That would have been true if Pat Gelsinger didn't became CEO. Worth pointing out Intel's R&D didn't stopped, all their CPU uArch design were done, only to be let down by their 10nm fiasco. That single misstep caused Intel years of setback. ( My calculation is somewhere around four years, they had 2 years lead at the time, so now they are about 2 years behind )
As some have pointed out, TSMC is the real competitor, not really Apple or AMD. So I was surprised how quickly Pat managed to open up Foundry with industry standard tools and ecosystem. I have been saying this since 2012 even before the original Intel custom foundry were announced. ( And constantly being attacked and abused by Intel Fans online) But to actually see Intel announcing it is a completely different thing. Especially knowing their strong inertia. In hindsight, it probably took that beating from 10nm before they could really go all in with Custom Foundry. ( "All in" as in with industry tools, they are still an IDM, not Pure Play )
And how the tide has turned. All of a sudden Leading Edge Foundry becomes a national security concern. And Intel should rip all the benefits from it.
It was Andy Grove first started moving away from DRAM in the late 1980s, and may be his disciple will be the one who start to move away from x86 as core business.
Yeah, and I should mention that the idea to make the foundry a big part of Intel's business came from a past CEO who was an MBA (circa 2010-2011), and it was the engineers in the company who sabotaged that effort.
History showed the engineers to be wrong, and here we are with Intel trying to compete with TSMC for customers.
Correction: Intel has had a Foundry business since 2010 or 2011. Then CEO Paul Otellini pushed hard for it, but had a lot of opposition internally. It then languished after he left until Pat took over.
It never died. It was always there. Pat's just fulfilling the vision Paul had.
An exception to the trope doesn't "put it to rest," except of course for that exception.
For Intel the interim CFO made CEO was actually executing a strategy that might have worked. I was pretty sure Gelsinger would be a catastrophic mistake because he wasn't a fabrication guy (but maybe they couldn't hire one?) and I'm sad to see this playing out. His strategy depends on one difficult to impossible, and one impossible thing: regain the ability to move to new nodes on a very fast time scale and change the corporate culture to accommodate foundry customers without buying such a company.
By now without having heard of mass firings of incompetent managers but plenty of reports it's still a snake pit or clown show if you prefer, and the latest capex decrease of $4 billion says nothing good. Even if the latter is just that they can't buy the machines they need.
While I'm at it, how well is their 10 nm now Intel 7 node at shipping parts? That was when Intel's decades of bad top level technical management snared their crown jewel.
This doesn't account for the fact that Gelsinger kicked off IDM 2.0 in 2021 and is this far in the hole already and the investments chosen have put them further behind TSMC before they even get started.
Gelsinger is trying to do too much in too short of a timeframe creating disarray at Intel, just like he left in his wake at VMware. I'm not sure that he has the landscape process that's required in this market. I think he's likely better cut out in a more CTO type role at Intel rather than being at the helm.
And even if Intel is on a better long term path, Gelsinger didn't see the short term hurdles as he should have. These are the American taxpayer dollars being wasted in high executive pay and corporate waste under his leadership. Gelsinger should be held better accountable if Intel is looking for more handouts [0].
its sad to see a king (Intel) slowly dying. Microsoft got its groove back with Satya Nadella and turn Microsoft into player two in the cloud computing and unlock .Net.
AMD ryzen to EPYC with Lisa Su and TSMC became king of pure-play foundry under Morris Chang.
i think there is a pattern here. a good engineer CEO have a vision of what a company can be while a CFO turn CEO only see the bottom line.
i don't know how long Intel can keep squeezing 14+++++++++++++++ nm.
He came on as CEO a little over a year ago. A new CPU from inception to release might take 5 years on a good day. Design tools and methodologies take many years to change and improve. I imagine the manufacturing side of it has much longer lead times, if anything. And then perhaps slowest of all can be the institutional structure. Executives, managers, even technical leaders can remain entrenched in their positions for years, decades. And it may not be that they're not doing good work or are incompetent (on the contrary they may be extremely bright and productive) so it's not like you can just come in and fire them all, it's just that they may be stuck on ideas that used to be great. Big organizations turn more like an oil tanker than speed boat, in large part due to this institutional entrenchment.
Although keep in mind they have a lot of momentum that is going largely in the right way to begin with. They have among the best logic designers, circuit designers, EDA, silicon research and manufacturing process and technologies, and software division in the world. Despite Intel having had a > 5 year train wreck in their 10nm manufacturing technology, they're able to release CPUs which are for many cases among the best if not the best in the market which goes to show how far ahead they were and how good their design capability still is.
So I think the problem is both bigger and smaller than people think (i.e., they've not completely crashed and burned, but it won't be a matter of just wiping the slate clean and ordering the engineers to deliver on the next product).
From the rumors I've heard (might be true; might not) Intel lost a great deal of semiconductor engineering talent because they were making so much money on minor evolutions of x86 that they saw little need to truly innovate. The MBAs took over.
Once it became clear that AMD and ARM (and by extension TSMC) were eating their lunch, they had great difficulty pivoting because they lacked the talent and the organizational will to do so -- at least until Gelsinger took charge. I have a lot of respect for Gelsinger and I think he just might turn it around.
That ignores the fact that older businesses tend to financialize to drive growth in equity value once revenue has stopped growing and older companies tend to be the most prone to disruption/failure.
Intel’s downfall can be tied back to an org structure that made up for bad gate-level architecture choices with proprietary fabrication techniques. All that customization crushed intel’s ability to compete with TSMC in foundry and the lack of architectural discipline prevented them from even coming close to fast-following QCOM SoCs or NVDA GPUs.
Keep in mind, for all the talk of Intel’s bad management and over-financialization, BK was a foundry engineer and he oversaw the worst period of decline.
In order to regain Apple as a customer, Intel would actually need to commit to becoming a foundry. The catch is that Intel has tried to become a foundry several times before and failed, and there's no reason to believe this time will be any different. Intel survives off of fat cat margins on silicon by selling premium systems (especially in the server market), and the foundry business model is simply unable to provide those kinds of margins. What would impress me is if Intel starts poaching the key people from foundries that are needed to sell and support the business model internally.
Intel was founded in '68. They've been around since the inception of the integrated circuit. Their war chest of patents and dollars and assets/resources aka foundries, is helpful in soaking up damage from bad calls in a way that no one else can match.
AMD could never made the same gamble as Intel did for Itanium. There's a long technical argument as to whether the world is better off in a technical CPU design sense because of that, but I disagree that it's necessarily good management of Intel that's allowed it to recover from disaster.
The best management can play the hand they're dealt perfectly and still lose. However bad management can play the best hand poorly and still win.
IMHO, Intel lost a couple of years because the CEO had a consensual affair with a subordinate so they fired him and put the CFO in charge for a while and puttered around unable to fix the serious process manufacturing problems getting to 10nm they encountered which caused them to fall behind in manufacturing to TSMC. Finally, after a few years of little progress, Gelsinger was hired, and we'll see what he can do.
> Intel has poorly executed a quite a few things while Pat has been CEO.
He's been CEO for 3 years, considering the state of decay of Intel in 2021 that's not a lot of time to turn things around. AMD took ~6 years between Bulldozer and Zen 1 and you could even argue that Zen 2 is when it truly became competitive so that's 8 years.
I'm not saying he's the Intel messiah FWIW, just that the jury is probably still out on whether he will deliver or not.
Intel has a lot of irons in the fire and some very talented engineers, but they've always competed with a process advantage behind them and been able to use it to recover from the occasional architecture misstep like Itanium or the Pentium IV. Pat Gelsinger is probably the best CEO they could have picked but they're in a tough position and I'm not optimistic.
Early in my career I got to meet Pat Gelsinger so I know firsthand he's smart, very energetic, and he has been in IC engineering since masks were cut from Rubylith. He has all the background and knowledge to do the right things.
But what I have heard so far is scattershot: Be proprietary, be open, be exclusive, be a foundry, own an ADAS company, be nowhere in cars but wish you were, etc. Totally unsurprising to find that leads to starts and stops like this one.
Intel had a recipe that worked. It no longer does. Intel needs a new strategy as coherent as the old one but that fits the modern environment.
This is factually incorrect. Intel has in the past and is currently trying to sell and expand their foundry services. They just happen to have done a horrible job of it so far and have repeatedly lost foundry customers (like Achronix) as a result.
Some skepticism, but not too much. There's a decent possibility the self-sabotage at Intel stopped after new CEO Pat Gelsinger took over.
Previous leadership was seriously mismanaging things. The following comment sheds some light on their stagnation during the 10nm/'Intel 7' node development period:
As some have pointed out, TSMC is the real competitor, not really Apple or AMD. So I was surprised how quickly Pat managed to open up Foundry with industry standard tools and ecosystem. I have been saying this since 2012 even before the original Intel custom foundry were announced. ( And constantly being attacked and abused by Intel Fans online) But to actually see Intel announcing it is a completely different thing. Especially knowing their strong inertia. In hindsight, it probably took that beating from 10nm before they could really go all in with Custom Foundry. ( "All in" as in with industry tools, they are still an IDM, not Pure Play )
And how the tide has turned. All of a sudden Leading Edge Foundry becomes a national security concern. And Intel should rip all the benefits from it.
It was Andy Grove first started moving away from DRAM in the late 1980s, and may be his disciple will be the one who start to move away from x86 as core business.
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