[tester756]

>finds a CEO who is as technical and strategic, as opposed to the bean-counters

Did you just call Gelsinger a "non-technical"? wow, how out of touch with reality

>Gelsinger first joined Intel at 18 years old in 1979 just after earning an associate degree from Lincoln Tech.[9] He spent much of his career with the company in Oregon,[12] where he maintains a home.[13] In 1987, he co-authored his first book about programming the 80386 microprocessor.[14][1] Gelsinger was the lead architect of the 4th generation 80486 processor[1] introduced in 1989.[9] At age 32, he was named the youngest vice president in Intel's history.[7] Mentored by Intel CEO Andrew Grove, Gelsinger became the company's CTO in 2001, leading key technology developments, including Wi-Fi, USB, Intel Core and Intel Xeon processors, and 14 chip projects.[2][15] He launched the Intel Developer Forum conference as a counterpart to Microsoft's WinHEC.

[jillesvangurp]

Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software.

I used to work at Nokia Research. The problem was on full display during the period Apple made it's entry into mobile. We had plenty of great software people throughout the company. But the leadership had grown up in a world where Nokia was basically making and selling hardware. Radio engineers and hardware engineers basically. They did not get software all that well. And of course what Apple did was executing really well on software for what was initially a nice but not particularly impressive bit of hardware. It's the software that made the difference. The hardware excellence came later. And the software only got better over time. Nokia never recovered from that. And they tried really hard to fix the software. It failed. They couldn't do it. Symbian was a train wreck and flopped hard in the market.

Intel is facing the same issue here. Their hardware is only useful if there's great software to do something with it. The whole point of hardware is running software. And Intel is not in the software business so they need others to do that for them. Similar to Nokia, Apple came along and showed the world that you don't need Intel hardware to deliver a great software experience. Now their competitor NVidia is basically stealing their thunder in the AI and 3D graphics market. Intel wants in but just like they failed to get into the mobile market (they tried, with Nokia even), their efforts to enter this market are also crippled by their software ineptness.

This is a lesson that many IOT companies struggle with as well. Great hardware but they typically struggle with their software ecosystems and unlocking the value of the hardware. So much so that one Finnish software company in this space (Wirepas), has been running an absolute genius marketing campaign with the beautiful slogan "Most IOT is shit". Check out their website. Some very nice Finnish humor on display there. Their blunt message is that most hardware focused IOT companies are hopelessly clumsy on the software front and they of course provide a solution.

[tester756]

>Gelsinger is a typical hardware engineer out of his depth competing against what is effctively a software play. This is a recurring theme in the industry where you have successful hardware companies with strong hardware focused leadership fail over time because they don't get software.

He spent almost decade on VMware which is... software company that significantly grew during his time

>just like they failed to get into the mobile market (they tried, with Nokia even), their efforts to enter this market are also crippled by their software ineptness.

Microsoft, which is software company failed at it too.

[donor20]

apple did initially want to build on what they saw as the best fab - Intel. unlock the power Intel would bring for their phone. But they had some design objectives focused on user experience (power/cost) and Intel didn't see the value. Intel then scrambled to try and build what apple had asked for but without the software.

Nokia kept doing crazy hardware to show off on hardware side. But these old companies can't stop nickle and dimeing - so you'd get stuff w crazy drm etc. And software wasn't there or invested in fully.

[whomst]

My brother in Christ he was literally the CEO of VMware

[brindlejim]

Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters. Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper. I doubt that culture is gone. It has already cost Intel many opportunities.

[alexey-salmin]

Otellini wasn't an engineer but still he made the historical x86-mac deal, pushed like crazy for x86-android and owned the top500 with xeon phi.

The downfall began with Krzanich who had no goal besides raising the stock price and no strategy other than cutting long-term projects and other costs that got in the way. What a shame.

[selimthegrim]

Krzanich started out as an engineer

[bell-cot]

"Optimize for Wall Street" is a disease to which even the seemingly-best minds can succumb.

[SilverBirch]

>owned the top500 with xeon phi.

This is interesting - because what I heard (within Intel at the time, circa 2015) was Xeon Phi was a disaster. The programming model was bad and they couldn't sell them.

[alexey-salmin]

It definitely had its downsides, but holding TOP1 for 6 lists (3 years straight) was an achievement. Biggest issues weren't in engineering IMO.

GPUs also have a weird programming model and yet here we are. I think in the end what mattered the most was the strategic failure to address the low-end market with Phi. When the right time came everyone did CUDA because everyone already had a GPU -- basically the same reason why x86 won the server market against SPARC decades ago.

In the meanwhile came the 2015 US export ban, then loss of interest by the management right before matrix multiplication stopped being an HPC problem and came into every segment in the form of ML.

Based on what we know now probably the best strategy was to bet everything on Intel Graphics and leverage the widespread of built-in graphics while it was dominated by Intel. From there it was possible to eat Nvidia's lunch in hi-end and HPC too. However in 2010 it wasn't certain at all. No one was talking about AI, the buzzword of the time was "big data" which relied on conventional computing methods. Deep learning revolution didn't happen yet, even GBDTs weren't a thing, ML was about linear regression. MPP architectures were confined to physics simulation and 3d graphics (which is a physics simulation of a sort).

[baq]

Otellini also made the historical decision to pass on the iPhone chip...

[tester756]

>Intel spent more than a decade under Otellini, Krzanich and Swan. Bean counters.

It still doesn't change mistake in your original message.

>Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation, but the problem runs much deeper.

How much "much deeper"? VPs? middle level managers? engineers?

The example goes from the top, so if he can change the culture at the top, it will eventually get deeper.

[jbm]

> as technical and strategic

It seems that this is an AND not an OR.

[tester756]

Point is valid regardless of "AND" or "OR"

He is both - technical and has a vision

[ksec]

>It still doesn't change mistake in your original message.

Precisely. The problem I found on HN is that It is hard to have any meaningful discussion on anything Hardware. Especially when it is mixed with business or economics models.

I was greedy and was hoping Intel could fall closer to $20 in early 2023 before I load up more of their stock. Otherwise I would put more money where my mouth is.

[ksec]

>Gelsinger was appointed out of desperation,

You will need to observe Intel more closely. It was not out of desperation. And Gelsinger is more technical and strategic than you implies.

[natbennett]

If you read carefully you’ll see the comment is “as technical and strategic.”

That’s very different from “non-technical.”

He was clearly capable of leading a team to develop a new processor but that’s not the issue here.

[tester756]

What makes you think that he is not strategic?

I believe his vision/strategy is really sound

[natbennett]

Again, if you read carefully you’ll see that the phrase is “as strategic.”

I’ll have to take your word for it on his vision/strategy though. I worked for him at VMware and never saw him articulate one.

[hackernewds]

1989 is 34 years ago.