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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for pointing that out - I was under the impression he still worked for intel, before commenting I checked and all the top Google results suggested as much, I’ve corrected my comment.
> 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 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.
Worth pointing out the two directional changes That Intel made, from DRAM to Microprocessor and IA64, NetBust High Clockspeed to Pentium M IPC. The first one was Andrew Grove, the 2nd one was from his disciple Patrick Gelsinger.
Those people are gone. Retired or pushed out by Intel's politics. Their legacy and work continues for about 5 years, as that is the lead time of their roadmap. And we saw what happen to Intel since 2016.
Intel had such a person. Patrick Gelsinger, mentored by Andy Grove. But Intel's Broad ( Andy Bryant ) decided he was never going to be CEO and so ultimately left Intel. BK became CEO, and the rest is history.
It never died. It was always there. Pat's just fulfilling the vision Paul had.
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