"Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert Palmer, former DEC CEO)
Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel.
* Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.
* Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there are rarely any delays or cancellations. When you looked at an Intel roadmap, expect 30% of them cancelled, 50% delayed by 1-2 quarters, and 30% switched to a different node tech.
* IFS strategy under Pat amounted to nothing. Fab cancellations or on hold. Cancelling 20A altogether. Not being able to woo any notable customers. Not hiring the right people for external customers. There were reports that he didn't know how to run an external fab, which is why the board decided to hire Lip Bu Tan who came from Cadence.
* He missed on AI boom, crypto boom, said AMD was in rear view mirror, politicized TSMC in order to win government grants while still still using TSMC nodes themself.
“We have all this money but we have no long term vision for how to grow the company. We’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing prop up our share price instead”.
Of course that is a pipe dream, so it should provide the highest value for the lowest cost.
For those who want to argue it should be a balance: consider the opposite position. A producer should provide no value at infinite cost. In this case, everything withers. If party A and party B need each other's products to survive, they can do that when the value is infinite and the cost is zero, but not when the value is zero and the cost is infinite.
The last few decades have shown that giving the finger to the customer and going all in on shareholdermaxxing has nothing but terrible effects and is like sticking a spanner into the wheel of capitalism.
That's nonsense. Intel's problems were caused by falling behind TSMC, which was not the fault of Pat Gelsinger. Quite the contrary, he did a lot to turn things around, but this takes time, a lot more than three years.
Under Pat, Intel overestimated the covid boom, which nearly put them into bankruptcy. They hired many more employees while their revenue tanked. He went on an IFS spending spree while he lacked execution on actually winning external customers. He didn't stop dividends until 2024 which tells me he lacked awareness of where Intel was as late as 2024.
LBT was hired because he could actually see Intel as what it is today, instead of the Intel dominance that Pat thought he was still operating in.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/revenue
Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.
I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was chosen to clean up the mess when the whole place was already up in smoke and the smell was only starting to leak out. I liked his strategy, was disappointed to see him booted out.
That’s just a statement of fact. I offered no other analysis.
soon or later they were gonna turn things around with military precision specially with DOD, Intelligence folks giving advice.
https://observer.com/2026/03/the-catholic-priest-who-helped-write-anthropics-ai-ethics-code/Matthew 22:36-40 (emphasis mine), "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Note the "as thyself" part. This part counters people who want to interpret "love" as "romantic love". Unfortunately, Catholic priests and many (fake?) Christians seem to not care about the "as thyself" part.
Intel makes Broadcom start to look good.
For instance, when the AI boom was heating up and they were shipping the ARC GPUs, they could have taken some business simply by making a 48GB or 64GB VRAM version.
There are some that are saying Panther Lake is a great CPU for laptops; will be a vindication of his 14A efforts if so.
Intel's current CEO was hired to explicitly not try to recapture that magic. The board thought Gelsinger's approach of do all the things was reckless. He was hired to take fewer risks, at the cost of putting a restoration of Intel's position in technology out of reach.
When LBT took over, Intel was on a path to bankruptcy. Although Pat wasn't solely responsible, he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy.
Intel over the last 15 years missed the following booms:
* Mobile boom
* Missed on chiplets and allowed AMD to take the lead
* Missed on EUV transition
* Crypto mining boom
* AI chips boom (A huge reason was Pat Gelsinger backed Larrabee, an x86 GPU, and failed to compete against Nvidia)
* Missed storage boom by selling SSD/3D NAND division
* Missing local LLM boom by not having an Apple Silicon, Strix Halo competitor
* Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago
Basically, if they reversed all their decisions in the last 15 years and invested wisely, they'd likely be worth 10x more today.
This is just scratching the surface - his religious posts went on and on and on whilst he was Intel CEO.
https://gizmodo.com/things-are-so-bad-at-intel-that-the-boss...
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing...
https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1hb1imh/former_intel...
https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1891069258953576711
https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1820503612591919375
You could've just said, "I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff while CEO". That would've been a very defensible position. You didn't need the false part of posting from official Intel accounts.
Or, if it was an honest mistake, you should've written something along the lines of: "Sorry, I misremembered, it was his personal accounts. But when you're a CEO, I don't think the distinction matters much; anything you post will be read as 'Intel's CEO says'".
CEO's should be sufficiently self aware to understand that they should not be foisting their beliefs on the company and their employees and customers.
Being unable to recognize that is a very bad tell about a persons judgement.
Based on my brief interactions with him, and my overall experience with Intel as a project partner at the time, I'd say he has exceptionally high integrity. I'd bet he didn't even have his books ghost written.
EPIC was Intel's first big folly that I remember and it almost killed the company. Years late, too expensive, motivated by Intel's desires rather than customer needs, software would've required significant rewrites at every level. The Gigahertz race (culminating in the Pentium 4) was near-fatal to AMD but then near-fatal to Intel and they only recovered because somebody went back to the Pentium 3 and bolted on AMD's x86_64 extensions. Still, for half a decade Athlon/Opteron were a huge problem for Intel..
But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork.
Many (including myself) thought Pat's appointment was a good sign for Intel, being an engineer. From the outside it seemed like Intel was organizationally broken, having descended into fiefdoms that didn't communicate let alone cooperate.
So this conversation is largely about what Pat's doing now rather than what happened at Intel. He's previously pointed the finger at Wall Street "short-termism" [1], for example.
It's interesting that they talk about the relationship with the current administration being positive and receiving funding from the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was passed in 2022.
But if we're looking ahead here, I'm a little disappointed China was only mentioned once at that was just with building solar capacity. I'm sorry but if you're in the chip space and not thinking about what China is doing, I don't know what you're doing.
China has been restricted by the US from buying the best chips and buying the latest lithography technology. So they're making their own and it's happening way faster than I think many of these industry types are telling you it will happen. A few years from now when China produces EUV chips, I guarantee you'll read news articles about how this came out of nowhere and nobody expected it.
[1]: https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-ame...
I'd love to see a post-mortem. Intel's 14nm came out with Broadwell in 2014, and it was their desktop/server node for seven years, until Alder Lake in 2021. But they got stuck on the micro-arch as well. They shipped what was essentially the same Skylake core for five years from 2015 to 2020.