[allie1]

I’ve been reading about Pat Gelsinger turning things around on execution, but many of the announced products for this year are already late (Sapphire Rapids, GPUs, even alder lake roll out was late).

Do you know if anything has changed at Intel? Is it reasonable to expect changes within a year and a half of starting on the job given the size of the company and the changes needed?

[throwawaylinux]

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).

[interesting_pt]

I'll somewhat echo the other response: I believe in Pat. He clearly communicates during his press releases, obviously is very technical and has a good understanding of the industry. He also seems to work well with others. I think it's possible he can turn that ship around (and may already be doing so), but it was just too late for me.

I haven't sold the $INTC I got as comp, and that probably speaks louder than whatever I say here.