this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Wow, this is a really bad look for Intel. Gelsinger stepping down without Intel having a replacement! I always wonder when it doesn't say why a CEO is stepping down suddenly without warning.
It's notable that the announcement says nothing about Gelsinger having finished the part of the task he started on. It looks like they've lost confidence in Gelsinger (speculation). If that's true, it also means they've probably lost confidence in the entire rescue plan he started on?
This is a huge bombshell, and not very elegantly executed IMO. Not just effective immediately, but effective YESTERDAY!?
Well, he tried doing nothing, now he's all out of options?
Stock didn't sink so at least investors and Wall Street think they're headed in the right direction.
The biggest problem is that any change that would come from an engineering effort is going to take many many years to even have a shot at changing anything. Speeds can't really get much higher and they can't seem to crack making stuff smaller. There are limits to making stuff bigger.
Their video card division are essentially making $5 Walmart rotisserie chicken and $1.50 Costco hot dogs. They're not fantastic, but they're not bad and they're extremely cheap.
They needed to make the next big thing three or four years ago to have it on the plate by now, assuming they don't have anything viable in their skunk works at the moment that's a very big ship to turn around.
So even if someone else walks in, what do they do? Fire sale inventory, put a bunch of dreamer engineers in places, hire a bunch of rock stars. Produce a new unicorn after operating for about 5 years during losses and a possible economic downturn.
I think it's looking pretty grim even with the subsidies and a bunch of people who know what they're doing.
Absolutely, but for some reason Intel has a history of failing in new areas. Their attempt with Itanium for high end was really bad, their attempt at RISC which mostly ended up in SCSI controllers was a failure too. Their failure with Atom not being competitive against Arm. Their attempts at compute for data-center has failed for decades against Nvidia, it's not something that just happened recently. And they tried in the 90's with a GPU that was embarrassingly bad and failed too.
They actually failed against AMD Athlon too, but back then, they controlled the market, and managed to keep AMD mostly out of the market.
When the Intel 80386 came out it was actually slower than the 80286!, When Pentium came out, it was slower than i486. When Pentium 4 came out, it was not nearly as efficient as Pentium 3. Intel has a long history of sub par products. Typically every second design by Intel had much worse IPC, so much so that it was barely compensated by the higher clocks of better production process. So in principle every second Intel generation was a bit like the AMD Bulldozer, but where for AMD 1 mistake almost crashed the company, Intel managed to keep profiting even from sub par products.
So it's not really a recent problem, Intel has a long history of intermittently not being a very strong competitor or very good at designing new products and innovating. And now they've lost the throne even on X86! Because AMD beat the crap out of them, with chiplets, despite the per core speed of the original Ryzen was a bit lower than what Intel had.
What kept Intel afloat and hugely profitable when their designs were inferior, was that they were always ahead on the production process, that was until around 2016. Where Intel lost the lead, because their 10nm process never really worked and had multiple years of delays.
Still Intel back then always managed to come back like they did with Core2, and the brand and the X86 monopoly was enough to keep Intel very profitable, even through major strategic failures like Itanium.