Lip-Bu Tan was previously on the board but left after disagreements:
> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
> The current CEO was supposed to be a down to earth, technical, no bureaucracy guy as well.
Turning a ship the size of Intel is a super power in it's own right. Especially one with such a large entrenched bureaucracy as Intel has.
Politics aside for a moment - we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE - the main difference is the fight is in full public view instead of behind closed doors. We can only imagine and speculate at the resistance Pat and others met while trying to change Intel's course.
The infamous Oscar Wilde quote is very applicable: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Ever large bureaucracy eventually exists largely to preserve itself. This is why it is so incredibly difficult to reduce the size of a bureaucracy. Every member is convinced the organization will fail tomorrow if they are let go today, and every member fights/resists any and all changes that threaten their bureaucracy and the status quo.
Best of luck to Tan - I truly hope they succeed where many have failed at Intel. AMD needs a healthy Intel to drive motivation and competition. The world will be watching.
I do not live in the US, and I don't follow all that's happening too closely, but from what I hear it seems that most of DOGE actions are about eliminating people and cutting budgets, which may be a valid way to save money. This has nothing to do with bureaucracy.
If, to complete a process, you needed approval by three people and you still need the same approvals, the bureaucracy is untouched -- it will just take longer without people and money.
Bureaucracies are about process. Process require people, a ton of people if you have a ton of processes. If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient. This becomes problematic only once your processes are reasonably optimized. The later is what I view is essentially the vision of DOGE, they say processes are not efficient. Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.
>> If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient.
Or broken. The latter has a higher a probability.
This is pretty naive, one dimensional thinking. Making things efficient requires deep systems understanding and lack of which is on display here (Chesterton's fence). And one can achieve it reasonably for physical/technical things, however dismantling social processes that have evolved over the years for variety of reasons indicates neither the capability nor the desire to improve them.
> Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.
I disagree, of course it will meaningfully decrease the efficacy. The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.
Of course, the same amount of stuff needs to get done. The workload doesn’t actually decrease because these jobs are complex in nature. There’s a lot of citizens to provide services to, or a lot of organizations to regulate. Those factors stay constant. The hope is that they’re unable to do their jobs in time, and we get more “asbestos in baby powder” type incidents as a result. Or shitty water (literally) or listeria, or watergates, or pick whatever bad thing you want when regulation goes down.
I truly don’t understand how people make such bold statements as “letting people go changes nothing!” Really? What’s the mechanism for that? Process just… become more efficient? Do we even know how efficient the processes currently are? Because something tells me you have no idea. You’re assuming they’re inefficient because that’s easy to believe and requires no analysis.
> The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.
If you working from a bad faith PoV like this it really makes no sense to talk about it.
The mechanism is pretty obvious to me. The pareto principle is well studied.
Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has. As far as I understand it. DOGE is trying to be that.
> Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has.
What? No.
1. Unlike the private sector, the public sector is built on hard budgets, not speculation. They don’t balloon up like your typical money-burning tech company.
2. They can, and do, fire people for performance. No idea where the myth that they can’t do that came from.
3. They run probationary periods just like the private sector to make firing easier and, in fact, their probationary periods are much longer!
4. There are inspectors and agencies directly responsible for optimization.
1. That is simply a budget cap. There is still no pressure to optimize. It's like if I tell this function has to run in 10 seconds. You will make it run in 9.9 seconds and stop there. Maybe the function could run in 9.0 seconds, 5.3 seconds or even one second. Forcing continuous optimization is what is needed. Not a hard budget cap.
2. Firing individual people is obviously not what this is about. It's about department wide processes.
3. Oke, see my prior point.
4. Well yeah now there is, it's called the department of government efficiency.
1. Okay, and this is somehow better than, say, Uber, making approx -500 million a year every year for a decade and a half.
2. Firing people isn't what this is about? Or you blind or just dishonest? The only action DOGE has taken has been firing people. That's literally the only thing they've done! Not only is firing people "all this is about", it's all it could possibly be about!
4. No, there was MANY before. MANY of which were actually cut by the DOGE! And, somehow, DOGE has convinced bumbling idiots such as yourself that they're "saving" something. You aren't getting anything, and it should've been obvious a long time ago.
I don't even know why I'm arguing with you, it's obvious you're a cultist for Trump and Musk and will literally parrot anything they say, no matter what. You've said multiple things now that are just... blatantly untrue. Just, no evidence at all behind them. And this is all public information. You can see how the departments run, how the inspector generals work, how the Government Accountability Office works, etc. Why am I wasting my breath, or keystrokes, on someone who is either a diehard cultist or a literal computer program?
1. In the long run Uber won't exist if they cannot optimize. In fact Uber is a great example. they turned multi billion profit in 2024 after years of optimization.
2. Firing people in large groups is definitely part of it. Not firing individuals. That is what you originally said.
4. Considering the real impact DOGE has already made in the few weeks it has existed I think we can at least conclude they weren't doing their job then.
Ah now I understand. You simply don't like musk and trump and anything they do must be obviously bad. I really don't like them either but at least I can still see that the government is not a lean functioning machine. I hope DOGE can fix that. And I don't particularly care if trump, musk or even Obama had done it.
Even if you believe the government is inefficient - which is just that, a belief - you can’t support DOGE.
Again, they’ve fired people at the office of government accountability, which are the inspectors who literally ensure tax dollars aren’t wasted.
That’s not me “hating musk”. That’s the reality of what’s happening. Following that, we must admit DOGE has no plans to save anyone any money.
Their goal is LESS accountability, not more. Government spending will only go UP.
If you read Project 2025 you would know the explicit goal of this is to cripple bureaucracy so that that power can be concentrated in the president. Not “save money”. Come on now.
> we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE
That's one interpretation, sure. I hope you'll concede that another equally valid one is that we're hearing the deliberate shattering of the only institution in the country capable of standing up to the oligarchs.
So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget. However, a lot of has been cut so far has been very favourable to the ultra rich. The most obvious ones being cutting the IRS enforcement budget
and gutting the CFPB.
It's possible to argue that all of that is good policy, but the facts make it very to claim that all of the destruction being wrought is going to make a meaningful dent in the government's spending.
Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.
Anyway at this point it's impossible to predict what will happen. There is no doubt a ton of inefficiency at these bureaucracies. You are making the point that cutting the budget will mean they will become less effective. But that doesn't follow if the departments are totally inefficient. Look at twitter. Musk fired like 80% of the software engineers. I'm not a heavy twitter user but I haven't noticed any difference in terms of reliability.
There is a massive difference though. It doesn't matter to anyone if Twitter works or not, while a lot of people depend on functioning government agencies.
And there are people who rely on it that aren't appropriately handled today. What I mean with that the current state is far from perfect too.
Your argument is essentially change is risk. Which is true. But what is also true is that never changing will yield a much worse system in the long run.
Just because one is something people rely upon and the other isn't is not really a reason they are incomparable. Just because the end goal is different doesn't suddenly mean nothing applies.
Have you read the misc "why can't America build things any more" criticisms? Like why our mega projects are super expensive, late, and over budget.
The recurring punchline is: Lack of administrative capacity.
The trials and tribulations of California's ill fated high speed rail is such a case study. Decades of outsourcings and privatization eliminated CA's ability to manage the effort.
After getting rid of most third party app support, 99.9% of all API access, losing massive chunks of active userbase and virtually all advertising except penis pills and scams, site performance probably isn’t terrible for casual users, it would difficult for it to not be adequate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE"
DOGE is just Musk bribing Trump into letting him settle scores and shut down agencies that are investigating him or that he doesn't like. Finding and eliminating "inefficiency" is just another one of Musk's myriad lies. I'm shocked at how many people still consider him to have any credibility at all.
I agree with grandparent commenter that it's shocking a lot of people (also here) think DOGE is a serious endeavour and not some slapstick bunch of people. The realization is that even in here, plenty of people's emotions cloud their ability to think.
In my experience the highly intelligent are simply more able to find and generate rationalizations and justifications.
It's similar to a science-believing schizophrenic, their brain finds physically possible but implausible ways to deceive them. This split demonstrates that intelligence and being grounded in reality are two orthogonal psychological phenomenon. Being grounded in reality is simply the ability to be open to being wrong. That's largely independent of being smart.
we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE
What is political about that statement? You may disagree with him, I certainly don’t think all of what happened with DOGE is justified, but that was a neutral statement.
It presumes that DOGE will be successful in a political fight, which is possible but not certain. The statement is no more neutral (and less accurate IMO) than saying “we’re seeing the culmination of a decades-long war on competence”.
It's political because it assumes anything happened besides what actually did, which was arbitrary number of people were fired from the agencies that Musk was most easily able to do so at, with no regard for what their roles were or their relation to the actual functions of the agencies.
The comment (despite protests to the contrary) injected politics unnecessarily and a bit randomly (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar).
Not really, no. Governments aren’t businesses. There isn’t much of a market for governance, people mostly become citizens by birth instead of by shopping around.
Governments have natural “monopoly” over their territory (if there is competition for governing inside a territory, you have a civil war going on).
Or, there is no monopoly, since you can “shop around” by moving to other countries. It depends on how you want to line up the analogy. (There’s room to line up the analogy in multiple ways because it is an analogy, and not a description of what countries actually are).
Governments don’t innovate much on governance. They might enable innovation in other sectors. But the process of governance itself should generally be pretty slow-and-steady because the stakes are higher than an individual business. The goal of a government is not to create new and interesting governance-products and then sell those products, but to rule over an area in a way that doesn’t annoy the populace too much.
Hah. Not even, though. Redness is a characteristic that means the same thing in the context of your shirt and a bus. Because there isn’t generally a competitive market for the service of “being governed” monopoly doesn’t even make sense there.
It is more like saying strawberries and ethyl methylphenylglycidate are both red tasting.
It's really simple - either Intel is shipping products on 18A (Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest) by Q1 of next year or they are not, and their entire future hinges on this.
I'm not an expert in the silicon business, but I'm pretty sure the lead time is long enough that an incoming CEO has little impact on whether or not they are shipping a new architecture in less than 12 months.
Intel's valuation might hinge on it, but evaluating the CEOs success or not... that doesn't strike me as a great idea.
Totally agree. Even the 3.5 years in the role that Pat Gelsinger got was insufficient to see his strategies come to fruition. At this point it's baked and there's not much anyone can do. My point isn't to assign credit/blame, it's simply to point out that Intel will not survive in its current form if they are not shipping 18A products by this time next year.
Agree you can’t evaluate entirely on ship date, but you can evaluate on how well the company handles either the last year of development or pivoting and adapting if it’s late. It’s challenging times at Intel, lots of opportunity for a CEO to show great leadership either in success or adversity.
Agreed, and to the sibling comment who ponders if the new CEO is too late to influence this... He may be. But he needs to decide if he thinks it can be solved, and if not immediately push the fab business out. Even if it gets pushed out to bankruptcy or sold for $1.
I own some Intel stock so I sure hope it works, but they need to take urgent action if it's not...
I'm agnostic, but I wouldn't personally be offended or bothered if my Indian CEO sent out a letter asking my coworkers and I to try Hindu meditation or yoga, nor would I be offended or bothered by Pat's suggestion, nor by a suggestion that I try fasting for the month of Ramadan, etc etc.
Am I misunderstanding some aspect of this? Was Pat demanding rather than asking or something like that?
Maybe we're just different, but I would be extremely offended by a suggestion that I fast for ramadan, just as I would if I were asked to eat kosher for a month, or to go on a vegan diet for a month, or even just to watch his favorite cooking show for a month. Whether they were suggestions, requests or demands, I find these to be unreasonable intrusions of the company into people's private lives. Asking people to pray, might be a tiny bit less intrusive, but I still find it to be unreasonable.
Would you be more offended by your employer contacting you during your vacation to ask you to work, or is that less offensive to you because it's less unrelated to work?
Is the company asking you to go to a morale event where free food is being served less offensive?
Perhaps a better way to ask what I'm trying to get at... if asking (not demanding) you to try fasting is too intrusive into your personal life, what are some examples of an appropriate amount of intrusion into your personal life for the company, by way of voluntary, optional requests?
Is the problem that there's an ask with nothing offered in return? Is it that the ask isn't work-related? Is it that it's the company's leadership asking, rather than your coworker?
I am a big proponent of voluntarism - I believe that voluntary interaction free of coercion is at least partially inherently ethical in a way that involunatry interactions featuring coercion aren't. I tend to give a lot of good faith leeway to voluntary interactions (requests) that I do not give to coercion (demands), so your perspective is very intriguing to me and I want to understand it better.
I appreciate your curiosity and the way you phrased your point.
You hit the nail on the head with:
> Is it that it's the company's leadership asking, rather than your coworker?
I'm a fan of voluntarism too, but don't believe that a company leader can just "ask" something. Same as it is with sexual advances, when a boss asks something from their employees, it automatically implies that doing so will be beneficial to their position in the company, even if they didn't intend it.
As for your examples, I'd generally be ok with requests that can in some way be justified by the typical person as good for the company (e.g offsite team-building), but would draw the line at requests that go beyond that.
Fasting and prayer are pretty universal. Fasting itself has pretty interesting physiological effects wrt healing.
As a straight up atheist if pushed to make a decision, I'd probably participate. The prayer part id probably just interpret as picking an aspect of this news to explicitly make present in my mind for the day.
He's supposedly quite low level, savvy about Platform Development Kits (PDK). Worked at Cadence, so he knows a lot about relating to other people making chips, selling IP, working with EDA tools.
A lot of potential here!
The disagreement with the board was supposedly related more to elements of the board trying to parts up and sell off bits of Intel. Harder to report that directly. Good for him, food sign if true.
Today was a very very good day to be hanging out on TechPoutine podcast. Very fun to have this as breaking news at the end of stream. https://www.youtube.com/live/aSoYz9Qp1xI
> That's what I'm trying to understand. His educational background was in Physics/Nuclear Engineering so he's obviously a smart guy, and he was CEO/Chairman of Cadence for 15 years, but other than that his 40+ year career has most been in VC and being on the boards of an incredibly large number of companies.
He is no Pat. He is no Andy. He is a business guy with some hard science behind (not electronics per se). It doesn't feel right.
>He is a business guy with some hard science behind (not electronics per se). It doesn't feel right.
I think you need to look up Cadence and look into how the fabless industry works. Picking him means Intel is possibly about to spin off or spin out the Chip division and only focus on Fabless.
My interpretation is that Intel didn't understand the customers of the fabless business and Tan does, so he's there to make Intel fabs attractive to them.
EDA companies have limited exposure to the inner workings of the fabless semi giants (Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD). They have even less exposure to running a fab service for fabless companies.
EDA tool vendors have to work extremely closely with both fabless firms and fabs forever to tune their products to deal the ever increasing complexity of nanometer scale manufacturing processes. Backside power delivery? You bet your ass that the tools folks were involved in making that work well for designers. Gate-All-Around? Probably needed the tool vendors to make tweaks based on feedback from the fabs.
The important thing is that Lip-Bu is from the industry, and has contacts on the tools side of things as well as the customers for those tools which happen to be potential future customers for any Intel fab services. This is a step in the right direction for INTC which has a board where industry experience is severely lacking.
Anyone that's successfully been running hardware companies would be where I'd start. Offer the best of them much more money than they're currently making. Actually, hire a dream team of them. Turning Intel around would be worth paying a high price.
Maybe. It's a good start. The part where I'm unsure is that Cadence is one of the Big Three vendors. They have so much I.P., EDA tooling, patents, etc. that money will keep rolling in with incremental innovation.
Most hardware startups have to come up with new ideas, engineer good implementations of them, market them, and react to all kinds of competition. I'm talking companies like Habana or Cavium more than Cadence.
When I say hardware CEO, I meant one that ran a company like that where we know they'll be innovative and capable. Intel will need that since they're going to have to change so dramatically with so many product innovations. Whereas, running Cadence doesn't require (from what I know of them) that sort of innovation and it might have even hurt their entrenched position.
That said, I'm still positive about the new CEO. I hope his mindset and experience helps him do a lot of good. The letter he put out was great.
Sure he knew how to get there: build SOTA fabs that can compete with TSMC. The problem was that it was going to cost $100B and take 10 years. The board wasn't patient enough and wanted a quick fix. There is no quick fix.
They already spent 10 years and probably $100b. 14nm with Broadwell was launched in 2014 and they never recovered from there. They just launched one node process in 2019 in full capacity after that and by that time it was too outdated.
There is no way to justify that a market leader would fall this bad this fast and couldn't recover and loose billions in process, except something was terribly wrong.
That's just how fabs are. Yeah, something went terribly wrong. That much is obvious.
Regardless of who was picked as CEO getting back to the cutting edge was always going to be horrendously expensive and take on the order of a decade. There was never a magical unicorn CEO that could avoid that.
The only obvious (at least to me) alternative is to sell off the foundry business. But someone is going to be running a cutting edge process at scale in the US. The federal government will presumably see to that.
>>The disagreement with the board was supposedly related more to elements of the board trying to parts up and sell off bits of Intel.
If true this would be very interesting. The most recent rumors were TSMC was trying to grab a part of Intel and have Nvidia/Broadcom/AMD take over the rest. Bringing in a CEO that literally left the board because he was against carving up Intel would be quite the signal from the board.
Cadence is a horrible company which just relies on monopolistic tactics rather than innovation to keep their position. Plus, their digital design tools are second grade.
That aside, he doesn't have fab experience. I guess that's very hard to come by, especially outside Taiwan and Korea.
If he wants to succeed, he will need to reconsistute the board. That's a tough one since they appointed him, but otherwise it won't work. The type of transformation Intel needs to go through won't withstand a myopic, short term oriented bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, index funds and mutual funds own about 68% of the Intel, with Vanguard retirement funds being the biggest. These passive custodian investor companies just vote along with the board's recommendation rather than making opinionated or activist decisions.
> These passive custodian investor companies just vote along with the board's recommendation rather than making opinionated or activist decisions.
I don't know where you get that idea from. They own so many shares they have direct control over who gets appointed to the board, and unlike a small investor when these guys walk away with their money it hurts. I often see the news reports of them flexing their muscles in the board room.
It's true they probably don't have much to say about bets like 18A or corporate culture. But they will almost certainly be involved on the decision on if or when Intel will be split up - if only because these investors decide which, if any of the new entities they are prepared to fund.
I’m with you except “unfortunately”. I don’t think we really want Vanguard trying to be an activist investor in all the companies they have major positions in.
It's a huge downside of passive investing. We lose a democratic element of corporate America by surrendering our votes to a couple big custodians that really don't care either way. I agree that I don't think Vanguard trying to make opinions on 1000s of company votes is the fix.
> We lose a democratic element of corporate America by surrendering our votes to a couple big custodians that really don't care either way.
By design, though, the people who invest with Vanguard do that precisely to offload decisions to experts and focus on other things.
Passive investors have neither the time nor expertise to monitor and vote on corporate decisions, so we're stuck with the current system regardless.
I think Intel is a bureaucracy that's gradually eating itself. Maybe it's harsh, but such companies might not be worth saving. They should be left to fizzle out and another should take their place.
The beauty of capitalism is that giants can fall down to earth, and smaller startups can take their place. Rinse and repeat.
I think the post above you asks a relevant question - shouldn't Vanguard, rather than always voting with the board, just not vote at all? Wouldn't that be the truly neutral position?
> Together, we will work hard to restore Intel’s position as a world-class products company, establish ourselves as a world-class foundry and delight our customers like never before.
Sounds like he wants design and foundry to stay together.
There will be a all-hands in the next few weeks, supposedly. I hope whoever sees this reply, if you are in a position to do so comfortably, ask him straightforwardly whether he has or has heard about a plan to knife and sell INTC in the next 18 months.
Intel employees are at high risk of losing their jobs. I don't think cornering the new CEO at an all-hands is a good idea. And I wouldn't even trust his answer, anyway.
Of course you cannot trust it. If you are working in a publicly traded company (as an ordinary employee) you never hear strategic changes first from your management. They have to make a filing to the stock exchange before they tell you.
I read through some posts and found this, after Gelsinger was fired:
>It’s over.
> If corporations are people, then Intel has decided to commit suicide and sell its vital organs.
Yet now the same guy seems more positive ("The best outcome has happened.... Lip-Bu Tan lacks the critical flaw that Gelsinger had… excessive kindness").
> A tsunami of decapitation (headcount reduction) is coming. However unpleasant the last several years has been… what is coming will be much worse.
> This will be a disorderly decapitation frenzy. Nobody is safe.
Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?
> Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?
The author thinks that it's about to happen, so it's too early to expect any revision. In that earlier post they said that Lip-Bu Tan resigned from the board because he wanted to reduce headcount more than Gelsinger, and that in their opinion hiring him and carrying out that reduction would be the best outcome for Intel.
Given that Lip-Bu Tan got hired, I think it's reasonable to expect some reductions soon. Before this the author listed a couple of possible outcomes, and as I understand it, Lip-Bu Tan and his reductions are described as one of the less chaotic and "unpleasant" options for Intel, because his cuts would be more specific than cuts that would be the result of splits/mergers/bankruptcy.
On the contrary, because he was leading Cadence it looks like he will at least spin off the fabs. The major card Intel had against competitors was the integration. The tick-tock model.
The failure of Intel is in the board and terrible middle-managers. If Intel becomes fabless like AMD it will be left with the worse parts. They will make money in the sale but there will be nothing left.
Intel had a lot of cool tech recently like Optane and QAT. The failure to get market adoption lies squarely in management. Can you believe they put in-chip yearly licenses to enable QAT, that's INSANE (what if they 10x the license price next year?). And of course, almost zero reach out to open source. Only a PoC and calling it a day.
IMHO, Intel should concentrate in their core strengths. Fire most of the managers, get rid of the toxic board. Open all they can and invest heavily in documentation and software, guided by the community. But this is not going to happen. The board is firmly in place.
Understanding everything it takes to design a chip, after spending 15 years leading the company that makes software tools for chip design, perhaps.
Cadence Design Systems, that is. I worked there for a couple of years on computational lithography/optical proximity correction software that we licensed to TSMC and Micron. If you don't know about Cadence, well, you don't know about silicon.
Some of the biggest EDA tools come from companies that use them for a reason (NX by Siemens, CATIA by Dassault, ...).
Those are the same reasons that make Lip-Bu Tan a great choice for the position.
That's what I'm trying to understand. His educational background was in Physics/Nuclear Engineering so he's obviously a smart guy, and he was CEO/Chairman of Cadence for 15 years, but other than that his 40+ year career has most been in VC and being on the boards of an incredibly large number of companies.
>he was CEO/Chairman of Cadence for 15 years, but other than that
Oh, so he's only been leading one of the handful of companies making the full software suite for all stages of silicon design and simulation for 15 years, no biggie.
You're aware what kind of company Cadence is, are you?
I know, right? John Sculley ran the, at the time, most successful computer maker, Apple, for 10 years. Brian Krzanich ran the, at the time, largest chip maker, Intel, for 6 years. They were the authorities; their decision-making and abilities running businesses in those industries must have been impeccable to do so for so long.
Thank you for agreeing with me that “years experience in industry” has numerous examples both ways for efficacy and is thus insufficient support for snide assertions of fitness for position as the person I was responding to was making.
The entire point of the comment I was responding to was that Lip-Bu Tan doesn't have the experience in the industry, hence the snideness.
Whether he'd be a good chairman given his experience in the industry is a discussion that we can have once people understand which experience he actually has.
I feel Intel is in a similar situation as IBM in the 90s when Gerstner came in. You don't necessarily need a super technical CEO but somebody who is forceful enough to see through his initiatives. Not sure if the new guy is that type though.
It seems that Lip-Bu Tan resigned on his own, because he disagreed with the direction of the board and Gelsinger. Given that they fired Gelsinger and hired Lip-Bu Tan, it seems that they now think his direction may be better for Intel.
> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly. (...)
> To cut costs, Intel announced in August layoffs of more than 15% of its workforce (...). The layoff plan was one source of tension between Tan and the board, according to sources. Tan wanted specific cuts, including middle managers who do not contribute to Intel's engineering efforts.
> Gelsinger, who took over in 2021 as part of a turnaround plan, added at least 20,000 employees to Intel's payroll by 2022. To Tan and some former Intel executives, the workforce appeared bloated. Teams on some projects were as much as five times larger than others doing comparable work at rivals such as AMD, according to two sources. One former executive said Intel should have cut double the number it announced in August years ago.
I am not sure if Intel can survive on its own. Games changed quite a bit and Nvidia is about to enter the space and will likely gain significant shares if they bundle their products in anticompetitive ways. It will be cutthroat for both Intel and AMD. But if he pulls it off, he will go down in history as the guy who saved Intel.
They certainly need to make chips for others to retain the scale needed to make chips.
As far as x86 goes, it's not as sexy as GPUs or mobile chips but they're still selling a ton of x86.
A few years after the first battle over Taiwan has taken place.
There has been news about Broadcom and NVidia testing their designs on Intel process nodes. Which is arguably worse in at least two respects, they are behind TSMC in density and also proprietary software tooling at Intel. After the 13000/14000 CPU chip death issues possibly also in regard to reliability. But they still want to do it.
Although this page in the history books is not yet written, companies hedging their bets this way is a really bad sign.
> A few years after the first battle over Taiwan has taken place.
Awful but true.
> There has been news about Broadcom and NVidia testing their designs on Intel process nodes.
Links? It makes sense to invest in second and third sources, even if it does mean handing money to a competitor. Especially given the instability of the global community right now.
Yes, and also 0x.
I'd say they are equally likely.
2x or 0.5x seem most likely to me.
I own shares at about $20. It's my gamble since I don't casino or sports gamble :-)
Lip-Bu Tan was previously on the board but left after disagreements:
> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-board-member-quit-a...
Tan's complaints seem to be the same ones I read here over and over from ex-employees, so hopefully he can actually turn it around.
The current CEO was supposed to be a down to earth, technical, no bureaucracy guy as well.
There is no current permanent CEO. Pat Gelsinger got fired last December. I liked him but it sounds like the board got impatient.
Intel trying to regain a foothold in fabs is costly and time consuming. Hopefully, they are finally able to turn it around.
> The current CEO was supposed to be a down to earth, technical, no bureaucracy guy as well.
Turning a ship the size of Intel is a super power in it's own right. Especially one with such a large entrenched bureaucracy as Intel has.
Politics aside for a moment - we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE - the main difference is the fight is in full public view instead of behind closed doors. We can only imagine and speculate at the resistance Pat and others met while trying to change Intel's course.
The infamous Oscar Wilde quote is very applicable: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Ever large bureaucracy eventually exists largely to preserve itself. This is why it is so incredibly difficult to reduce the size of a bureaucracy. Every member is convinced the organization will fail tomorrow if they are let go today, and every member fights/resists any and all changes that threaten their bureaucracy and the status quo.
Best of luck to Tan - I truly hope they succeed where many have failed at Intel. AMD needs a healthy Intel to drive motivation and competition. The world will be watching.
Bureaucracies are about processes.
I do not live in the US, and I don't follow all that's happening too closely, but from what I hear it seems that most of DOGE actions are about eliminating people and cutting budgets, which may be a valid way to save money. This has nothing to do with bureaucracy.
If, to complete a process, you needed approval by three people and you still need the same approvals, the bureaucracy is untouched -- it will just take longer without people and money.
Bureaucracies are about process. Process require people, a ton of people if you have a ton of processes. If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient. This becomes problematic only once your processes are reasonably optimized. The later is what I view is essentially the vision of DOGE, they say processes are not efficient. Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.
>> If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient.
Or broken. The latter has a higher a probability.
This is pretty naive, one dimensional thinking. Making things efficient requires deep systems understanding and lack of which is on display here (Chesterton's fence). And one can achieve it reasonably for physical/technical things, however dismantling social processes that have evolved over the years for variety of reasons indicates neither the capability nor the desire to improve them.
> Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.
I disagree, of course it will meaningfully decrease the efficacy. The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.
Of course, the same amount of stuff needs to get done. The workload doesn’t actually decrease because these jobs are complex in nature. There’s a lot of citizens to provide services to, or a lot of organizations to regulate. Those factors stay constant. The hope is that they’re unable to do their jobs in time, and we get more “asbestos in baby powder” type incidents as a result. Or shitty water (literally) or listeria, or watergates, or pick whatever bad thing you want when regulation goes down.
I truly don’t understand how people make such bold statements as “letting people go changes nothing!” Really? What’s the mechanism for that? Process just… become more efficient? Do we even know how efficient the processes currently are? Because something tells me you have no idea. You’re assuming they’re inefficient because that’s easy to believe and requires no analysis.
> The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.
If you working from a bad faith PoV like this it really makes no sense to talk about it.
The mechanism is pretty obvious to me. The pareto principle is well studied.
Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has. As far as I understand it. DOGE is trying to be that.
> Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has.
What? No.
1. Unlike the private sector, the public sector is built on hard budgets, not speculation. They don’t balloon up like your typical money-burning tech company.
2. They can, and do, fire people for performance. No idea where the myth that they can’t do that came from.
3. They run probationary periods just like the private sector to make firing easier and, in fact, their probationary periods are much longer!
4. There are inspectors and agencies directly responsible for optimization.
1. That is simply a budget cap. There is still no pressure to optimize. It's like if I tell this function has to run in 10 seconds. You will make it run in 9.9 seconds and stop there. Maybe the function could run in 9.0 seconds, 5.3 seconds or even one second. Forcing continuous optimization is what is needed. Not a hard budget cap.
2. Firing individual people is obviously not what this is about. It's about department wide processes.
3. Oke, see my prior point.
4. Well yeah now there is, it's called the department of government efficiency.
1. Okay, and this is somehow better than, say, Uber, making approx -500 million a year every year for a decade and a half.
2. Firing people isn't what this is about? Or you blind or just dishonest? The only action DOGE has taken has been firing people. That's literally the only thing they've done! Not only is firing people "all this is about", it's all it could possibly be about!
4. No, there was MANY before. MANY of which were actually cut by the DOGE! And, somehow, DOGE has convinced bumbling idiots such as yourself that they're "saving" something. You aren't getting anything, and it should've been obvious a long time ago.
I don't even know why I'm arguing with you, it's obvious you're a cultist for Trump and Musk and will literally parrot anything they say, no matter what. You've said multiple things now that are just... blatantly untrue. Just, no evidence at all behind them. And this is all public information. You can see how the departments run, how the inspector generals work, how the Government Accountability Office works, etc. Why am I wasting my breath, or keystrokes, on someone who is either a diehard cultist or a literal computer program?
1. In the long run Uber won't exist if they cannot optimize. In fact Uber is a great example. they turned multi billion profit in 2024 after years of optimization.
2. Firing people in large groups is definitely part of it. Not firing individuals. That is what you originally said.
4. Considering the real impact DOGE has already made in the few weeks it has existed I think we can at least conclude they weren't doing their job then.
Ah now I understand. You simply don't like musk and trump and anything they do must be obviously bad. I really don't like them either but at least I can still see that the government is not a lean functioning machine. I hope DOGE can fix that. And I don't particularly care if trump, musk or even Obama had done it.
Even if you believe the government is inefficient - which is just that, a belief - you can’t support DOGE.
Again, they’ve fired people at the office of government accountability, which are the inspectors who literally ensure tax dollars aren’t wasted.
That’s not me “hating musk”. That’s the reality of what’s happening. Following that, we must admit DOGE has no plans to save anyone any money.
Their goal is LESS accountability, not more. Government spending will only go UP.
If you read Project 2025 you would know the explicit goal of this is to cripple bureaucracy so that that power can be concentrated in the president. Not “save money”. Come on now.
What's DOGE's plan for process improvement? Is there a policy and legislative framework in the works?
> we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE
That's one interpretation, sure. I hope you'll concede that another equally valid one is that we're hearing the deliberate shattering of the only institution in the country capable of standing up to the oligarchs.
So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget. However, a lot of has been cut so far has been very favourable to the ultra rich. The most obvious ones being cutting the IRS enforcement budget and gutting the CFPB.
It's possible to argue that all of that is good policy, but the facts make it very to claim that all of the destruction being wrought is going to make a meaningful dent in the government's spending.
> So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget.
IIRC, less even than the govt's subsidies to Musk's enterprises.
Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.
Anyway at this point it's impossible to predict what will happen. There is no doubt a ton of inefficiency at these bureaucracies. You are making the point that cutting the budget will mean they will become less effective. But that doesn't follow if the departments are totally inefficient. Look at twitter. Musk fired like 80% of the software engineers. I'm not a heavy twitter user but I haven't noticed any difference in terms of reliability.
> Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.
A tenth of one percent. So not 10%, but 0.1%.
There is a massive difference though. It doesn't matter to anyone if Twitter works or not, while a lot of people depend on functioning government agencies.
And there are people who rely on it that aren't appropriately handled today. What I mean with that the current state is far from perfect too.
Your argument is essentially change is risk. Which is true. But what is also true is that never changing will yield a much worse system in the long run.
No, my argument is you can't compare the two.
Just because one is something people rely upon and the other isn't is not really a reason they are incomparable. Just because the end goal is different doesn't suddenly mean nothing applies.
I find it really weird when people just willy nilly repeat principles without any regard to their meaning or application.
Have you read the misc "why can't America build things any more" criticisms? Like why our mega projects are super expensive, late, and over budget.
The recurring punchline is: Lack of administrative capacity.
The trials and tribulations of California's ill fated high speed rail is such a case study. Decades of outsourcings and privatization eliminated CA's ability to manage the effort.
After getting rid of most third party app support, 99.9% of all API access, losing massive chunks of active userbase and virtually all advertising except penis pills and scams, site performance probably isn’t terrible for casual users, it would difficult for it to not be adequate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE"
DOGE is just Musk bribing Trump into letting him settle scores and shut down agencies that are investigating him or that he doesn't like. Finding and eliminating "inefficiency" is just another one of Musk's myriad lies. I'm shocked at how many people still consider him to have any credibility at all.
[flagged]
Why is that?
I agree with grandparent commenter that it's shocking a lot of people (also here) think DOGE is a serious endeavour and not some slapstick bunch of people. The realization is that even in here, plenty of people's emotions cloud their ability to think.
In my experience the highly intelligent are simply more able to find and generate rationalizations and justifications.
It's similar to a science-believing schizophrenic, their brain finds physically possible but implausible ways to deceive them. This split demonstrates that intelligence and being grounded in reality are two orthogonal psychological phenomenon. Being grounded in reality is simply the ability to be open to being wrong. That's largely independent of being smart.
[dead]
My assumption is intelligent people generally have better things to do with their time than chat on HN....
It’s a well written comment. Just because you disagree is no reason to downvote a well written comment.
"Politics aside for a moment" and then following up with politics is at the very least a logically inconsistent statement.
Logical inconsistencies aside for a moment, the comment would've carried a little more weight if cited any sources for their claims.
we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE
What is political about that statement? You may disagree with him, I certainly don’t think all of what happened with DOGE is justified, but that was a neutral statement.
Disagree. It was both political and speculative.
It presumes that DOGE will be successful in a political fight, which is possible but not certain. The statement is no more neutral (and less accurate IMO) than saying “we’re seeing the culmination of a decades-long war on competence”.
It's political because it assumes anything happened besides what actually did, which was arbitrary number of people were fired from the agencies that Musk was most easily able to do so at, with no regard for what their roles were or their relation to the actual functions of the agencies.
The comment (despite protests to the contrary) injected politics unnecessarily and a bit randomly (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar).
> (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar)
Large monopolies with limited market pressure to innovate?
Not really, no. Governments aren’t businesses. There isn’t much of a market for governance, people mostly become citizens by birth instead of by shopping around.
Governments have natural “monopoly” over their territory (if there is competition for governing inside a territory, you have a civil war going on).
Or, there is no monopoly, since you can “shop around” by moving to other countries. It depends on how you want to line up the analogy. (There’s room to line up the analogy in multiple ways because it is an analogy, and not a description of what countries actually are).
Governments don’t innovate much on governance. They might enable innovation in other sectors. But the process of governance itself should generally be pretty slow-and-steady because the stakes are higher than an individual business. The goal of a government is not to create new and interesting governance-products and then sell those products, but to rule over an area in a way that doesn’t annoy the populace too much.
[dead]
How are the concepts of a state and a business the same?
Also they both own real estate?
Not all things that share some attributes are similar in general.
My shirt today is red. Do you know what else is red? Those buses in London!
Hah. Not even, though. Redness is a characteristic that means the same thing in the context of your shirt and a bus. Because there isn’t generally a competitive market for the service of “being governed” monopoly doesn’t even make sense there.
It is more like saying strawberries and ethyl methylphenylglycidate are both red tasting.
Fair point. Is that what they put in Code Red? Because that drink tastes damn red.
I dunno it was the first thing I came across for artificial strawberry flavor, haha.
so he's getting knifed after 6 months and Intel will be in even worse shape?
It's really simple - either Intel is shipping products on 18A (Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest) by Q1 of next year or they are not, and their entire future hinges on this.
I'm not an expert in the silicon business, but I'm pretty sure the lead time is long enough that an incoming CEO has little impact on whether or not they are shipping a new architecture in less than 12 months.
Intel's valuation might hinge on it, but evaluating the CEOs success or not... that doesn't strike me as a great idea.
Totally agree. Even the 3.5 years in the role that Pat Gelsinger got was insufficient to see his strategies come to fruition. At this point it's baked and there's not much anyone can do. My point isn't to assign credit/blame, it's simply to point out that Intel will not survive in its current form if they are not shipping 18A products by this time next year.
Agree you can’t evaluate entirely on ship date, but you can evaluate on how well the company handles either the last year of development or pivoting and adapting if it’s late. It’s challenging times at Intel, lots of opportunity for a CEO to show great leadership either in success or adversity.
Agreed, and to the sibling comment who ponders if the new CEO is too late to influence this... He may be. But he needs to decide if he thinks it can be solved, and if not immediately push the fab business out. Even if it gets pushed out to bankruptcy or sold for $1. I own some Intel stock so I sure hope it works, but they need to take urgent action if it's not...
He is exactly there to be knifed after he cut intel into easy to sell pieces.
Yeah I hope they negotiated a really nice severance package in the employment contract
seems to be the case
[flagged]
Isn't it kind of mean-spirited and divisive to imply that people are mentally unwell for practicing religious beliefs of their choice?
Would you still be saying that if he was Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu?
Practicing a religion in your own, and asking your employees to practice it are two very different things
I'm agnostic, but I wouldn't personally be offended or bothered if my Indian CEO sent out a letter asking my coworkers and I to try Hindu meditation or yoga, nor would I be offended or bothered by Pat's suggestion, nor by a suggestion that I try fasting for the month of Ramadan, etc etc.
Am I misunderstanding some aspect of this? Was Pat demanding rather than asking or something like that?
Maybe we're just different, but I would be extremely offended by a suggestion that I fast for ramadan, just as I would if I were asked to eat kosher for a month, or to go on a vegan diet for a month, or even just to watch his favorite cooking show for a month. Whether they were suggestions, requests or demands, I find these to be unreasonable intrusions of the company into people's private lives. Asking people to pray, might be a tiny bit less intrusive, but I still find it to be unreasonable.
Would you be more offended by your employer contacting you during your vacation to ask you to work, or is that less offensive to you because it's less unrelated to work?
Is the company asking you to go to a morale event where free food is being served less offensive?
Perhaps a better way to ask what I'm trying to get at... if asking (not demanding) you to try fasting is too intrusive into your personal life, what are some examples of an appropriate amount of intrusion into your personal life for the company, by way of voluntary, optional requests?
Is the problem that there's an ask with nothing offered in return? Is it that the ask isn't work-related? Is it that it's the company's leadership asking, rather than your coworker?
I am a big proponent of voluntarism - I believe that voluntary interaction free of coercion is at least partially inherently ethical in a way that involunatry interactions featuring coercion aren't. I tend to give a lot of good faith leeway to voluntary interactions (requests) that I do not give to coercion (demands), so your perspective is very intriguing to me and I want to understand it better.
I appreciate your curiosity and the way you phrased your point.
You hit the nail on the head with:
> Is it that it's the company's leadership asking, rather than your coworker?
I'm a fan of voluntarism too, but don't believe that a company leader can just "ask" something. Same as it is with sexual advances, when a boss asks something from their employees, it automatically implies that doing so will be beneficial to their position in the company, even if they didn't intend it.
As for your examples, I'd generally be ok with requests that can in some way be justified by the typical person as good for the company (e.g offsite team-building), but would draw the line at requests that go beyond that.
Fasting and prayer are pretty universal. Fasting itself has pretty interesting physiological effects wrt healing.
As a straight up atheist if pushed to make a decision, I'd probably participate. The prayer part id probably just interpret as picking an aspect of this news to explicitly make present in my mind for the day.
[dead]
He's supposedly quite low level, savvy about Platform Development Kits (PDK). Worked at Cadence, so he knows a lot about relating to other people making chips, selling IP, working with EDA tools.
A lot of potential here!
The disagreement with the board was supposedly related more to elements of the board trying to parts up and sell off bits of Intel. Harder to report that directly. Good for him, food sign if true.
Today was a very very good day to be hanging out on TechPoutine podcast. Very fun to have this as breaking news at the end of stream. https://www.youtube.com/live/aSoYz9Qp1xI
> That's what I'm trying to understand. His educational background was in Physics/Nuclear Engineering so he's obviously a smart guy, and he was CEO/Chairman of Cadence for 15 years, but other than that his 40+ year career has most been in VC and being on the boards of an incredibly large number of companies.
He is no Pat. He is no Andy. He is a business guy with some hard science behind (not electronics per se). It doesn't feel right.
>He is a business guy with some hard science behind (not electronics per se). It doesn't feel right.
I think you need to look up Cadence and look into how the fabless industry works. Picking him means Intel is possibly about to spin off or spin out the Chip division and only focus on Fabless.
My interpretation is that Intel didn't understand the customers of the fabless business and Tan does, so he's there to make Intel fabs attractive to them.
EDA companies have limited exposure to the inner workings of the fabless semi giants (Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD). They have even less exposure to running a fab service for fabless companies.
EDA tool vendors have to work extremely closely with both fabless firms and fabs forever to tune their products to deal the ever increasing complexity of nanometer scale manufacturing processes. Backside power delivery? You bet your ass that the tools folks were involved in making that work well for designers. Gate-All-Around? Probably needed the tool vendors to make tweaks based on feedback from the fabs.
The important thing is that Lip-Bu is from the industry, and has contacts on the tools side of things as well as the customers for those tools which happen to be potential future customers for any Intel fab services. This is a step in the right direction for INTC which has a board where industry experience is severely lacking.
Yes. There is an ever increasing amount of complicated design rules for modern processes and EDA tools have to model all of them for automated layout.
Anyone that's successfully been running hardware companies would be where I'd start. Offer the best of them much more money than they're currently making. Actually, hire a dream team of them. Turning Intel around would be worth paying a high price.
Lip-Bu Tan would fit that criteria.
Cadence is a successful hardware company - they have an IP catalog available for licensing and sell design services.
Maybe. It's a good start. The part where I'm unsure is that Cadence is one of the Big Three vendors. They have so much I.P., EDA tooling, patents, etc. that money will keep rolling in with incremental innovation.
Most hardware startups have to come up with new ideas, engineer good implementations of them, market them, and react to all kinds of competition. I'm talking companies like Habana or Cavium more than Cadence.
When I say hardware CEO, I meant one that ran a company like that where we know they'll be innovative and capable. Intel will need that since they're going to have to change so dramatically with so many product innovations. Whereas, running Cadence doesn't require (from what I know of them) that sort of innovation and it might have even hurt their entrenched position.
That said, I'm still positive about the new CEO. I hope his mindset and experience helps him do a lot of good. The letter he put out was great.
Given the current situation of Intel, it might need a lot of house cleaning to make any strategy work.
> It doesn't feel right.
Who would you have as CEO?
Gelsinger. Should've kept Pat and gotten rid of (at least some of) the board.
His problem was that he had a vision, possibly the correct one, with absolutely no clue how to execute it. That is unforgivable in a CEO.
Sure he knew how to get there: build SOTA fabs that can compete with TSMC. The problem was that it was going to cost $100B and take 10 years. The board wasn't patient enough and wanted a quick fix. There is no quick fix.
They already spent 10 years and probably $100b. 14nm with Broadwell was launched in 2014 and they never recovered from there. They just launched one node process in 2019 in full capacity after that and by that time it was too outdated.
There is no way to justify that a market leader would fall this bad this fast and couldn't recover and loose billions in process, except something was terribly wrong.
> fall this bad this fast
That's just how fabs are. Yeah, something went terribly wrong. That much is obvious.
Regardless of who was picked as CEO getting back to the cutting edge was always going to be horrendously expensive and take on the order of a decade. There was never a magical unicorn CEO that could avoid that.
The only obvious (at least to me) alternative is to sell off the foundry business. But someone is going to be running a cutting edge process at scale in the US. The federal government will presumably see to that.
>>The disagreement with the board was supposedly related more to elements of the board trying to parts up and sell off bits of Intel.
If true this would be very interesting. The most recent rumors were TSMC was trying to grab a part of Intel and have Nvidia/Broadcom/AMD take over the rest. Bringing in a CEO that literally left the board because he was against carving up Intel would be quite the signal from the board.
Cadence is a horrible company which just relies on monopolistic tactics rather than innovation to keep their position. Plus, their digital design tools are second grade.
That aside, he doesn't have fab experience. I guess that's very hard to come by, especially outside Taiwan and Korea.
If he wants to succeed, he will need to reconsistute the board. That's a tough one since they appointed him, but otherwise it won't work. The type of transformation Intel needs to go through won't withstand a myopic, short term oriented bureaucracy.
> If he wants to succeed, he will need to reconsistute the board.
Intel is a publicly listed company.
Yes, and I'm sure all those public shareholders are mighty unhappy with the current board's stewardship.
Unfortunately, index funds and mutual funds own about 68% of the Intel, with Vanguard retirement funds being the biggest. These passive custodian investor companies just vote along with the board's recommendation rather than making opinionated or activist decisions.
> These passive custodian investor companies just vote along with the board's recommendation
I know that's true, but I'm wondering - why? Why wouldn't they just withhold their vote and let the remaining (active) investors make decisions?
> These passive custodian investor companies just vote along with the board's recommendation rather than making opinionated or activist decisions.
I don't know where you get that idea from. They own so many shares they have direct control over who gets appointed to the board, and unlike a small investor when these guys walk away with their money it hurts. I often see the news reports of them flexing their muscles in the board room.
It's true they probably don't have much to say about bets like 18A or corporate culture. But they will almost certainly be involved on the decision on if or when Intel will be split up - if only because these investors decide which, if any of the new entities they are prepared to fund.
I’m with you except “unfortunately”. I don’t think we really want Vanguard trying to be an activist investor in all the companies they have major positions in.
It's a huge downside of passive investing. We lose a democratic element of corporate America by surrendering our votes to a couple big custodians that really don't care either way. I agree that I don't think Vanguard trying to make opinions on 1000s of company votes is the fix.
> We lose a democratic element of corporate America by surrendering our votes to a couple big custodians that really don't care either way.
By design, though, the people who invest with Vanguard do that precisely to offload decisions to experts and focus on other things.
Passive investors have neither the time nor expertise to monitor and vote on corporate decisions, so we're stuck with the current system regardless.
I think Intel is a bureaucracy that's gradually eating itself. Maybe it's harsh, but such companies might not be worth saving. They should be left to fizzle out and another should take their place.
The beauty of capitalism is that giants can fall down to earth, and smaller startups can take their place. Rinse and repeat.
I think the post above you asks a relevant question - shouldn't Vanguard, rather than always voting with the board, just not vote at all? Wouldn't that be the truly neutral position?
IIRC when Jobs came back to Apple, there was a major board shakeup.
Just because the board made mistakes doesn't mean you have to go full altman on them.
At this point I think you should. They literally took a great company and run it into the ground over profits
He left said board about 6 months ago after having a falling out with the previous CEO, so…
Remaking Our Company for the Future: A message from Lip-Bu Tan, who has been named Intel CEO, to company employees.
https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/lip-bu-tan-remaking-our...
> Together, we will work hard to restore Intel’s position as a world-class products company, establish ourselves as a world-class foundry and delight our customers like never before.
Sounds like he wants design and foundry to stay together.
> Tan left Intel's board last year over disagreements on how to turn around the company. He felt Intel had too many layers of middle management
Good sign.
There will be a all-hands in the next few weeks, supposedly. I hope whoever sees this reply, if you are in a position to do so comfortably, ask him straightforwardly whether he has or has heard about a plan to knife and sell INTC in the next 18 months.
Intel employees are at high risk of losing their jobs. I don't think cornering the new CEO at an all-hands is a good idea. And I wouldn't even trust his answer, anyway.
Of course you cannot trust it. If you are working in a publicly traded company (as an ordinary employee) you never hear strategic changes first from your management. They have to make a filing to the stock exchange before they tell you.
why
This author has a very interesting mail list on the semiconductor industry, and kind of predicted the new CEO:
https://irrationalanalysis.substack.com/p/make-intel-great-a...
I read through some posts and found this, after Gelsinger was fired:
>It’s over.
> If corporations are people, then Intel has decided to commit suicide and sell its vital organs.
Yet now the same guy seems more positive ("The best outcome has happened.... Lip-Bu Tan lacks the critical flaw that Gelsinger had… excessive kindness").
> A tsunami of decapitation (headcount reduction) is coming. However unpleasant the last several years has been… what is coming will be much worse.
> This will be a disorderly decapitation frenzy. Nobody is safe.
Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?
> Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?
The author thinks that it's about to happen, so it's too early to expect any revision. In that earlier post they said that Lip-Bu Tan resigned from the board because he wanted to reduce headcount more than Gelsinger, and that in their opinion hiring him and carrying out that reduction would be the best outcome for Intel.
Given that Lip-Bu Tan got hired, I think it's reasonable to expect some reductions soon. Before this the author listed a couple of possible outcomes, and as I understand it, Lip-Bu Tan and his reductions are described as one of the less chaotic and "unpleasant" options for Intel, because his cuts would be more specific than cuts that would be the result of splits/mergers/bankruptcy.
Sounds like the guy to trim Intel to be sold in in parts.
Intel engineers: thank you for these amazing machines, for all these years. They shaped many lives. We salute you.
Actually, he sounds like the opposite, but anyway.
What?
He's led Cadence for many years. You know, making tools to design silicone.
As a former Cadence employee, I really don't have any complains about his leadership, looking back at my time there.
He's been on Intel's board for a long time too.
I have no idea where you'd get that impression, so please elaborate.
On the contrary, because he was leading Cadence it looks like he will at least spin off the fabs. The major card Intel had against competitors was the integration. The tick-tock model.
The failure of Intel is in the board and terrible middle-managers. If Intel becomes fabless like AMD it will be left with the worse parts. They will make money in the sale but there will be nothing left.
Intel had a lot of cool tech recently like Optane and QAT. The failure to get market adoption lies squarely in management. Can you believe they put in-chip yearly licenses to enable QAT, that's INSANE (what if they 10x the license price next year?). And of course, almost zero reach out to open source. Only a PoC and calling it a day.
IMHO, Intel should concentrate in their core strengths. Fire most of the managers, get rid of the toxic board. Open all they can and invest heavily in documentation and software, guided by the community. But this is not going to happen. The board is firmly in place.
What does he bring over Pat or Michelle?
>What does he bring over Pat or Michelle?
Understanding everything it takes to design a chip, after spending 15 years leading the company that makes software tools for chip design, perhaps.
Cadence Design Systems, that is. I worked there for a couple of years on computational lithography/optical proximity correction software that we licensed to TSMC and Micron. If you don't know about Cadence, well, you don't know about silicon.
Some of the biggest EDA tools come from companies that use them for a reason (NX by Siemens, CATIA by Dassault, ...).
Those are the same reasons that make Lip-Bu Tan a great choice for the position.
> Some of the biggest EDA tools come from companies that use them for a reason (NX by Siemens, CATIA by Dassault, ...).
What do you mean? NX and CATIA are mechanical CAD systems, not EDA tools.
Pardon me, I wanted to make an analogy between EDA and CAD by drawing a parallel to the CAD world.
That's what I'm trying to understand. His educational background was in Physics/Nuclear Engineering so he's obviously a smart guy, and he was CEO/Chairman of Cadence for 15 years, but other than that his 40+ year career has most been in VC and being on the boards of an incredibly large number of companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip-Bu_Tan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lip-bu-tan-284a7846/details/expe...
>he was CEO/Chairman of Cadence for 15 years, but other than that
Oh, so he's only been leading one of the handful of companies making the full software suite for all stages of silicon design and simulation for 15 years, no biggie.
You're aware what kind of company Cadence is, are you?
I know, right? John Sculley ran the, at the time, most successful computer maker, Apple, for 10 years. Brian Krzanich ran the, at the time, largest chip maker, Intel, for 6 years. They were the authorities; their decision-making and abilities running businesses in those industries must have been impeccable to do so for so long.
Did you know that Jensen Huang has been running Nvidia for 30 years? Anyone can pick examples to prove their point.
Thank you for agreeing with me that “years experience in industry” has numerous examples both ways for efficacy and is thus insufficient support for snide assertions of fitness for position as the person I was responding to was making.
The entire point of the comment I was responding to was that Lip-Bu Tan doesn't have the experience in the industry, hence the snideness.
Whether he'd be a good chairman given his experience in the industry is a discussion that we can have once people understand which experience he actually has.
They may have just agreed to get Intel to this point and hand it off.
Well at least one very obvious upside that he brings is avoiding the embarrassment of rehiring Pat.
They fired Pat and went the M&A route. Apparently the board changed its mind again.
I feel Intel is in a similar situation as IBM in the 90s when Gerstner came in. You don't necessarily need a super technical CEO but somebody who is forceful enough to see through his initiatives. Not sure if the new guy is that type though.
Motivation to fix things?
Pat seemed to have it
Let's wish him luck. He will sure as hell need it.
Question: Why is Intel rehiring people they previously let go?
Pat Gelsinger – ex-Intel, rehired as CEO, ousted.
Lip-Bu Tan – ex board member, ousted due to disagreements on how to turn the company around.
If Intel removed him over disagreements on turnaround, what will be different this time?
It seems that Lip-Bu Tan resigned on his own, because he disagreed with the direction of the board and Gelsinger. Given that they fired Gelsinger and hired Lip-Bu Tan, it seems that they now think his direction may be better for Intel.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-board-member-quit-a...
> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly. (...)
> To cut costs, Intel announced in August layoffs of more than 15% of its workforce (...). The layoff plan was one source of tension between Tan and the board, according to sources. Tan wanted specific cuts, including middle managers who do not contribute to Intel's engineering efforts.
> Gelsinger, who took over in 2021 as part of a turnaround plan, added at least 20,000 employees to Intel's payroll by 2022. To Tan and some former Intel executives, the workforce appeared bloated. Teams on some projects were as much as five times larger than others doing comparable work at rivals such as AMD, according to two sources. One former executive said Intel should have cut double the number it announced in August years ago.
I am not sure if Intel can survive on its own. Games changed quite a bit and Nvidia is about to enter the space and will likely gain significant shares if they bundle their products in anticompetitive ways. It will be cutthroat for both Intel and AMD. But if he pulls it off, he will go down in history as the guy who saved Intel.
They certainly need to make chips for others to retain the scale needed to make chips. As far as x86 goes, it's not as sexy as GPUs or mobile chips but they're still selling a ton of x86.
For now. Nvidia is starting to package everything and eat the whole DC market. x86 is not looking so great outside of legacy use cases.
It spiked the stock to $23. Let's see how long it takes to go back to $19.50 again. Intel became a pump and dump stock.
Tan looks like Pat. Amazing.
Tan is much taller apparently.
Does Intel have any path to its stock price going 10x?
A few years after the first battle over Taiwan has taken place.
There has been news about Broadcom and NVidia testing their designs on Intel process nodes. Which is arguably worse in at least two respects, they are behind TSMC in density and also proprietary software tooling at Intel. After the 13000/14000 CPU chip death issues possibly also in regard to reliability. But they still want to do it.
Although this page in the history books is not yet written, companies hedging their bets this way is a really bad sign.
> A few years after the first battle over Taiwan has taken place.
Awful but true.
> There has been news about Broadcom and NVidia testing their designs on Intel process nodes.
Links? It makes sense to invest in second and third sources, even if it does mean handing money to a competitor. Especially given the instability of the global community right now.
Yes, and also 0x. I'd say they are equally likely. 2x or 0.5x seem most likely to me. I own shares at about $20. It's my gamble since I don't casino or sports gamble :-)
If you're looking for 10x, you are gambling. Buy calls on GME or quantum or whatever.
Not a chance. Fabs are an expensive business. The financials of a company like Intel can never compete with that of a fables company.
Even when Intel was having record revenues year after year its stock price barely moved.
Is this another one of Jensen and Lisa’s cousins?
No, he’s from Malaysia and not from Taiwan