical. I mean we saw what happened to Apple
| when the CEO came from Pepsi. But you need someone
| technical, in the domain, who is also a strong leader and
| a visionary and those people are not that common.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of Conway's Law:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
| bjarneh wrote:
| > the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at
| management
|
| The golden combo.
| lnsru wrote:
| Technical founder sold a company (where I currently work)
| to a big corp. Big corp sends here regularly directors with
| MBA to fix things, but things are worse and worse every
| year. People ask me why I joined a company in free fall
| every week. The thing is that technical understanding of
| MBAs is close to zero. Result will not improve throwing
| away 15% of the employees (the guy before current director
| did this). It's obvious to me as an engineer with
| experience in operations - the products are not designed
| for easy production and manual testing takes too long and
| has bad error coverage. I have experience to fix obvious
| technical problems. No MBA will see them in first place. No
| MBA with their arrogance will listen to an engineer. Let's
| wait for recession to end and look for new jobs.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Talk to your manager manager. Talk in manager's language.
| Be rich. :-/
| silvestrov wrote:
| It's a very common business school line of thought that
| managers are always smarter than the people they manage.
| Employees are seen as "resources", not as talents.
|
| So by definition nerds (and other non-business school
| people) cannot be as good.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The difference between immediate pre-P4 and now Intel
| problems is stark though.
|
| Immediately pre-P4, Intel need a better architecture than
| K6-* or AMD-next (revealed as Athlon). That's not a process
| problem.
|
| Now, Intel needs their leading node to work. That's a process
| problem.
|
| Arguably, none of Intel's business model works if their
| process is substantially behind TSMC.
|
| Consequently, the CEO and board should be 100% focused on
| returning to process parity.
|
| Gelsinger at least had an economically viable plan for that.
| Without him? No strategic plan: the board sure as shit isn't
| going to come up with one.
| YZF wrote:
| Intel historically was the best at semiconductor
| manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got
| to.
|
| I bought some Intel shares when it crashed last time but
| the latest events are changing my mind on the prospects of
| this company. Intel getting to be the best at process
| happened over years or decades of people and culture. If
| that's gone there's no way to reproduce it. Looking from
| the outside it looks like through offshoring, layoffs and
| culture issues they've basically lost what they had.
|
| I think AMD managed to make it through tough times (and
| Intel way back then as well) because even when the company
| was struggling financially it managed to maintain people
| and culture that enabled it to overcome the challenges. But
| now the times have changed and executives don't see people
| or culture as leverage, and are happy to get rid of those.
| You better not need any amazing execution from that point
| on.
| tgma wrote:
| > Intel historically was the best at semiconductor
| manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got
| to.
|
| Exactly. AMD has been executing perfectly on the CPU
| side, but they also happened to be a key beneficiary in
| an unprecedented event in the past few decades: TSMC
| overtaking Intel in their process which would likely not
| have happened without Apple betting on them.
|
| Intel did not benefit from the stagnation they had which
| was enabled by their success and monopoly. Internet
| Explorer 6-level stagnation: from Haswell to ~2018 they
| successfully shipped the same product over and over again
| and when AMD pressure started to mount, they basically
| trickled down higher core counts into cheaper SKUs. It
| would have worked, except at the highest end, they needed
| the process to be competitive and it wasn't, which messed
| up everything.
| hedora wrote:
| It's not just a process problem. Unless you are on windows
| or playing steam games on linux, there is zero reason to
| prefer x86.
|
| Those markets add to way less than 50% of consumer market
| share. X86 is rapidly declining in cloud too.
|
| It reminds me of sun, dec and hp fighting to have the best
| commercial unix OS in the late 1990's. Even if you win, you
| loose.
| kimixa wrote:
| The only way you can get _close_ to x86 being "less than
| 50% of the consumer market" is by including phones, but
| I'd argue that's a new market _on top_ of the "consumer
| computing" market. And even then, in "unit count" rather
| than revenue.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Besides Windows or gaming, there is another market for
| x86.
|
| If you are interested in technical and scientific
| computing, but you cannot afford to spend amounts of $
| written with 6 digits or much more, then x86 is the only
| solution.
|
| The only Arm-based CPUs with decent performance are those
| made by Fujitsu, which are not available at retail.
|
| The "datacenter" GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA are much too
| expensive for small businesses or individuals. Even for a
| bigger business their price is justifiable only when they
| are busy close to 24/7.
|
| So for most people only the x86 CPUs provide an
| acceptable performance for computations that use either
| FP64 numbers or large integers.
| mkesper wrote:
| Things are changing on that front, too:
| https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-megadc-
| ars-211m-nr-r...
| adrian_b wrote:
| The Ampere CPUs may be great for something like Web
| servers, but they are pathetic at number crunching. The
| same is true for the CPU cores designed by Arm, which are
| used in the server CPUs of other cloud vendors.
| wbl wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20. If higher clocks won out because
| extractable IPC was lower Netburst was the right design.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Foresight (at the time) told you NetBurst was a dead end
| though. AMD made a lot of sales from people avoiding
| NetBurst, ignoring clock speeds and looking at actual
| performance numbers.
|
| NetBurst looked good on benchmarks; code with few/no
| branches that fit in the L2 cache if not the L1 cache. On
| real world code consisting almost entirely of branches and
| pointer chasing the NetBurst chips performed horribly
| compared to lower clocked Athlons.
|
| Intel's promises of 5+ GHz chips got more laughable as the
| line went on because they were already straining cooling
| and power supply options at less than 3GHz.
| wbl wrote:
| Netburst's branch predictor choices survived. It was the
| penalties that were a bad idea.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| The problem with Netburst was the clock speed wall. They
| designed it with a view to continued doubling which has
| been a trend up until then. It turns out once you go past
| 3GHz improvements are much, much slower.
|
| We hit 3GHz in 2003. If you go back ten years from that,
| the top speed available was 66MHz, ten years before that
| and it was 8MHz. Fast forward 20 years and we're just
| barely scraping 6GHz.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Doing the math - even a conservative estimate for 1983 to
| 2003 is eight doublings.
|
| That would give us a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 768GHz
| today. Which, Netburst or no, would wipe the floor with
| the fastest available multi-core chip.
|
| While also putting out enough heat energy to keep a small
| town in Northern Canada warm all winter long.
| roenxi wrote:
| I don't think the article did assume that. If you read between
| the lines the writer might well believe Intel is beyond saving
| no matter what Gelsinger does. Zero in on:
|
| > The CEOs who got Intel into this mess were much longer than
| Pat and a worse fit. Meanwhile, the board let most of his
| predecessor's activities go unchecked as they sped through
| disaster.
|
| That really captures the spirit of the article. It is pointing
| out that the people ultimately responsible for getting Intel
| into a mess are still in charge and have started to flail. That
| doesn't mean the writer thinks Gelsinger was going to be a
| great CEO because he is technical. They think that the board is
| terrible and there is evidence that it hasn't changed.
|
| This behaviour by the board would be a common enough pattern in
| both business and political failures. Something goes wrong, the
| people in charge don't admit they made mistakes (or everyone
| just assumes it is too late to recover) and retain power.
| njtransit wrote:
| The article focuses on the boards alleged ineptitude, not
| about Gelsinger directly, but the article directly states
| that Gelsinger was the best possible candidate:
|
| > But the reality is he's the single best candidate for the
| company.
|
| However, directly before this, the author offers this:
|
| > Meanwhile, Pat wanted to pursue the big, bold IFS bet, with
| 100s of thousands of wafers, when the reality is just getting
| 10s of thousands of wafers is a massive problem as is.
|
| This sounds oddly reminiscent of people I've worked with in
| the past. They have grand, pie-in-the-sky visions of what
| something should be, but don't know how to quickly and
| efficiently take the steps to get there.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Personally, I've heard nothing but bad things from Intel
| during Gelsinger's tenure. He had some lofty ideas,
|
| I don't know if I can say he was doing a good or bad job - it's
| really hard to say. But were there good things about him that
| people say?
|
| He was the first CEO to say Intel was underpaying. He promised
| to raise pay, made a deal with the board to do so, and
| delivered. Most people got something like a 20% pay boost.
| Still not FAANG level, but compared to the prior CEOs who said
| "We pay fair market rates"... yeah, he won points with a lot of
| employees for that.
|
| He quickly banned stock buybacks. Throughout his tenure he
| focused on his Foundry plans and improving engineering
| practices, at the cost of share value. His plan was "Let's fix
| our fabs and our efficiency, get back to building world class
| products, and the financials will take care of themselves". As
| opposed to all his predecessors who did stock buybacks instead
| of investing the money into the company.
|
| He convinced the board to cut the dividend to a third of its
| value - because Intel was paying triple the dividends that its
| competitors paid.
|
| No doubt many didn't like declining stocks, but no one can
| argue he was trying to artificially prop up the share price.
| His overall compensation was low.[1] He didn't earn any of his
| performance based stocks, and didn't try to manipulate those
| prices for personal gain. In the end he made a little over $10m
| per year - that includes the severance pay and signing bonus.
|
| He was fairly good with transparency. He wanted the world to
| see the fab's financials when he knew they were poor. The point
| was to give the world a real number that could be used as a
| metric of how well Intel is doing. $8B loss this year, with the
| hope of breaking even in the next few years.
|
| This last thing is what probably got him fired because the
| stock tanked after that (I don't know why - everyone knew it
| was unprofitable...).
|
| Declining revenues are due to Intel products not competing. How
| much of that is Pat's fault - hard to say. Intel was making
| poor products for a while, and partly due to a poor fab process
| - which is precisely what Pat was trying to fix (5 nodes in 4
| years is _unprecedented_ , and it looks like Intel will achieve
| it). Lunar Lake was built on TSMC, and is a fairly decent
| product. Overall, the gap between AMD and Intel has shrunk.
|
| Finally, perhaps the reason people really hated him: The
| layoffs. But as is often pointed out on HN, if you compare
| Intel's headcount with comparable companies (AMD, Nvidia), you
| can see Intel is really wasteful. The revenue per person is
| much, much lower. You can compare just the Intel Products head
| count (excluding the fabs). The layoffs had to happen. And
| there have to be more if Intel wants to be competitive. It can
| no longer command high margins.
|
| So yeah, plenty hate him. But plenty do like him.
|
| > but he clearly wasn't executing well with Intel's bread and
| butter business.
|
| Nor were the previous two CEOs.
|
| [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-
| massive-14...
| njtransit wrote:
| These are all very interesting points. I'd like to add the
| total flop of Arrow Lake. That's the type of thing the board
| likely cares about.
| BeetleB wrote:
| One product won't sink a company or CEO. The failure to
| capitalize on AI, though, is another matter.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Agree with all of this - lot of armchair experts in here but
| the reality is we will not know how good he was until a few
| years down the line
| smaddox wrote:
| > if you compare Intel's headcount with comparable companies
| (AMD, Nvidia), you can see Intel is really wasteful
|
| AMD and NVIDIA are fabless. They are not comparable. It takes
| far more people to R&D a cutting-edge process node and run a
| dozen fabs 24/7 365.25 than it takes to design cutting edge
| chips.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > AMD and NVIDIA are fabless. They are not comparable.
|
| Which is why I said:
|
| > You can compare just the Intel Products head count
| (excluding the fabs).
|
| Both AMD and Nvidia have under 30K folks. Intel has what -
| 115K employees? I can assure you that 85K of them are not
| working in Foundry. TSMC, BTW, has 76K employees in case
| you want to do a Foundry comparison. Anyway you slice it
| (compare products or compare fabs), Intel is wasteful.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Management is all about delegation.
|
| yes, but a manager who has no idea about his products, is a bad
| manager. Sometimes the teams below compensate and this is not
| visible, but, when the shit hits the fun, it becomes obvious.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have followed Intel's products closely. While they suck
| enough that there have passed more than 5 years since I have
| bought for the last time Intel CPUs (but before that I had
| spent a lot of money on Intel CPUs and other products), I have
| not seen any problem that can be attributed directly to Pat
| Gelsinger.
|
| Unlike most companies, Intel publishes relatively detailed
| roadmaps with years in advance.
|
| Since Pat Gelsinger has become CEO, all those roadmaps have
| been accomplished in time, even if the products have not been
| as good as they could have been, due to things like low clock
| frequencies for any new fabrication process at launch (but this
| is a problem that has plagued Intel for the entirety of the
| last 10 years) or high intercommunication latencies for the
| first Intel multi-tile CPUs, like Sapphire Rapids and Arrow
| Lake, which can be attributed to an unavoidable lack of
| experience with such designs (because the former Intel
| management has delayed for too many years the transition to
| such designs, with jokes about the "glued" CPUs of the
| competition).
|
| According to the roadmaps published years ago, the recent years
| have been intended as transitional years, with the first really
| competitive Intel products being launched only in the second
| half of 2025. Only then it would have been possible to judge
| correctly whether Pat Gelsinger had done a good job or a bad
| job as CEO.
|
| As outsiders, we do not have enough information about what Pat
| Gelsinger has done. The roadmaps have been reasonable, the main
| thing that could be criticized is that there have been too many
| intermediate steps before reaching desirable products. However,
| it is likely that Intel could not have sustained financially a
| more abrupt transition. Even with this slower transition that
| has included the launch of many intermediate products intended
| to avoid a collapse of the sales, the financial losses have
| been high enough that they have been used as an excuse to eject
| Pat Gelsinger.
|
| It seems that Pat Gelsinger did not have the power to do a real
| cleanup of the Intel managers, especially of those from the
| fabs. For years many of those managers must have lied
| continuously both to other Intel divisions and in the public
| presentations. There is no public information that any of those
| managers have suffered adequate consequences for their actions.
|
| Also, it does not seem that he has succeeded to improve the
| internal cooperation between various Intel divisions. Some
| internal competition is good, but withholding information and
| lack of cooperation is bad. At Intel, too many products appear
| to have been developed independently by different teams,
| instead of all teams sharing some common designs as a base for
| their products.
| kk032 wrote:
| In their defense its a complex world. Its easy to focus on people
| and forget about how complex the environment they operate in has
| become. And the complexity is increasing not decreasing.
|
| Google C-Suite turnover rates and the downward trend they have
| been on for the last few decades. In Tech and Finance C-Suite its
| super steep. The famous ones are outliers and mostly figure
| heads. Behind the scenes there is constant chaotic churn.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yeah and this space is about as complex as it gets. That being
| said, they have screwed a lot of things up. But even if they
| executed perfectly they might be in approximately the same
| spot.
| rvba wrote:
| Working at Boeing, GE... should be like a kiss of death -
| permanent ban on any work related to shareholder value
| bdangubic wrote:
| it is a publicly-traded company though, and if they are not
| working towards increasing shareholder value the investors will
| bolt and then how are you gonna pay your bills? :)
|
| nationalizing might be a way but the government will run it and
| that always works out...
| rvba wrote:
| Looks like they maximize short term with various snake oil
| tactics, but then the company dies long term.
|
| For me it has nothing to do with creating value, it is more
| like putting putting lipstick on a pig.
|
| Instead of actually fixing and building things.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Intel should have someone like Jim Keller on the board. Maybe
| even software folks like Chris Lattner. Not Boeing, GE, merger
| and acquisition clowns.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| He was there in 2020!
|
| He left after something like 3 months because he couldn't get
| buy-in for his ideas from senior management, most probably
| the board of directors: https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/commen
| ts/z3set6/jim_keller_ap...
| sgerenser wrote:
| It was a bit more than 3 months: According to Wikipedia,
| between April of 2018 and June of 2020. Him not getting
| buy-in for his ideas though does appear to be one of the
| reasons he left.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Clowns indeed. The only investment Boeing and Intel board
| members know how to execute is the ole' C-suite self-serving
| stock buyback.
|
| Intel is over 100B in the last 30 years.
|
| Boeing bought back 3x what it would have cost to develop the
| next-gen 737 in very recent history.
|
| Clowns with no shame, and apparently no repercussions.
| airstrike wrote:
| After almost a decade advising on large cap M&A in Wall Street,
| my biggest takeaway is that activist investors play a fundamental
| role in capital markets. I think a lot of the hate they get is
| fabricated by the status quo in PR wars. If I were considering
| going back to M&A, that gig would be at the top of my list.
|
| I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen activists clamoring for
| this board to be replaced. Maybe it's too late for Intel and
| nobody has the stomach and stamina to try to turn it around when
| there's easier money to be made in a very favorable environment.
| Or maybe it's too early and an activist is indeed slowly buying
| up a position but hasn't hit the threshold after which they must
| disclose their stake.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I have been a consistent critic of Intel on here.
|
| But a company like Intel can't be spun up/replaced on anything
| less than even more subsidies and probably 10 years of
| nondelivery/noncompetitiveness. A chip foundry and chip design
| of this level takes a long time to reach competence. Hell, if
| you are 1 generation behind status quo, Intel shows it can take
| 3 years to catch up, if then.
|
| This company isn't a struggling retailer in a sea of retailers
| (Sears) or some rando restaurant chain selling potato skins,
| blooming onions, and nachos (TGIFridays).
|
| This is a top-line chip fabricator, in a geopolitical
| environment where supply lines/shipping lines are under threat
| in the Pacific, demographic collapses in China, Japan, and
| South Korea are underway, and a president that wants to start a
| tariff war.
|
| National security concerns underline Intels importance. It
| isn't some chopshop private equity spreadsheet play. If you
| split it you need functional mission-based companies.
|
| Intel has something like a dozen fabs. I would subdivide those
| into the lines of business their process nodes can serve, from
| embedded / industrial stuff, board chipsets, whatever.
|
| Identify the process nodes desperately needed for economic
| protection from a hostile/collapsing China (same thing
| basically in economic impact). We need state of the art, so the
| latest and n-1 fabs get wrapped up, but we likely need a
| boatload of second and third tier node production as well.
|
| I think Intel's fabs can be split in the n-2 and n-3 nodes into
| two competing companies, because the US doesn't need
| monopolies, it needs competition, and that will be the path to
| far better utilization of subsidies and speeding up production
| independence from the Asian rim.
|
| I cannot believe Intel has failed at integrated graphics for so
| long. I'd like a competitor to NVidia besides AMD.
|
| Setting up functional subsidiaries like this will absolutely
| not happen with private equity chopshops, all run by the same
| financial illusionists that have crushed Intel and Boeing.
|
| But that's not how the oligarchy works. It'll be something that
| maximizes concentration of the subsidy check by the same
| incompetents that "manage" Intel right now, and the subsidy
| will be squandered.
|
| I cannot believe a Boeing fuckhead is now the interim CEO.
| Nothing will go well, these people are survivalist lizards that
| care about their careers and stock options and parachutes. That
| Boeing guy likely engineered the ousting, he's a slimy survivor
| of corporate Machiavellianism.
|
| I invite him to prove me wrong, the country needs it.
| airstrike wrote:
| The activist playbook isn't limited to chopping up shops or
| any subset of the PE playbook.
|
| Intel stock is likely so undervalued right now that an
| activist can just come in, throw a fight deck at the board,
| show to the market that they will put _some_ better board in
| charge (shouldn't be too hard), get the votes they need,
| replace the board (partially), see the stock rally (pick a
| number) 20% on improved sentiment and expectations, gradually
| unwind the position and move on.
| meiraleal wrote:
| That's a very romantic way to describe a corporation that was
| sucked dry by greedy men in suits.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I feel like Intel was ahead for a very long time and perhaps
| intentionally coasting and then suddenly in the span of a few
| years they went from barely any competition to losing best in
| class in compute to three separate competitors. AMD having
| great consumer processors and now beating in sales in data
| centers, Apple having without a doubt the best consumer
| processor, NVIDIA completely owning the machine learning
| compute market which is now enormous.
|
| I think beat case is NVIDIA buys Intel and spins off some of
| the less mainline business units.
|
| In dire straights I don't think the government would allow
| Intel to fall to vultures and instead would compel them to
| continue operating at any loss rate and then if they failed
| to avoid bankruptcy nationalize them in much the same way as
| AIG or General Motors for long term reorganization.
| hulitu wrote:
| > , Apple having without a doubt the best consumer
| processor
|
| too bad it doesn't run (properly) other OS. than Apple's
| andreasmetsala wrote:
| Linux support seems to be getting there. Windows support
| is on Microsoft to deliver.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Literally all that happened is Intel lost the fab lead and
| then lost fab parity. Their CPUs were, and are, still
| competitive with AMD chips, or at least close enough that
| they can just adjust prices to make up the difference.
|
| Fabs are extremely expensive, and an uncompetitive fab is
| literally just a pit in which you toss money. That's
| Intel's current problem.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > uncompetitive fab
|
| I have seen this phrase used a few times here. Is there
| such a thing? Sure, a fab can be old and produce chips
| with larger transistor sizes, but there isn't a lack of
| demand. Only a tiny fraction of ICs need the latest
| transistor sizes.
|
| To be clear, do you any inside information / career
| experience that you _know_ that existing Intel fabs are
| losing money? I have not read any such reports in media.
|
| As a counterpoint, Europe and Japan are no longer cutting
| edge in their fabs, but continue to produce many ICs for
| industry.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Intel's financial reports show their fabs losing billions
| every quarter.
|
| Nevertheless, it is hard to know how real are these
| numbers, because the prices charged by the Intel fabs for
| making Intel CPUs are set internally, so they could be
| manipulated to move all losses on the fabs from the
| consumer and server product divisions.
|
| Moreover, for the latest Intel fabrication process for
| which anything is known, i.e. Intel 4, which is used for
| making the CPU tiles in the Meteor Lake CPUs, it is known
| that the fabrication yields have been much less than
| desirable, which had two outcomes, both less profit
| margins when selling Meteor Lake and the inability to
| produce as many Meteor Lake CPUs as they could have sold.
| Both effects have increased the financial losses suffered
| by Intel during 2024.
|
| In general, "uncompetitive fab" can mean two things.
| Either there are things that the fab cannot do at all or
| the fab has too low fabrication yields at the things that
| it can do.
|
| The Intel fabs are in the second situation. They can do
| about the same things that TSMC can do, but at much lower
| fabrication yields, which means much higher production
| costs. High production costs means low profits and Intel
| is a company that has been habituated to have huge
| profits, so it cannot manage well the case when its
| profit margins are very thin.
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| But is this an issue of them only building their own
| chips?
|
| (Speaking of which, what does Intel do with old fabs for
| the past 20 years after moving to a new node?)
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| > Only a tiny fraction of ICs need the latest transistor
| sizes.
|
| The problem is that the latest transistor sizes are the
| ones that have profit margins. 90% of TSMCs chips aren't
| on EUV processes, but 50% of their profits come from EUV.
| If you don't have leading (or close to leading)
| processes, you're completely shut out of the phone,
| laptop, server, and GPU market. Intel could survive like
| that, but it would involve laying off ~90% of their staff
| and exiting all of their major markets.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Collapsing China? I read this is as a big no clue rant.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| China's demographics are beginning to look bad and their
| sclerotic economy is brewing for civil unrest
| lnsru wrote:
| Many many unrest cases showed, that with proper
| oppression methods the country can go for decades
| afterwards. Gulags and closed psychiatric clinics were
| full of unstable elements trying to destabilize
| countries. And that was possible without modern
| observation methods.
| meiraleal wrote:
| you know that The United States leads the world in total
| number of people incarcerated, right? the consumerist
| Gulag isn't less gulag than the soviet one.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| It actually is
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| China has four brewing issues:
|
| Demographic cliff on a scale not seen: yes Japan is going
| through one now, but China's is simply unprecedented in the
| sheer numbers
|
| Authoritarianism: China is rolling back free market
| reforms, centralizing power under Xi
|
| Finance: China has a real estate and debt bubble at the
| regional government level.
|
| War and aggression: China US relations are approaching cold
| war levels and a Taiwan invasion seems likely. Four years
| of trade war is imminent.
|
| Depending how it plays out, any one of these is trouble for
| offshore manufacturing in China. I suppose collapse is a
| strong word, but it is stupid to rely on Chinese production
| both for a company and in terms of national security.
|
| Zeigan has been singing this tune for a decade, but
| recently there are many other geopolitical talks I've seen
| repeating each or all of the four issues I've listed above,
| and the demographics aspect is inevitable at a minimum.
| chithanh wrote:
| The "China collapse" claim is indeed not new, and it is
| as wrong as ever.
|
| The demographic situation is manageable, especially given
| how the generation entering retirement are factory
| workers, who are being replaced by automation on a
| massive scale. The generation which enters the labor
| market has a much higher number of college degrees.
|
| Real estate bubble doesn't concern most Chinese citizens,
| but only those who used it to speculate, despite being
| warned by Xi not to[1]. If you own a house for living
| inside, you don't need to care if its resale value goes
| up or down. Still, deflating the housing bubble was
| painful, but China managed to grow the economy through
| this anyway.
|
| About war, I don't think so, at least not in the next 4
| years. Trump and several Republican leaders made it clear
| already that they don't want to defend Taiwan, so the
| Taiwanese government will likely refrain from things
| which could trigger armed conflict. Even if things
| escalated, a naval blockade would be more likely, and the
| US public largely doesn't support entering into direct
| conflict over that[2].
|
| [1] https://www.scmp.com/business/article/2116621/what-
| president...
|
| [2] https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-
| survey/tai...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Still, deflating the housing bubble was painful, but
| China managed to grow the economy through this anyway.
|
| China hasn't deflated its housing bubble yet. Yes, real
| estate turn over has basically ground to a standstill,
| but that doesn't mean many have been forced to take a
| loss yet. The reckoning still hasn't come, and should
| look something like a larger Japan property bubble pop
| when it happens.
|
| Still, the US is screwed since China is basically going
| to own automation via its current investments (along with
| investments in EVs, green energy, and HSR). If they can
| figure out their chip and jet turbine problems (still not
| solved, they can't make fast chips economically yet, or
| even expensive ones without western equipment), they have
| everything in the bag, so to speak.
| huijzer wrote:
| I would politely argue against the word "collapse". It's
| overly dramatic. It makes no sense when talking about
| societies. Peter Zeihan uses the word a lot but that doesn't
| mean it's correct. Peter just knows that fear sells. But what
| does it mean for a society to collapse? One day all is fine
| and the next day it is not? "Downward spiral" seems more
| appropriate.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| When a bridge collapses it doesn't happen in one go - first
| a couple of bits are rusty, some foundations are crumbling
| and not tended to. Then a couple of supports fall off but
| it's fine because it's summer. Then winter comes with the
| extra load than entails, snow, rain.
|
| It's fine, the bridge remains up but now one of the
| remaining supports is working back and forth every time a
| car goes over it. One day a heavy truck goes over it.
|
| One day the collapse is apparent to us all, and complete.
| But it began long ago when maintenance was neglected.
|
| Society is like that.
| huijzer wrote:
| Could you give a clear example from history? Usually it
| isn't clear. For example, historians are still not in
| agreement about when the Roman empire ended [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/fall-of-rome-short-
| timeline-121196
| scandox wrote:
| > One day the collapse is apparent to us all, and
| complete.
|
| This only happens in historical retrospect. The sacking
| of Rome in 476 theoretically marked the collapse of The
| Roman Empire in Western Europe but nonetheless people all
| over Europe continued to live in a Roman style and think
| of themselves as citizens of the Roman Empire for a very
| long time.
|
| We won't know when our society has collapsed. Our grand
| children may.
| timschmidt wrote:
| I generally agree, however a counterpoint is that modern
| technology has made the world smaller and consequences
| arrive faster. No longer does news travel at the speed of
| a mule drawn cart, now it happens at a significant
| fraction of the speed of light.
| w10-1 wrote:
| The analogy to Rome is inapt.
|
| We're highly dependent on external capital, technologies,
| materials, and resources -- not to mention goodwill
| enabling trade and avoiding social chaos. All of these
| can and do change in a matter of months, and the speed of
| the collapse can be amplified by smart individuals making
| self-interested decisions, and even more by bad actors
| working in concert for strategic reasons.
| hulitu wrote:
| > because the US doesn't need monopolies
|
| They seem to love them very much, though. (Microsoft, Google,
| Apple, Facebook)
| 7speter wrote:
| Uhhh... most of the companies you listed compete with
| eachother?
| passwordoops wrote:
| Making it an oligopoly... Not much better
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >a company like Intel can't be spun up/replaced on anything
| less than even more subsidies and probably 10 years of
| nondelivery/noncompetitiveness.
|
| As a taxpayer I sincerely couldn't care less, I'm fucking
| tired of seeing my tax dollars wasted on bailouts and
| subsidies for nothing. If we absolutely must use tax dollars
| on Intel at this point, I have a hardline requirement:
| Nationalize them. I want fucking tangible assets, things of
| fucking value for my tax dollars spent. I want them to become
| Public Property if they want to spend Public Money. I want
| them answering to the accountability of the Constitution and
| the electorate for wanting my tax dollars so desperately.
|
| >This is a top-line chip fabricator,
|
| No, they are not. If they were, none of us would be having
| this conversation.
|
| >National security concerns underline Intels importance.
|
| No, it is not. Not when we (Intel) are already defeated and
| the battle decided. Not when allies (South Korea, Israel,
| Germany/EU, et al.) have actual top-line silicon production.
| Also see next.
|
| >Identify the process nodes desperately needed for economic
| protection ... We need state of the art,
|
| No, we do not. Most of the country, let alone the world,
| still runs on 50+ year old silicon technology. Not even the
| military uses "state of the art" silicon, they're almost
| always at least 10 to 20 years back from the bleeding edge if
| not more.
|
| As for the silicon we all actually need and use? We can
| produce plenty of them. See: Texas Instruments (includes
| former National Semiconductor), Analog Devices, Onsemi
| (includes former Fairchild Semiconductor), and more.
|
| No, we _do not need_ Intel for national security, nor even
| economic prosperity for that matter. The American
| semiconductor industry is much more massive than Nvidia, AMD,
| and Intel.
|
| >I cannot believe Intel has failed at integrated graphics for
| so long.
|
| Intel's iGPUs have been and are the best iGPUs on the market.
| They almost always work everywhere everytime for all
| practical purposes. It's their discrete GPUs which have been
| and always were disappointing, I'm not holding my breath that
| Battlemage can defy history.
| crowcroft wrote:
| The cycles are so long that I think it's hard for activists to
| get in, set a new course and exit with a profit.
|
| Having said that the stock is so low at this point something
| will probably happen. I think private equity taking it private
| for 5-10 years would let the company work through a long term
| turn around.
|
| Similar to what's happened with Yahoo. PE could buy it, spin
| out/sell the most distracting adjacent parts of the business,
| and then focus the core business over the next five years
| without needing to publicly deliver quarterly updates.
|
| It would be a massive PE deal, but not outside the realms of
| possibility, especially if the stock drops a few more percent.
| llsf wrote:
| Is it time for Elon Musk to step in, or is it too early ?
|
| Now with the CHIPs money coming in, it might be the right time...
| claaams wrote:
| By asking musk to step in are you talking about having him make
| the company worth 10% of what it's worth now?
| llsf wrote:
| Not worrying about the worth of the company as much, but more
| to salvage the chip maker expertise that Intel still has
| (Intel has been in several rounds of layoffs, including
| 15,000 in 2024).
|
| According to the article, splitting Intel would be good
| (short term) for the shareholders, bad long term, and bad for
| the country.
|
| Intel is still a great asset, but it looks like it is losing
| its appeal as time passes. CEO of Intel is deemed to be a
| very challenging position. The board does not seem to know
| how to turn the ship around.
|
| I could see Musk steering that ship. It is technically
| challenging (Musk seems to thrive in those environments), and
| it could even benefit the other Musk companies to some extent
| (XAi, Tesla and even maybe SpaceX).
|
| Intel market cap is 94.713B (AMD is 233B, ARM Holdings is
| 144B... not mentioning NVIDIA), so about twice what Musk paid
| for Twitter. But if Musk sets his view on Intel, he would not
| have a hard time to finance the purchase. Actually, he could
| wait a bit more as the stock can fall even more (today, Intel
| stock is at the price of Dec. 1996).
|
| This is armchair talking/joke, and it would be one more crazy
| thing on the 2024 bingo card, but from all the crazy things
| we have seen recently, Musk taking over Intel would look
| quite normal in comparison.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| We're going to need a bigger bingo card for 2025...
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Maybe if he owned the whole thing and could run it as he
| liked, without having to care about the stock price or
| paying money to investors, but personally I don't think
| anyone can do it while also satisfying the stock market.
|
| I'm not sure Musk is especially qualified either, except
| that he could afford it.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| You're right. Intel makes too many woke CPUs.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I don't think Intel manufactures enough transgender chips to
| make Musk care about buying it
| bell-cot wrote:
| Interesting idea. And with Musk's ties to Trump, he doesn't
| need to buy Intel himself. The shake-up doesn't need to fit
| stereotypes, nor (with the current SCOTUS) satisfy legal
| niceties. If Musk told Trump "great countries make their own
| chips", the national security establishment echoed that, and
| Pat wound up in charge of Intel's fabs, with "Make Great Chips"
| for his marching orders...could Pat make that work out? It
| certainly would be interesting.
| llsf wrote:
| Yes, Pat could come back and take care of IFS, with this time
| a supporting CEO/board. With the China/Taiwan tensions, it
| might be a good move for the US to not let Intel slip
| further, and stir that ship in the right direction. Musk
| could justify the move to help his AI ventures (XAi, Tesla
| FSD, robot, etc.)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Vote me down to the 9th circle of hell, but I find the article is
| simply off with the fairies. What do boards, directors,
| companies, capital, investors or any of the self-important suit-
| wearing dog and pony show have to do with what's happening to
| Intel?
|
| Intel is dying because it simply cannot bring itself to make a
| product that people want instead of the things it _thinks_ people
| want [0].That 's its fundamental life-preserving responsibility
| to itself. Sure, semiconductor making is very cut-off from the
| reality of what it makes tech _for_. But mindless progress for
| the sake of progress? It 's a headless chicken running about the
| farmyard. The basics of business still apply. Make stuff people
| ask you for.
|
| [0]
| https://techrights.org/n/2024/12/04/Technology_rights_or_res...
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| > Intel is dying because it simply cannot bring itself to make
| a product that people want instead of the things it thinks
| people want [0].
|
| Not sure that the link adequately makes its case. The number of
| people that actually care about Intel Management Engine is
| extremely small. Intel's real problem is that their products
| have struggled to be competitive in the marketplace on a price
| and performance level.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I could see a case for "we'll sell a few narrow SKUs of non-
| ME products for an audience that demands it" -- assuming
| there are some people who will vote with their pockets for
| it. It's probably up there with some of the other corner-
| cases in their product matrix.
|
| But I agree, that's noise. There are much bigger problems
| with their product line:
|
| * Adding and removing features (especially AVX, but also the
| whole market-segmentation nonsense with ECC memory) * The
| marginal and in some cases negative generation-over-
| generation performance boosts. * The unlocked wattage
| situation which screams "we're pushing an end-of-the-rope
| product that we can only get to decent clocks by feeding it
| an entire mains circuit". (See: FX-9590, Pentium 4 Extreme
| Edition)
|
| Intel might be able to say "Today's Glysophate Lake CPU is
| clearly better than the Haswell you bought 10 years ago", but
| there will be a lot of mumbling if you ask "how much better
| is it than last year's Paraquat Lake". That doesn't inspire
| confidence, especially when they have traditionally been the
| premium brand.
| amluto wrote:
| > The number of people that actually care about Intel
| Management Engine is extremely small.
|
| I think this sentence, in isolation, actually kind of nails
| the problem. I realize this isn't what you and the article
| you're replying to have in mind, but: no one cares enough
| about ME _to buy it_. After years of development, Intel has a
| solution to server management (and client management?) that
| is arguably technically superior to the crappy, power hungry
| chips from ASPEED and the management stacks from the likes of
| Dell and HPE that, until very recently, were unbelievably
| bad.
|
| But Intel completely failed to execute! ME should have been a
| headline feature, made friendly to the point where people
| would buy Intel systems _because of ME_. Anyone considering
| AMD or Ampere or POWER would be annoyed because their
| organization heavily used ME and Intel's competitors didn't
| have it!
|
| But instead, Intel hid the good parts (iAMT) behind annoying
| SKUs, obnoxious and secretive software and weird proprietary
| lock-ins. And the result is: no one cares about ME!
|
| (Intel has messed up most of its recent features in almost
| exactly the same way.)
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Fully agree -- always thought the same way.
|
| Saw AMT once about 15 years ago -- available for free on an
| Intel banded desktop motherboard.
|
| Now I can't even pay money to use it on my modern PCs...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This is a good point that I cannot disagree with. One more
| round in the magazine of the Intel footgun. Lack of
| openness and engagement with customers cuts both ways. The
| ME tech is great for a market segment of industrial
| datacentres. If those buyers chose to prioritise energy and
| management over security, then hurrah to whatever works for
| them.
|
| But as you say, Intel hid it away. Like a guilty secret.
| They somehow forgot to tell even their most Evil(tm)
| customers about the Evil Inside(tm). Which is jolly
| suspicious. And they've hidden away other "features" that
| trash security. It may be the number of people who
| "actually care about Intel Management Engine is extremely
| small", but those who do matter and they make decisions.
| Yes performance is important but security factors are going
| to be gaining more and more influence now.
|
| So Intel were told time and time again that people want
| legible, well documented products with no surprises, and
| they ignored that.
| throwawaythekey wrote:
| > Intel's real problem is that their products have struggled
| to be competitive in the marketplace on a price and
| performance level.
|
| That's not super true. AMD has had good outlier performance
| in gaming with the X3Ds for a while, but for regular use
| something like a 13400f has been as good of a deal as any AMD
| chip.
|
| Arrow lake seems to have definitely made the situation worse
| for intel though.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| For most people. "regular use" (and "gaming") is the
| expectation that the CPU doesn't self-destruct.
|
| Regaining the faith of users will take years if the best
| Intel has to say is "this SKU is unaffected by this flaw";
| less years if they openly switch to more trusted TSMC
| processes and/or ARM designs.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| If it was only IME...
|
| But AMD has their own version with the PSP.
|
| So we're stuck on Bulldozer hoping for Risc-V or something to
| mature enough before Bulldozer is completely obsolete.
|
| (With Apple obviously never having been an option to start
| with, and Microsoft keeping to push for the likes of TPM and
| Pluton, thankfully still optional for now.)
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| You do realize that it takes at least 5 years for new products
| to come to fruition in semi right? And Intel brought GPUs to
| market under Gelsinger's tenure.
|
| This isn't some software startup that just pivots from widget A
| to widget B or some ad campaign
|
| Even Tesla took like 5 years from announcement (after several
| years of developing a prototype BEFORE the announcement) to
| bringing the Cybertruck to market, and unlike cars, you need to
| mostly build the entire assembly line from scratch for new
| nodes every few years.
|
| It will be at least 3 years before we even see the outcome of
| decisions Gelsinger made at the beginning of his tenure.
| sounds wrote:
| Grandparent said:
|
| > it simply cannot bring itself to make a product that people
| want
|
| To which you responded:
|
| > You do realize that it takes at least 5 years
|
| Intel could lower the price on their HEDT chips tomorrow.
|
| Intel could enable AVX-512 tomorrow.
|
| Intel could more fully open up their fabs to other companies
| tomorrow.
|
| Intel could publicly commit to producing silicon with no
| Management Engine tomorrow.
|
| What would you do, if you were Intel CEO?
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| > Intel could enable AVX-512 tomorrow.
|
| They can't just enable AVX-512 on their chips that include
| both performance and efficiency cores, because it's only
| present on the perf cores.
|
| > Intel could more fully open up their fabs to other
| companies tomorrow.
|
| Their fabs are open to other companies. they have multiple
| customers already signed on to make their chips on
| 18A/1.8nm process that enters mass production next year,
| including Amazon and the DoD.
|
| > Intel could publicly commit to producing silicon with no
| Management Engine tomorrow.
|
| Do real people actually care about the presence or absence
| of the IME to such a degree that it would be worth
| redesigning a bunch of their products and greatly
| increasing the number of individual SKUs?
|
| ... and, your first point "Intel could lower the price on
| their HEDT chips tomorrow". Well.. they could I suppose?
| They are pretty irrelevant when it comes to HEDT chips
| anyway though considering how crazy Threadrippers are.
| Would they really sell more of them if they knocked a
| couple hundred off their 2000/3000 lines? probably not.
| they're all under 5GHz anyway.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Because if the rot is this bad at the top, imagine what it's
| like below it.
|
| The board smacks of people that spend their careers making and
| defending their career positions, rather than actually doing
| something or achieving something. These are the top dogs of
| middle management Machiavellis.
|
| Underneath them is just a bunch of lackeys built on loyalty,
| not competence. The talent has been chased out. The talent that
| remains in engineering is likely just counting days to
| retirement or a buyout package.
| etempleton wrote:
| The board's lack of technical or even product expertise struck me
| when it was announced Gelsinger would abruptly retire. They don't
| have the chops to be the wartime board Intel needs. They likely
| have no idea if Gelsinger was on the right path or chasing a
| dream. I believe Gelsinger was the right person for the job, but
| the board wasn't and isn't. The board would have had to approve
| of his plans. They should have known what they were signing up
| for.
|
| For Gelsinger's part he was probably too cavalier with finances
| and market sentiment to ever sustain any political capital.
| TheCondor wrote:
| It's too late. It was too late 18 months ago. Nvidia is over
| 30x bigger. Qualcomm is 2x, AMD is 2x. Intel needs a world
| beater, like tomorrow. Qualcomm offered to buy them, no idea
| what the terms are but he'd have to beat those terms, right?
| That had to be the death blow.
|
| AMD has already shipped ARM parts in the recentish time frame
| (Opteron A1100) there are rumors that they have internal arm
| projects that can be ready quickly. All the other part makers
| are all in with ARM. Intel is on an island. Throw the
| customization that MS and AWS are doing, unless they have
| something magical, tomorrow, it's just hard to see.
| tw04 wrote:
| > All the other part makers are all in with ARM. Intel is on
| an island.
|
| Intel also has an ARM architecture license... they sold
| Marvell the Xscale assets, but retained rights to produce ARM
| chips should they desire to do so in the future.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Sure, but then they're competing with everyone else in a
| fair fight. Which means either taking a huge hit on
| margins, or having a product with enough of a performance
| delta to justify prices somewhere near today's.
|
| The problem isn't so much x64 vs ARM but that, more
| broadly, high-performance CPUs are becoming commoditised.
| bfrog wrote:
| Which is why Pat was on the right track imho with
| foundry. It's too bad he won't have the tenure needed to
| see the outcome of 18a, good or bad.
|
| Even Arm is tenuous at best with risc-v right on its
| heels.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > It's too late. It was too late 18 months ago. Nvidia is
| over 30x bigger. Qualcomm is 2x, AMD is 2x.
|
| AMD came back from odds much longer than this. At its nadir,
| AMD's market cap was about a billion. A billion! Jensen's
| jacket collection is worth more than that.
|
| Anyway, it's not looking good for Intel but it's certainly
| not "too late".
| swifthesitation wrote:
| > nadir
|
| Great word, TIL.
| TheCondor wrote:
| If they can dominate with process, no it's not too late. If
| their process is on par with TSMC? I don't know. Like I
| said, they need a world beater else margins erode
| dramatically. They have assets, they have value and Intel
| has done it again and again for decades but unless there is
| something that is a tier better than anything else margins
| drop and they just forced their "technical CEO" out.
|
| They have had ultra success in the past, I don't see
| anything on the roadmap to suggest a repeat of that, there
| is a lot of institutional memory of that success. With a
| long term plan, a board that is knows it's going to be a
| journey and the CHIPS money, there is a story, make X86S a
| reality... I think there will be incredible pressure to cut
| and sell it though. If the new fabrication technology is
| only as good as the competition, I think that makes Intel
| an even more attractive take over target for the fabless
| giants
| bsder wrote:
| > It's too late.
|
| Hardly.
|
| Intel has fabs and, as we found out from Covid, we don't have
| capacity in old nodes _either_. Intel can very much still
| print money.
|
| Fabless companies are really cool--until shit hits the fan
| and nobody will run your chips anymore--but, hey, who cares,
| it's not like that ever happens, right? I mean you'd have to
| get an enemy invasion or terrorist bombing or tsunami or
| earthquake or fire in the fab line or global pandemic--and,
| pfft, how common are those, really?
|
| All it takes is some high-level dumbass trying to curry favor
| with Pooh Bear over Taiwan and suddenly Nvidia, Qualcomm,
| Apple, etc. have a net value of _zero_ for the forseeable
| future.
|
| But, hey, it's _super_ more profitable to not actually have
| all that icky manufacturing. Ewwwwwww.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Yup. Fabless is also totally dependant on churning out good
| designs. Intel's current gen chips are fine, compared to
| AMDs. Not great, not terrible, just competitive.
|
| The reason Intel are worth less is because investors are
| actually assigning negative value to their fabs - until
| they see Intel churning out advanced chips again it's just
| a money pit.
| immibis wrote:
| Are AMD chips wearing out after a few years?
| rvba wrote:
| They arent fine.
|
| Intel seems to be cutting corners to be faster what made
| their tech full of security issues. Now those issues are
| fixed by microcode.. and chips become less efficient.
|
| They also oxidize?
| mnau wrote:
| > suddenly Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, etc. have a net value
| of zero for the forseeable future.
|
| That is an exaggeration. There is still Samsung, Nvidia
| even fabbed there few years back. It's worse than TSMC, but
| it's not like Intel is the only alternative.
| 7speter wrote:
| Thats a great idea until China and NK launch a
| coordinated attack on both Taiwan and South Korea
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Samsung is in TX too
| mnau wrote:
| We should definitely be prepared when China attacks USA.
| Supersonic missiles to the fabs, ASML, Tel facilities
| too.
|
| Maybe we should make fabs on moon, just as an insurance.
|
| That's not a joke BTW. If China attacks both SK and TW,
| that's a war with US and this will happen. Fabs in USA
| will be a very valid military target.
| ls612 wrote:
| In a pacific escalation scenario, which I don't think is
| farfetched in the next decade, the CONUS would still be
| safe at least short of nuclear exchange.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > All it takes is some high-level dumbass trying to curry
| favor with Pooh Bear over Taiwan
|
| Or just one large earthquake to disrupt production for a
| few months. I'm sure that TSMC has planed for earthquakes,
| but they are still highly centralized, where as Intels have
| their fabs spread out nicely (not all the same node size so
| if you really need 5nm you might still be in trouble).
| rvba wrote:
| Maybw centralization is the competetive edge.
|
| Their best people can easily move from fab to fab.
| rsanek wrote:
| definitely not too late. plenty of cases in tech where worse
| comebacks were achieved. amd is a good example mentioned
| elsewhere in the thread. jobs brought apple back after it was
| months away from bankruptcy. even Nvidia itself was close to
| being fucked when its cuda bet was early and wasn't paying
| off yet -- Jensen talks about this in interviews
| mahkeiro wrote:
| Market cap are by no means an indicator of the future of a
| company! I bought AMD shares when their market cap was 20x
| smaller than today and everyone was telling me that AMD
| didn't stand a single chance vs Intel. I'm pretty sure that
| you were that guy then.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| I agree that the board's lack of technical expertise is an
| issue, but I think the root issue is - and hear me out, because
| this sounds ridiculous - the vibes.
|
| At the end of the day, a company is a machine to turn employee
| labor into revenue. Intel has clearly been a sinking ship for
| years now. What kind of people work at a failing company? What
| kind of people serve on its board? Is this portrait of the
| board not a portrait of any other failing business?
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Its on the CEO if he cant convince with a plan to turn the
| ship around and sell that story.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Interesting take, but wouldn't also have the chance to
| attract the exactly right people too? Renegades, outcasts who
| dreamed too big for Nvidia or never got the opportunity at
| TSMC maybe?
|
| There are many comeback stories, Apple being a particularly
| great one.
| freeqaz wrote:
| There are also a lot of geopolitical interests in helping
| Intel succeed. As much as investors might balk at Intel
| today, the amount of money that Western governments can
| toss at the problem is effectively infinite. (Looking at
| Defense contractors as an example; horrendously
| inefficient, but tax revenue is effectively perpetually
| guaranteed to keep flowing.)
|
| It's silly to frame it this way, but even though the US and
| allies pay gobs for planes like the F-35, it's also what
| continues to allow the stream of taxable money to continue.
|
| I view Intel in a similar light. Even if they stay
| inefficient, there will still be money for a long time
| because the West needs a way to be self-sufficient. The
| cost of not having a backup is too high (tens of trillions
| of dollars when I last looked into it).
|
| It's a weird market that doesn't obey a lot of the
| conventional rules of capitalism. Yes, it would be better
| if Intel were able to compete without government subsidies,
| and maybe they will. But even if they don't it's very
| unlikely they'll totally crater because of how central this
| "power" is, and TSMC will never cede full control of their
| latest tech until the UN recognizes Taiwan as a distinct
| entity from China (imo).
| XorNot wrote:
| The F-35 is actually an extremely affordable 5th
| generation fighter aircraft.
|
| It is cheaper per unit then some 4th generation aircraft
| now.
| michaelt wrote:
| Yes, the F-35 costs just $34,000 per flight hour.
|
| That's much cheaper than, say, Pat Gelsinger whose total
| comp was $86,000 per hour in 2021.
| etempleton wrote:
| Not to mention from the US Govt perspective it keeps
| thousands of people employed in well paying jobs and
| extends domestic expertise and capabilities.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well, the _current_ US administration was committed to
| helping Intel succeed
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act),
| not so sure about the incoming one. Maybe that also
| played a part in the decision?
| rolandog wrote:
| Exactly. It's a "too big to fail" with a touch of "what
| are you gonna do, let me go _bankrupt_? " situation.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Too bad Andy Grove is dead.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Such people are not hired by this companies, the hiring
| process is strongly against them. Also such people have
| better things in life to do and fight for, not the worst of
| the corporate world and a board of pokemons.
| rob74 wrote:
| I don't want to belittle Apple's success, but managing the
| turnaround at Apple didn't require the kind of long-term
| planning and commitment that investments in semiconductor
| manufacturing require.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure about that. Apple is a huge
| hardware machine, and has been, since Day One. They not
| only have to deal with manufacturing hardware, but also
| promotion and distribution, which is not for the faint of
| heart. Most of Intel's work is B2B, while Apple is B2C.
|
| Steve Jobs was particularly good at playing The Long
| Game; something American CEOs generally suck at.
| brookst wrote:
| While it's true that hardware was a central part of
| Apple's turnaround, it was the comparatively simple and
| quick hardware of designing boards with off the shelf
| parts (at the time). That's actually closer to software
| than the "hire the bulldozers to break ground for the
| building that is designed from blueprints to house the
| highly custom machines designed to make the chips using
| the fab processes that we're betting the company on" kind
| of hardware.
|
| At its core, Intel (like TSMC) is more of a manufacturing
| company than a tech company.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was thinking more about the long-term planning that
| Jobs was so known for. He would develop product lines
| that would take years to break even. Not all were able to
| make the cut.
|
| I worked for a Japanese corporation, and most of their
| initiatives had decade-long timelines.
|
| US companies tend to have 3-month-long timelines (I have
| _no idea_ why /s).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > US companies tend to have 3-month-long timelines (I
| have no idea why /s).
|
| I don't understand this platitude because the largest and
| most profitable businesses in the world, US tech and
| pharma companies, have very long timelines.
|
| Amazon took 20+ years to literally build infrastructure,
| the early investors of Facebook were not looking for a 3
| month payday, they invested billions for the 10+ year
| payday.
|
| See the HN threads for when Zuckerberg paid for Instagram
| and WhatsApp, with so many wondering how he would recoup
| the enormous investment.
|
| Apple probably plowed billions into watches AirPods and M
| processors for years before it saw a return, going so far
| as to lend money to TSMC for many years with no guarantee
| of TSMC being able to make the product they wanted.
|
| Tesla, Alphabet's Waymo bet, Uber, Nvidia, so many
| publicly listed businesses have a years long timelines
|
| Same for US pharma, it takes decades to get a product to
| market, with a high chance it never does.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Every single example that you gave, had visionaries
| behind the long-term pushes.
|
| Steve Jobs had a _lot_ of failures. It 's just that his
| successes were _so_ successful, that people forget about
| the duds.
|
| These visionaries don't just have plans, they have
| _fiendish plots_ , that would make a Grand Vizier hang
| his head in shame.
|
| But they move on, and that's when the "quarter-miners"
| inevitably move in.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The formula seems to be "businesses led by people with
| long term goals + filled with employees capable of
| executing + luck".
|
| I don't think "US" is a useful qualifier, publicly listed
| businesses all over the world have the same short-termism
| without the right ingredients.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The Japanese basically have "long-terminism" baked into
| their corporate bylaws.
|
| The company I worked for, is a pretty "old-fashioned"
| one, so may no longer be representative of the standard,
| but it didn't matter who was in charge. All planning was
| done in 10/5/3/1 year process; with the goals getting
| "sharper," as you approached zero.
|
| It was not particularly conducive to software
| development, but worked fairly well, for most of the
| stuff they made.
| 7speter wrote:
| I think attracting these sorts of minds also depends on the
| resources a company can provide to them. Right now intel is
| keeping their belt tight. Iirc, there was a whole team of
| brilliant engineers who were working on a RISC V project
| let go from Intel late summer/early fall. I've read about
| talks regarding a sort of brain drain occuring.
| vasco wrote:
| Intel won't go down after receiving the billions it did for
| foundries. The USA doesn't burn money. IBM 2.0
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The billions are just a drop in the Intel bucket.
| chithanh wrote:
| Intel won't go down, US lawmakers are determined to prevent
| that from happening. Any government rescue will however
| cause Intel shareholders to lose their money. Which is
| presumably why investors aren't too happy about the current
| situation.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-might-be-
| to...
| lordnacho wrote:
| > the vibes
|
| I went to lunch the other day with a friend. We had both
| worked at Intel during our early careers, and we still know
| people who are there over 20 years later.
|
| Of course the topic arose of our old workplace. We had a
| great time there it should be said. But neither of us stayed
| on, and it was vibes.
|
| Even at that time, as a young guy in university, I thought
| something was wrong. I couldn't tell what, since I was a
| young guy who barely knew anything about the business. But I
| knew that I felt uncomfortable about potentially spending
| decades at a place where everyone was so relaxed. There was
| no urgency. People would come in, find a colleague to have
| coffee with, and that was their day. I checked with the other
| interns as well, it was really chill.
|
| I was working on my thesis, and my team was working on
| rolling out what would later be called WiFi. Amazingly, part
| of the strategy was to slow down certain standards, because
| we were behind in some of the fabs. That didn't seem like
| what you would do as a cutting-edge technology company.
| People at the all-hands would ask things like "should we keep
| AMD around just for show? So that we aren't a monopoly?".
| Well, that problem has been solved now.
|
| I got offered a permanent role but never even considered it.
| le-mark wrote:
| A phenomena so common it has a name:
|
| https://medium.com/geekculture/the-dead-sea-
| effect-d71df1372...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's so easy to fix with competent leadership. Kind of
| sad to see the state of American "leaders"
| brookst wrote:
| As someone who worked at Intel for 5ish years a while ago, I
| partly agree. There was a fatalism to the culture; a sense
| that any initiative had to be simultaneously super low risk
| and guaranteed to generate $1B in revenue within a couple of
| years. It had to be 100% predictable and planned month by
| month years in advance, and also exactly what customers would
| want on day one.
|
| The people who "succeeded" were those who could sell that
| story to the finance org (who essentially made all the
| product decisions), and who could move onward and upward
| before the fairy tale collapsed.
|
| The disconnect between the aspirational culture (risk taking,
| tech-forward, customer-focused) and the real culture (risk
| averse, finance-forward, planning-focused) was extreme. The
| whole place was like a filter designed to retain only those
| who had no interest or capability to fix the systemic issues.
| sbarre wrote:
| This describes almost every large enterprise I've ever done
| work for or worked at.
| Retric wrote:
| In most giant companies it _is_ a reasonable strategy.
|
| The critical difference is most large companies don't
| need to innovate. United doesn't design aircraft,
| airports, etc they compete with other huge companies in
| an extremely capital intensive industry and execution is
| what matters.
|
| FedEx, Walmart, Bank of America, etc all need to keep up
| with their competitors but there's no need to make risky
| bets when slow and steady brings in billions of revenue
| and nothing external is going to drive them out of
| business quickly.
|
| Intel essentially forgot just how ruthless their industry
| was and got crushed.
| cma wrote:
| I think all major airlines have pretty much gotten to the
| point of bankruptcy without bailouts
| Retric wrote:
| Again a logical choice.
|
| Much like banks the boards of airlines are incentivized
| to have high levels of debt supported dividends /
| buybacks because it's a highly volatile industry. Money
| isn't clawed back from investors, but cash reserves
| disappear in a downturn.
|
| Really any high risk industry where profits can be
| extracted in good times faces the same issues. The
| possibility for concessions from governments or people
| they owe money to like retires and bond holders etc, then
| repeat the cycle while maintaining control incentives
| high risk strategies because they are leveraging other
| people's money.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > There was a fatalism to the culture; a sense that any
| initiative had to be simultaneously super low risk and
| guaranteed to generate $1B in revenue within a couple of
| years. It had to be 100% predictable and planned month by
| month years in advance
|
| Ultimately, this is what MBA-style corporations do. They
| want unfettered predictability and massive revenues from
| every initiative. They even set up corporate structures to
| penalize failures.
|
| As a result, layers and layers of managers, and managers
| and engineers are all risk averse. They will be penalized
| for being wrong, their jobs and livelihoods are put on
| stake.
|
| What does one expect in such an environment?
| Innovation/risk-taking or politics of self-
| preservation/blaming/backstabbing?
|
| The MBA-style is a failure for innovation and Intel should
| be a case study in every MBA school.
| nradov wrote:
| Have you ever taken an MBA course? It's so weird for you
| to refer to "MBA-style corporations" considering that
| "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen has
| literally been a core text in most MBA programs for
| decades. If anything, Intel has become an _anti_ MBA-
| style corporation.
|
| https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/10706-PDF-ENG
| nine_zeros wrote:
| "MBA-style corporations" does not mean that they have
| read the innovators dilemma.
|
| An MBA-style corporation is one that is lost in a vast
| trove of metrics. They focus too much on the birds-eye
| view dashboard style of work - ultimately forgetting that
| it is less important to meet metrics and more important
| to keep innovating.
|
| The metric-driven production is well suited for
| warehouses and factories where every unit is the same as
| the other. Because every unit is the same your business
| can focus on eeking optimizations visible via metrics.
|
| But technology is not like that at all. Every unit of
| production is so different from one another. You cannot
| have a top heavy company that is just focusing on
| metrics. You need the top to be intelligently engaged
| with market, customers, systems, and employees.
|
| Put in another words, if your company's primary focus is
| margin management, shareholder return, and squeezing
| production (MBA-school style), your company will have a
| very very hard time innovating.
|
| Case in point - Intel - which has haemorrhaged itself
| with years of focus on buybacks and dividends and unit
| production - but not studying the market, studying modern
| tech, and innovation.
| brookst wrote:
| Eh, I have an MBA, and that is not at all my experience.
| At my program, there was a ton of focus on agility,
| avoiding sunk cost fallacies, the importance of a healthy
| corporate culture, what a tax elaborate structures can
| be, and so on.
|
| And it was before Intel failed, but we had case studies
| on IBM, Enron, and General Motors and how misaligned
| incentives led to incompetence, corruption, and failure.
|
| You may have had bad experiences with some individual
| MBAs (they run the gamut, just like everyone else), or
| you may have absorbed some stereotypes, but that's really
| not at all what is taught.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I was not aware that my last two companies have secretly
| been Intel because every one of these factors applied to
| them.
|
| It's really another aspect of the innovator's dilemma -
| interesting $-wise and margin-wise is so limited that they
| end up never doing anything interesting.
|
| It is a problem really specific to high margin companies.
|
| You actually don't see this behavior at low margin
| businesses because the spectrum of things that can be done
| which aren't immediately labeled a margin drag is a lot
| wider.
|
| The company I work for now put all the up front effort into
| a new product line which would lilekk pk y have easily
| gotten to a billion or two a year within 3y with the right
| customer wins, but out normal margin is very high and the
| new line of business would have been very profitable
| objectively but would have been a margin drag. Every dollar
| would have lowered the gross and net margin.
| nimish wrote:
| Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
|
| Intel's innovate or die culture died years ago
|
| Inertia has taken its time but the company itself is catching
| up
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| The pay is ridiculously low. Lower than tsmc in Taiwan on a
| ppp basis (not that far off in raw $ terms). Much lower than
| tiny hardware startups in the USA. Monumentally lower than
| AMD or nvidia, especially with stock grants factored in.
|
| No pay rises for over 20years now. Layoffs on a routine
| basis. They asked everyone to take a pay cut last year. All
| of this in an extremely competitive labour market.
|
| It's pretty obvious to anyone that a job at intel is
| temporary. You take the job and do the bare minimum (because
| hey you're paid bare minimum) and keep looking. There isn't
| going to be a single employee outside the board at intel who
| isn't browsing for a new job given the wage disparity.
| Everyone knows this. If you have a brilliant improvement for
| process keep it to yourself and take it to the next job. A
| low level position at a startup pays more than a senior role
| at intel at this point. It's a laughing stock and the most
| recent statement at the last earnings was more layoffs and
| wage freezes to give more shareholder value.
|
| They already have 0 serious talent and nobody gives a fuck
| there, reasonably so. "You're going to lay me off from by far
| the lowest paying company in tech if I don't give 100%?"
| "Ok!".
|
| It's such a joke of a company and has been for 20 years now
| and the investors have made it clear they want another 20
| years of this.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Do you want $77k/yr for a job with degree requirements at
| intel in an extremely high cost of living area or would you
| rather get well over $200k/yr at a competitor for the exact
| same job description. Lol. This was one random example out
| of pretty much any role at intel just to give awareness of
| how dire 20 years of wage freezes from short term investors
| becomes over time.
|
| https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Intel-Corporation/job-
| titles/Inte...
|
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NVIDIA-Signal-Integrity-
| Eng...
| Spivak wrote:
| Wow $77k holy shit that's uhh not doing so well with
| inflation.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Yeah I think people don't realize just how dire it is at
| Intel. The talk above of the culture being on a death
| march can easily be explained by the jobs at intel having
| literally nothing at stake. And they announced even more
| layoffs and wage freezes at the last quarterly earnings.
|
| It's not an engineering run company like the successful
| big tech companies. Everyone working at intel is there
| temporarily and there's no reason to build a long term
| career there. You jump asap.
|
| I don't see the shareholders voting for a reasonable
| tripling (quadrupling?) of engineer salaries anytime soon
| given the short term thinking track record. Which means I
| think the only way out is for an entirely new engineer
| run company to appear.
|
| Intel have run on momentum to this point. They actually
| have 10nm foundries operational due to some level of
| talent continuing to persist over the past 20 years. They
| can't seem to get much further past that (smaller nodes
| than that have reported terrible yields). They have more
| or less competitive cpus for sale (although they clearly
| hit a wall in that aspect to the point the latest CPUs
| bench exactly the same or worse than their own previous
| generations).
|
| I think the momentum has definitely run out and the
| talent is gone at this point. The momentum is now in the
| other direction. Morale is dire, no one working there
| gives anymore of a fuck about their job than the kid
| pushing trolleys at the grocery store. Their CPUs are not
| advancing with each generation at all anymore and they
| cannot get reasonable yields on newer fab nodes.
| nradov wrote:
| People seeking permanent US residency via an H-1B visa want
| to work at a failing company. And I don't blame them; from
| their perspective it's a totally rational choice as long as
| the company doesn't fire them before they get a green card.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Prediction: now that the bean counters taking over is complete,
| Intel will sell off its hardware branch and turn into a
| consultancy service like IBM
| lmpdev wrote:
| I don't see this happening
|
| 95-99%+ of their revenue is from hardware
|
| IBM had diversified for decades before evaporating completely
| passwordoops wrote:
| Not just let of technical experience, but the experience they
| do have is scary. Gregory Smith, for example, who is "the
| former CFO and EVP of operations at Boeing. He's been on the
| board since 2017 and was an interim CEO at Boeing during
| 2020...probably be directly involved with the Boeing fiasco."
|
| Someone like that should be facing criminal negligence charges,
| not sitting on boards.
| nimish wrote:
| Truly a comical choice for a board member
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's an indictment of the capitalist system. There's supposed
| to be oversight that ensure our organizations are run by
| capable people. But you look at this board (and I'm sure a
| few others) and it's clear they are not worth the money they
| are paid. What is anyone even thinking, having a guy from
| Boeing there?
|
| The board is also too big, and filled with irrelevant people.
| Four or five specialists who know the area, and one or two
| financial side people, that's all you need. Too many chefs =
| nobody's cooking, nobody is responsible.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > It's an indictment of the capitalist system.
|
| Do you have any evidence, that any other system, has
| demonstrated historical immunity to this problem? Last I
| checked, the Soviet system put some awfully unqualified
| people in charge of nuclear plants, and we know how that
| went. Last I checked, China put some awfully unqualified
| people in charge of the housing market, and we know how
| that's going.
|
| The correct response is that unqualified people in
| positions of power has plagued every social structure.
| Arguably, alternative systems have failed in this regard to
| even worse degrees, with far more catastrophic outcomes.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Isn't there some business cycle where companies reach the
| 'fattened pig' phase, and then wall street just feeds on it.
|
| Isn't this what that looks like? Nobody is really 'saving'
| Intel. They are eating it.
| klelatti wrote:
| I'm not sure how it's possible to come to a firm view on this
| decision on the basis of the information that is now public.
|
| For example whilst there has been apparent technical progress eg
| on 18A - which is central to Gelsingers track record - it will
| mean nothing without IFS customers. It wouldn't take a technical
| background to evaluate whether Intel is making progress in
| actually signing firms up for IFS.
|
| Will technical progress continue without Gelsinger - surely yes.
| But a new CEO might also deal with issues that he was clearly
| slow to such as costs and getting rid of products that are going
| nowhere.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Surely yes?
|
| Intel has been a company of engineering underdelivery and
| incompetence for a decade now. Huge bonuses and pay to
| financial management, salary reductions and cheapness on the
| labor side, your classic American MBA war-on-labor.
|
| The fact they cannot deliver a GPU, which is just a big vector
| processing array fundamentally, has been the long running sign
| of Intel's incompetence, something they should have had
| literally 25 years ago when Apples had vector processors and
| the first 3D accelerators were hitting the PC gaming world.
|
| The intellectual talent long fled Intel, and they didn't invest
| in replacement intellectual talent. Because MBAs don't respect
| "talent". They tolerate it for some function of tolerance, and
| generally the "dead sea effect" is imposed as talent leaves and
| the managers let the structure rot rather than fix it.
|
| Gelsinger obviously didn't have time to fix the intellectual
| and talent rot, because he probably needed to eliminate three
| levels of vice presidents to start with.
|
| I really celebrate the article's approach. The arrival of
| massive CEO pay, allegedly because of how important, public,
| and critical their positions are, never actually comes with
| detailing of who is in charge and the effect of their
| decisions.
|
| Why do the major heads of petroleum companies, cigarette
| companies, and other managerial structures largely get to
| destroy their companies or the world in the anonymity of
| private org charts?
| klelatti wrote:
| So Gelsinger personally did all the technical work on 18A? Of
| course he didn't and the work on that will continue.
|
| He also didn't really deal with the other issues you've
| highlighted and the 'didn't have time bit' is just an excuse.
|
| I mean how much time did it take to say eg Gaudi is a
| distraction and we should end it?
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Intel does have GPUs on the market which are good on the
| silicon side, but simply do not have the same level of
| software support that companies like Nvidia have built up
| (Nvidia has drivers that are backwards compatible for 20
| years, Intel has issues with games released more than 4 years
| ago, as an example)
|
| What they don't have is GPU manufacturing setup. All the
| Intel GPUs are fabbed by TSMC. But guess what, Nvidia has no
| manufacturing at all!
| ghxst wrote:
| I heard people were optimistic about their GPU drivers for
| AI when comparing them to AMD at least, I have a few
| friends that seem happy with each major driver version
| update they get for gaming as well so I'm optimistic that
| they can eventually figure out the software side of things.
| tester756 wrote:
| >The fact they cannot deliver a GPU,
|
| Their recent GPUs are decent, wdym?
| nimish wrote:
| They absolutely could have done so multiple times, and did a
| few times with the iGPU and Larrabee, but the issue was that
| they wanted to protect their lucrative CPU cash cow.
|
| So Jensen and nVidia worked around them. Any big tech company
| can become a fabless semiconductor company quickly, so the
| value edge of having "the best CPU" is declining. Intel
| products are OK for now but we can machine translate x86 to
| ARM or risc-v so well that it won't matter.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| > The fact they cannot deliver a GPU, which is just ..
|
| "Just"?! This is an incredibly dumb take.
|
| Are you by chance comparing a brand new hardware product
| launch with a software product launch? Launching a hw product
| that does well takes YEARS. Any other company will not be
| able to pull this off, or they would have done it already.
| Intel has done quite well coming up with a decent gpu from
| scratch. There are like two other companies in this world
| that know how to do that, and they took a long, long time to
| get there.
| someonehere wrote:
| For some reason when Apple moved to their own SOC I knew this
| would be one of the nails in the death of the company. A few
| other blunders on their part and here we are.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" he (was) the most technically competent CEO of the last few
| bad apples at Intel, but he was also among the shortest"_
|
| Is this article suggesting that Pat Gelsinger may have lost his
| job in part because he's shorter compared to other typical "CEO
| types"? Are we still subconsciously judging people based on their
| height in 2024? Sad if true, and if not true, then it's an odd
| thing for the article to point out.
|
| (Bezos is pretty short too, isn't he?)
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Is this a joke?
|
| He's talking about the length of his tenure.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| The word "tenure" was left out. It took me a second to guess
| that.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| I'm going to go with shortest as in length of time he was in
| the job.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I think this was a typo. He had the shortest tenure at 5 years.
| He wasn't the physically shortest guy.
|
| Intel greatest ceo Andy Grove may not have been particularly
| tall... spent his childhood as a malnourished holocaust
| survivor
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Is Pat ok? Everyone's talking about how it's terrible to force
| pat out but he started posting very out of context bible quotes
| to twitter starting in August this year and continued posting
| since.
|
| There's been no word of personal health issues but it did seem
| like a sudden change.
| anon291 wrote:
| I mean he's always been super religious and runs an org for
| Christians in tech
| tyre wrote:
| The board works in mysterious ways.
| mepian wrote:
| He has been posting them for years.
| douglee650 wrote:
| Is this guy short INTC, yes or no. The rest is color commentary
| porknubbins wrote:
| As a shareholder who lost quite a bit I was angry at Gelsinger.
| But now after reading this article I feel sorry for him as
| someone who by all appearances tried to do a very hard thing and
| just came up short and got pushed out by the board.
|
| Loss of a lot of performance crowns to AMD and 13th and 14th gen
| cpu failure problems were big black marks on his watch but its
| not certain that anyone else would have done better and I never
| doubted his commitment to the job at hand. Maybe what Intel needs
| is a whole culture shift to get rid of the bureaucratization and
| HR-ization and Gelsinger was not ruthless enough in removing
| calcified middle management layers and thought he could save
| Intel with technical achievements alone and avoid a lot of human
| suffering.
| tgma wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, Intel as we knew
| it, a technical powerhouse, who kicked ass and delivered the
| Moore's law, would likely have been best served by someone like
| Pat than the alternatives. However, the world may have changed
| and the real value of Intel going forward may be the national
| security aspect of it. If Intel is becoming a Lockheed Martin,
| perhaps you want a capital allocator more than a technologist at
| the helm.
| ulfw wrote:
| What national security? Huh? What do you have in mind for intel
| to be going forward?
| BeetleB wrote:
| Fabs. The only other major players are Samsung and TSMC, with
| the latter being the giant. If China invades Taiwan, they
| control the bulk of the semiconductor supply.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| The rumors say TSMC fabs are designed to self-destruct if
| China takes control of them.
|
| I don't know if that is true, but even if it wasn't I
| suspect that the US would destroy them instead of letting
| China have them. China having a de-facto monopoly on
| semiconductors production is a serious problem for the US
| until new fabs will be available elsewhere.
|
| In fact, not only they can prioritize domestic military/AI
| development leapfrogging the US giving enough time, but
| they can provide high tech components to the likes of
| Russia, Iran, North Korea.
|
| And the US wouldn't be able to retaliate as China could
| simply levy taxes or bans semiconductors exports to the US
| and whoever sells to them (similar to what the US is doing
| with Russia after the war in Ukraine started).
|
| So I expect that, as soon as an hypothetical invasion of
| Taiwan looks like it's gonna succeed, those fabs will be
| reduced to dust.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > The rumors say TSMC fabs are designed to self-destruct
| if China takes control of them.
|
| That still denies you access to the microprocessors that
| you may need for your own military equipment. My guess is
| that China already produces what they need in terms of
| microprocessors in mainland China, so while they can't
| access TSMC technology that won't necessarily have any
| influence on their weapons production. The US, and the
| west in general, needs to be able to produce
| semiconductors for the defence industry locally. For the
| US, and the EU, Intel is, or can be, a major part of the
| solution.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I don't know if that is true, but even if it wasn't I
| suspect that the US would destroy them instead of letting
| China have them.
|
| Propping up Intel is far, far cheaper than a war with
| China.
| zoky wrote:
| > _His brief stint of 1386 days was surprising because not only
| was he the most technically competent CEO of the last few bad
| apples at Intel, but he was also among the shortest._
|
| Well, how tall is he? And why does it matter? The article never
| actually says.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that was a typo. Short tenure, not short
| stature
| challenger-derp wrote:
| would be helpful if I could get assistance with the paywall - I
| could be wrong, but I'm assuming a sizeable handful of commenters
| in this section managed to read this paywalled article?
| h_tbob wrote:
| This may sound weird but I think the CHIPS act tempted intel to
| overextend. Counterintuitively they may even have been better
| without the money.
|
| i don't think problem was never lack of manufacturing capacity. I
| think it was process tech.
|
| So I think the free govt money tempted them to invest in
| something that wasn't mission critical - old node capacity, when
| they really needed r&d
| rapsey wrote:
| It was announced a few days ago that Intel is finally going to
| actually receive something from the CHIPS act. So far they
| haven't gotten a dime. CHIPS money has overall distributed
| barely any of the funds.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That's a good point, there's also Trump coming in and potential
| tariffs. The path set by Pat Gelsinger may no longer be the
| most profitable, in the short term. Why invest and restructure
| if you expect the incoming government to cut your competitors
| off and allow you to cruise along for another four years?
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Highly recommend the latest Oxide and Friends podcast where they
| discuss a lot of this and related stuff:
| https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242
| ksec wrote:
| We have a whole article on Intel's Board and not a single word on
| Andy Bryant?
|
| Andy Bryant was large part of the reason Pat Gelsinger left Intel
| in the first place.
|
| He has been the Chairman of the Board since 2012 and on the board
| as Vice Chairman for even longer. So yes, all the strategy and
| direction of Intel's CEO in the past 10 years prior to Pat
| Gelsinger can be attributed to him.
|
| He also handpicked all the Intel CEO since Paul Otellini.
|
| Pat was called number of times to be backed as next CEO to save
| Intel during and after Brian Krzanich 's era. He said "no" every
| time.
|
| Pat agree to be new CEO to replace interim or later official CEO
| Bob Swan _after_ Andy Bryant 's announced his retirement in early
| 2020. Handing it over to his friend Omar Ishrak.
|
| The share-holding part was the reason why Intel cant cut off its
| dividends the first thing Pat came back. They only wanted Intel
| to keep handing out those dividends.
|
| And ultimately it was the Shareholders or Wall Street, handing
| out Board Membership to their circles until it is run to the
| ground.
| brookst wrote:
| Well said. Everyone kept acting like Intel "should be" an
| innovator but was somehow failing, when the shareholders were
| running it as a cash cow all along. Rightly or wrongly, they
| decided a long time ago that it would be more lucrative for
| Intel to be in decline, and that became self-fulfilling.
| glial wrote:
| This is another reason that any federal investment in Intel
| should have strings attached.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I think Intel should just be bypassed entirely. Each node
| is such a leap in process it requires entirely new fabs. At
| that point going with the poorly run incumbent is
| pointless.
|
| A few facts about intel. Wages have been stagnant there for
| over 20years now. Just recently they had wage reductions
| across the company and there's been layoffs for those
| 20years of stock declines. Tsmc in Taiwan literally pays
| double on a ppp basis (it's not even that far off on a
| direct dollar to dollar basis). Even china has been
| poaching from intel. Look up the Chinese government funded
| Lianqiu Lake R&D Center, they are offering more for talent
| in raw $ terms in a custom built luxury city. And yes I get
| that if you were born in the USA you probably want to stay
| there but there's no hope of intel poaching international
| talent anymore.
|
| Do you know what the current boards plan is? More layoffs
| and lower wages. Like how the fuck can they compete without
| talent which they haven't had for over 20years now.
| Everyone there knows it's a stepping stone job. Do the bare
| minimum in hire and jump as soon as the next opportunity
| arises. And the government wants to give funding to this
| short sighted turd.
| sroussey wrote:
| Intel is hugely bloated.
|
| - Intel: 126,000 employees
|
| - AMD: 26,000 employees
|
| - TMSC: 76,000 employees
|
| - NVIDIA: 29,000 employees
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| You'd need to split that by business segment.
|
| Intel has more foundries than even tsmc and the others
| don't have foundries.
| hedgehog wrote:
| If you add AMD (design) + TSMC (fab) it's not that far
| off from Intel (who does both, and sells >3x AMD by
| units). Clearly there are struggles at Intel but the
| simple math doesn't explain it.
| tester756 wrote:
| AMD 26K + TSMC 76K = 102k ~=~ INTEL (126K - 15K) = 110k
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| You might want to compare by operation.
| sroussey wrote:
| It does. No share buybacks for example.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> the shareholders were running it as a cash cow all along_
|
| Those shareholders have seen an average dividend yield of
| 2.83% [1] in the past 5 years. In the meantime, the inflation
| rate has been 2.43%. And if you're about to say 'stock
| buybacks are more tax-efficient' the stock price is down 63%
| over that period.
|
| If you think that's a cash cow, you should see what an
| amazing deal 5-year treasury bills are, with their jaw-
| dropping 4% return on investment.
|
| [1] https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/dividend_yield
| jahabrewer wrote:
| GP probably means the 2010s, during which the board milked
| the company instead of investing.
| brookst wrote:
| Indeed, that is what I meant. And the fact that it is a
| poorly-performing cash cow now does not mean it is not
| run as a cash cow.
| brookst wrote:
| You can run something as a cash cow and not get tons of
| money out, just like you can run something like a star
| without actually being successful.
|
| Intent != outcome
| ksynwa wrote:
| > The Death of Intel
|
| I know they are not doing well number wise but is it correct to
| claim this? Or it exaggerated?
|
| If it is somewhat true, what could Intel ideally do to not die?
| The article talks about Gelsinger's naivete and provides a
| quanitity for wafers but I don't know what that means.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It probably means the death of a high net income business or a
| business that leads in its field.
|
| They fall sufficiently far back that they can no longer afford
| to pay the wages and capital expenses necessary to compete.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| _James Goetz is a partner at Sequoia and joined the board in
| November 2019. He has previously served on networking-focused
| boards. He has a degree in electrical engineering, is likely
| semi-technical, and understands the industry. He's relatively new
| but likely does not have a technical background. He's been on the
| board long enough to be partially to blame._
|
| I crossed paths with Jim Goetz at Accel because of the company
| Vital Signs that he started. I am not sure why they say "but
| likely does not have a technical background" because I can attest
| that he clearly did. Weird.
| billjive wrote:
| Jim and I were on my company's board (Jive) and he absolutely
| has a technical background.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I think a lot of the analysis of Intel is just looking at a
| totally broken timeframe. Intel started having problems in early
| 2010s. It has been sliding since then. To fix it you need to
| clean house, get aligned on a good chain of management and
| engineering, then build out a roadmap that gets you back to
| process leadership and then execute on that roadmap. A year to
| sort out the organisation, a year to re-vamp the roadmap,
| probably 2-3 years to execute. Pat was probably the only person
| with the clout to ask for that time, and he didn't get it (and
| arguably he didn't really face the scale of the problem). The
| board failed, but it failed in 2010-2015, there's no point
| searching for someone to blame now, we're well past the point
| that the correct answer is to sell it for parts.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What's crazy about Intel's downfall is that Intel used a bunch of
| anticompetitive tactics to hamper AMD throughout the years and
| _still_ couldn 't keep them at bay long term. It's like a sports
| team that keeps cheating and still loses in the end.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Hey who changed the title of this post?
| hedgehog wrote:
| Let's not underestimate the complexity of the problem Gelsinger
| took on. I base that on the experience of selling them a company,
| and then having a little bit of a view from inside (under Bob
| Swan). It's clear to me that Gelsinger was trying to keep a lot
| of plates spinning while returning to former glory in an
| organization with a lot of cultural baggage doing work that is
| not amenable to clean sheet attempts. Messy. Post author is
| probably correct that PE-style chop & shop is the short-term most
| profitable approach, but it's also the worst outcome for almost
| everyone besides the largest shareholders.
|
| What I'm looking for in the next set of leadership is a clear,
| positive vision for the future + an acknowledgement of the
| systemic changes to the industry they're in (e.g. no longer have
| the dominant volume to give them a process leadership advantage).
| There's a lot they can do with tight integration, security,
| software platform, and product lifecycle that the smaller fabless
| players aren't able to (yet).
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| MBAs are the ruin of America
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