[njtransit]

There’s an implicit assumption in the article that, because Gelsinger was technically competent, he was going to be a great CEO of given enough time.

Personally, I’ve heard nothing but bad things from Intel during Gelsinger’s tenure. He had some lofty ideas, but he clearly wasn’t executing well with Intel’s bread and butter business.

Also, I’m not sure good engineers always make good managers. Management is all about delegation. The skillset is really about identifying talent and trusting them to do things competently so you don’t have to worry about the details. That’s pretty much the antithesis of engineering, where you like thinking through the specific details of how things will work. And of course, engineering is only one part of brining products to market.

[roenxi]

I don't think the article did assume that. If you read between the lines the writer might well believe Intel is beyond saving no matter what Gelsinger does. Zero in on:

> The CEOs who got Intel into this mess were much longer than Pat and a worse fit. Meanwhile, the board let most of his predecessor’s activities go unchecked as they sped through disaster.

That really captures the spirit of the article. It is pointing out that the people ultimately responsible for getting Intel into a mess are still in charge and have started to flail. That doesn't mean the writer thinks Gelsinger was going to be a great CEO because he is technical. They think that the board is terrible and there is evidence that it hasn't changed.

This behaviour by the board would be a common enough pattern in both business and political failures. Something goes wrong, the people in charge don't admit they made mistakes (or everyone just assumes it is too late to recover) and retain power.

[njtransit]

The article focuses on the boards alleged ineptitude, not about Gelsinger directly, but the article directly states that Gelsinger was the best possible candidate:

> But the reality is he’s the single best candidate for the company.

However, directly before this, the author offers this:

> Meanwhile, Pat wanted to pursue the big, bold IFS bet, with 100s of thousands of wafers, when the reality is just getting 10s of thousands of wafers is a massive problem as is.

This sounds oddly reminiscent of people I've worked with in the past. They have grand, pie-in-the-sky visions of what something should be, but don't know how to quickly and efficiently take the steps to get there.

[Zigurd]

There's a strong case to be made that Intel CEO is the worst job in tech, and also the most complex, and it also has mediocre upside. Which prompts the question: Is there someone better than Pat Gelsinger who actually wants that job?

[rsanek]

$50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take

[BeetleB]

> $50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take

OK. Rule of thumb. Any sensationalist headline about CEO making $N dollars is always wrong.

The real details are in the Proxy statement they are now required to file. As an example, when Pat signed on, his compensation package was worth over $160m. How much did he actually get? $10M. Why? Because the rest of the package was contingent on high share prices (I think $80 was the lowest target). He got none of it.

And the punchline: His total payout during his whole tenure is $46-49M. That's over almost 4 years. And includes his sign on bonus and severance bonus.

So yes, your claim of $50m yearly salary is ludicrous.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-14...

[nimish]

Incredible that they set his performance targets on stock price and not on market share and technological superiority.

Priorities and incentives matter

[eric-hu]

That’s a lot of money to you and me, but we’re not in the running for a CEO position at Intel. For the people who might be, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s peanuts.

[Earw0rm]

It's also, weirdly, not going to make a lot of difference to the person earning it.

If you're next in line to that, you can already afford literally everything. Or stop working tomorrow and still afford _almost_ everything.

So it's about whether or not it's a good job to work in, and one that will enhance your reputation and status.

[aitchnyu]

IIRC 10 year old report states 100 million usd net worth is enough to buy whatever you want.

[Earw0rm]

Depends on your appetite of course. But I think it's safe to say that if you're not satisfied at $10m net worth, you're never going to be, and you'll just keep on chasing til circumstances force you to stop.

[njtransit]

50M in salary is actually quite high. The S&P 500 average is less than 20M. I’ve seen companies half the size of Intel pay their CEOs ~11M.

[BeetleB]

It is high. And it is wrong. See details here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42341514

[alecco]

When you can get fired by the board within 6 months, it matters. This could be a death blow gig for a competent career CEO.

[shiroiushi]

>Also, I’m not sure good engineers always make good managers.

I worked at Intel when Craig Barrett was CEO. He was also a former engineer, and he was a terrible CEO. Intel got involved in a bunch of stupid stuff during his tenure, like the P4 Netburst architecture, the RAMBUS fiasco, and lots of side businesses that didn't pan out. Otellini took over and fixed things by going to the Core architecture, IIRC.

I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule.

[tgma]

> I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule.

Good managers are exceptions, period. Still, good engineers are leaps and bounds more likely to be effective as managers, even if they make managerial mistakes. This is probably even more true for high level executives than line managers.

There's a common bigco school of thought that does not say this explicitly, but believes "nerds are bad managers," so if you are good at engineering you're less likely to be good at management, so let's go hire pro managers (that end up being schmoozers and less technical). In my experience, the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management.

[lnsru]

Technical founder sold a company (where I currently work) to a big corp. Big corp sends here regularly directors with MBA to fix things, but things are worse and worse every year. People ask me why I joined a company in free fall every week. The thing is that technical understanding of MBAs is close to zero. Result will not improve throwing away 15% of the employees (the guy before current director did this). It’s obvious to me as an engineer with experience in operations - the products are not designed for easy production and manual testing takes too long and has bad error coverage. I have experience to fix obvious technical problems. No MBA will see them in first place. No MBA with their arrogance will listen to an engineer. Let’s wait for recession to end and look for new jobs.

[oneshtein]

Talk to your manager manager. Talk in manager's language. Be rich. :-/

[silvestrov]

It's a very common business school line of thought that managers are always smarter than the people they manage. Employees are seen as "resources", not as talents.

So by definition nerds (and other non-business school people) cannot be as good.

[packetlost]

I had a conversation today about that topic sorta. I find the abstract tradeoffs of writing software (ie. efficiency vs flexibility) to be inherent to company social structures as well. I suspect the intuition that engineers build up of knowing when to favor either side is applicable, just with different error signals.

[YZF]

There are a lot of similarities between software and organizations. But being a CEO also requires people skills. Many of us software folks have good intuition about how to make technical projects successful but the way to get there often involves getting other people to cooperate. AKA leadership. That's the tough one.

That said I agree that a CEO of a company like Intel has to be technical. I mean we saw what happened to Apple when the CEO came from Pepsi. But you need someone technical, in the domain, who is also a strong leader and a visionary and those people are not that common.

[PittleyDunkin]

Reminds me a lot of Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[bjarneh]

> the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management

The golden combo.

[ethbr1]

The difference between immediate pre-P4 and now Intel problems is stark though.

Immediately pre-P4, Intel need a better architecture than K6-* or AMD-next (revealed as Athlon). That's not a process problem.

Now, Intel needs their leading node to work. That's a process problem.

Arguably, none of Intel's business model works if their process is substantially behind TSMC.

Consequently, the CEO and board should be 100% focused on returning to process parity.

Gelsinger at least had an economically viable plan for that. Without him? No strategic plan: the board sure as shit isn't going to come up with one.

[YZF]

Intel historically was the best at semiconductor manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got to.

I bought some Intel shares when it crashed last time but the latest events are changing my mind on the prospects of this company. Intel getting to be the best at process happened over years or decades of people and culture. If that's gone there's no way to reproduce it. Looking from the outside it looks like through offshoring, layoffs and culture issues they've basically lost what they had.

I think AMD managed to make it through tough times (and Intel way back then as well) because even when the company was struggling financially it managed to maintain people and culture that enabled it to overcome the challenges. But now the times have changed and executives don't see people or culture as leverage, and are happy to get rid of those. You better not need any amazing execution from that point on.

[tgma]

> Intel historically was the best at semiconductor manufacturing processes. That's what got it where it got to.

Exactly. AMD has been executing perfectly on the CPU side, but they also happened to be a key beneficiary in an unprecedented event in the past few decades: TSMC overtaking Intel in their process which would likely not have happened without Apple betting on them.

Intel did not benefit from the stagnation they had which was enabled by their success and monopoly. Internet Explorer 6-level stagnation: from Haswell to ~2018 they successfully shipped the same product over and over again and when AMD pressure started to mount, they basically trickled down higher core counts into cheaper SKUs. It would have worked, except at the highest end, they needed the process to be competitive and it wasn't, which messed up everything.

[hedora]

It’s not just a process problem. Unless you are on windows or playing steam games on linux, there is zero reason to prefer x86.

Those markets add to way less than 50% of consumer market share. X86 is rapidly declining in cloud too.

It reminds me of sun, dec and hp fighting to have the best commercial unix OS in the late 1990’s. Even if you win, you loose.

[adrian_b]

Besides Windows or gaming, there is another market for x86.

If you are interested in technical and scientific computing, but you cannot afford to spend amounts of $ written with 6 digits or much more, then x86 is the only solution.

The only Arm-based CPUs with decent performance are those made by Fujitsu, which are not available at retail.

The "datacenter" GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA are much too expensive for small businesses or individuals. Even for a bigger business their price is justifiable only when they are busy close to 24/7.

So for most people only the x86 CPUs provide an acceptable performance for computations that use either FP64 numbers or large integers.

[mkesper]

Things are changing on that front, too: https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-megadc-ars-211m-nr-r...

[adrian_b]

The Ampere CPUs may be great for something like Web servers, but they are pathetic at number crunching. The same is true for the CPU cores designed by Arm, which are used in the server CPUs of other cloud vendors.

[kimixa]

The only way you can get close to x86 being "less than 50% of the consumer market" is by including phones, but I'd argue that's a new market on top of the "consumer computing" market. And even then, in "unit count" rather than revenue.

[shiroiushi]

>Unless you are on windows or playing steam games on linux, there is zero reason to prefer x86.

This is completely false, unless you're just speaking theoretically. In the real world of 2024, there's no real alternative to x86 for general PC computing, even if you're running Linux. Where are the laptops with ARM CPUs? (No, Macs don't count; can't easily run Linux on those plus they have a huge price penalty.) Where are the consumer-grade ATX motherboard + CPU combos for building desktop PCs? None of this stuff exists, at this time.

Sure, Apple's made some really nice ARM CPUs, but that's pretty useless if you don't want to run all-Apple hardware and use MacOS. And Windows keeps using x86 for whatever reason, even though technically they could target other architectures if they really wanted to (and they have, in the past). Linux basically just uses whatever Windows uses, because unlike Apple it's just not nearly big enough to command marketshare all by itself outside of dedicated servers. (And even here, for some reason, ARM hasn't made much headway, though I think it is pushing into this market slowly.)

[wbl]

Hindsight is 20/20. If higher clocks won out because extractable IPC was lower Netburst was the right design.

[Earw0rm]

The problem with Netburst was the clock speed wall. They designed it with a view to continued doubling which has been a trend up until then. It turns out once you go past 3GHz improvements are much, much slower.

We hit 3GHz in 2003. If you go back ten years from that, the top speed available was 66MHz, ten years before that and it was 8MHz. Fast forward 20 years and we're just barely scraping 6GHz.

[Earw0rm]

Doing the math - even a conservative estimate for 1983 to 2003 is eight doublings.

That would give us a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 768GHz today. Which, Netburst or no, would wipe the floor with the fastest available multi-core chip.

While also putting out enough heat energy to keep a small town in Northern Canada warm all winter long.

[giantrobot]

Foresight (at the time) told you NetBurst was a dead end though. AMD made a lot of sales from people avoiding NetBurst, ignoring clock speeds and looking at actual performance numbers.

NetBurst looked good on benchmarks; code with few/no branches that fit in the L2 cache if not the L1 cache. On real world code consisting almost entirely of branches and pointer chasing the NetBurst chips performed horribly compared to lower clocked Athlons.

Intel's promises of 5+ GHz chips got more laughable as the line went on because they were already straining cooling and power supply options at less than 3GHz.

[wbl]

Netburst's branch predictor choices survived. It was the penalties that were a bad idea.

[adrian_b]

I have followed Intel's products closely. While they suck enough that there have passed more than 5 years since I have bought for the last time Intel CPUs (but before that I had spent a lot of money on Intel CPUs and other products), I have not seen any problem that can be attributed directly to Pat Gelsinger.

Unlike most companies, Intel publishes relatively detailed roadmaps with years in advance.

Since Pat Gelsinger has become CEO, all those roadmaps have been accomplished in time, even if the products have not been as good as they could have been, due to things like low clock frequencies for any new fabrication process at launch (but this is a problem that has plagued Intel for the entirety of the last 10 years) or high intercommunication latencies for the first Intel multi-tile CPUs, like Sapphire Rapids and Arrow Lake, which can be attributed to an unavoidable lack of experience with such designs (because the former Intel management has delayed for too many years the transition to such designs, with jokes about the "glued" CPUs of the competition).

According to the roadmaps published years ago, the recent years have been intended as transitional years, with the first really competitive Intel products being launched only in the second half of 2025. Only then it would have been possible to judge correctly whether Pat Gelsinger had done a good job or a bad job as CEO.

As outsiders, we do not have enough information about what Pat Gelsinger has done. The roadmaps have been reasonable, the main thing that could be criticized is that there have been too many intermediate steps before reaching desirable products. However, it is likely that Intel could not have sustained financially a more abrupt transition. Even with this slower transition that has included the launch of many intermediate products intended to avoid a collapse of the sales, the financial losses have been high enough that they have been used as an excuse to eject Pat Gelsinger.

It seems that Pat Gelsinger did not have the power to do a real cleanup of the Intel managers, especially of those from the fabs. For years many of those managers must have lied continuously both to other Intel divisions and in the public presentations. There is no public information that any of those managers have suffered adequate consequences for their actions.

Also, it does not seem that he has succeeded to improve the internal cooperation between various Intel divisions. Some internal competition is good, but withholding information and lack of cooperation is bad. At Intel, too many products appear to have been developed independently by different teams, instead of all teams sharing some common designs as a base for their products.

[hulitu]

> Management is all about delegation.

yes, but a manager who has no idea about his products, is a bad manager. Sometimes the teams below compensate and this is not visible, but, when the shit hits the fun, it becomes obvious.

[jackyinger]

If you care to read the article you’ll find evidence of Pat’s competence.

[BeetleB]

> Personally, I’ve heard nothing but bad things from Intel during Gelsinger’s tenure. He had some lofty ideas,

I don't know if I can say he was doing a good or bad job - it's really hard to say. But were there good things about him that people say?

He was the first CEO to say Intel was underpaying. He promised to raise pay, made a deal with the board to do so, and delivered. Most people got something like a 20% pay boost. Still not FAANG level, but compared to the prior CEOs who said "We pay fair market rates"... yeah, he won points with a lot of employees for that.

He quickly banned stock buybacks. Throughout his tenure he focused on his Foundry plans and improving engineering practices, at the cost of share value. His plan was "Let's fix our fabs and our efficiency, get back to building world class products, and the financials will take care of themselves". As opposed to all his predecessors who did stock buybacks instead of investing the money into the company.

He convinced the board to cut the dividend to a third of its value - because Intel was paying triple the dividends that its competitors paid.

No doubt many didn't like declining stocks, but no one can argue he was trying to artificially prop up the share price. His overall compensation was low.[1] He didn't earn any of his performance based stocks, and didn't try to manipulate those prices for personal gain. In the end he made a little over $10m per year - that includes the severance pay and signing bonus.

He was fairly good with transparency. He wanted the world to see the fab's financials when he knew they were poor. The point was to give the world a real number that could be used as a metric of how well Intel is doing. $8B loss this year, with the hope of breaking even in the next few years.

This last thing is what probably got him fired because the stock tanked after that (I don't know why - everyone knew it was unprofitable...).

Declining revenues are due to Intel products not competing. How much of that is Pat's fault - hard to say. Intel was making poor products for a while, and partly due to a poor fab process - which is precisely what Pat was trying to fix (5 nodes in 4 years is unprecedented, and it looks like Intel will achieve it). Lunar Lake was built on TSMC, and is a fairly decent product. Overall, the gap between AMD and Intel has shrunk.

Finally, perhaps the reason people really hated him: The layoffs. But as is often pointed out on HN, if you compare Intel's headcount with comparable companies (AMD, Nvidia), you can see Intel is really wasteful. The revenue per person is much, much lower. You can compare just the Intel Products head count (excluding the fabs). The layoffs had to happen. And there have to be more if Intel wants to be competitive. It can no longer command high margins.

So yeah, plenty hate him. But plenty do like him.

> but he clearly wasn’t executing well with Intel’s bread and butter business.

Nor were the previous two CEOs.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-14...

[Melatonic]

Agree with all of this - lot of armchair experts in here but the reality is we will not know how good he was until a few years down the line

[smaddox]

> if you compare Intel's headcount with comparable companies (AMD, Nvidia), you can see Intel is really wasteful

AMD and NVIDIA are fabless. They are not comparable. It takes far more people to R&D a cutting-edge process node and run a dozen fabs 24/7 365.25 than it takes to design cutting edge chips.

[BeetleB]

> AMD and NVIDIA are fabless. They are not comparable.

Which is why I said:

> You can compare just the Intel Products head count (excluding the fabs).

Both AMD and Nvidia have under 30K folks. Intel has what - 115K employees? I can assure you that 85K of them are not working in Foundry. TSMC, BTW, has 76K employees in case you want to do a Foundry comparison. Anyway you slice it (compare products or compare fabs), Intel is wasteful.

[njtransit]

These are all very interesting points. I’d like to add the total flop of Arrow Lake. That’s the type of thing the board likely cares about.

[BeetleB]

One product won't sink a company or CEO. The failure to capitalize on AI, though, is another matter.

[rvba]

Guy praying on twitter does not sound like some scientist to me, although article says he did 486

[tgma]

Lots of top tier scientists have been religious. Knuth is too, for instance. It strikes me as strange that believing in "simulation theory" has become cool and acceptable in tech circles, but somehow traditional popular religions are frowned upon. Feels dogmatic to believe so strongly that scientists necessarily have to be in direct contrast with religion.

[shiroiushi]

>It strikes me as strange that believing in "simulation theory" has become cool and acceptable in tech circles

It has? I like to bring it up in comments sometimes, and I see other people do too, but this doesn't mean anyone actually "believes in it". Imagining it as a possibility is not at all akin to a religious belief, where you have a strong, dogmatic belief in something despite a total lack of evidence (or even evidence to the contrary).

[lupusreal]

> a religious belief, where you have a strong, dogmatic belief

"Strong" belief is probably overselling the strength of the belief of an average religious adherent. A whole lot of people have doubts, only go to church a few times a year, etc. There are a lot of people for whom Pascal's Wager is persuasive, who stick with a religion despite severe doubts "just in case."

In either the case of traditional religion or simulation theory, you have people with varied levels of conviction believing in something for which there isn't empirical evidence. As an atheist, I consider simulation theory to be one of the many manifestation of the innate religious tendencies in humans. It lacks a supernatural component per se (that's debatable, it depends on what is meant precisely by supernatural), but it's a framework commonly used to construct many of the same spiritual systems traditionally seen in religions (our reality was intentionally created, we have a purpose to the creator, we're being watched, we're being judged, etc)

[Zigurd]

He's religious but that shows publicly only on his personal social media posts once a week, where he posts a bible verse. That's unusual in the tech industry. For some people like for example, Cathie Wood, conspicuous religiosity is a red flag. But I've never seen any evidence that Pat Gelsinger has any problems like that.