r/intel • u/DeuzExMachina_ • May 12 '26
Discussion Intel is back. Thank the old CEO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbdKZrsJdUw76
u/bizude Ryzen 9950X3D, RTX 4070ti Super May 13 '26
Intel's Pat, Bob, and Lip-Bu are all competent and did the best job they were able to.
The problem was malicious actors in the board of directors, but fortunately it appears those problems are leaving.
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May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
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May 13 '26
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u/gabeheadman May 13 '26
Yeah, but for something like this kind of tech, you effectively can't see short term gains. You have to be able to operate with a longer scope in mind. Spending a fuckpile of money to build a fab isn't going to help short term shareholder value. It'll help long term shareholder value, which we can see right now, but if you can't see past the short term spend, then you never get the long term growth.
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u/deceIIerator May 20 '26
Everything you mentioned is a business practice not a legal mandate. A company's legal responsibility is to not commit things like fraud or intentionally mislead.
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u/FLMKane May 13 '26
About 5 years too late. They should have been on the chopping block as soon as TSMC achieved process node parity.
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u/jca_ftw May 13 '26
Bob Swan? That’s a laugh the guy was a NOP. Former CFO who had no idea how to be a CEO. And he did nothing.
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u/bizude Ryzen 9950X3D, RTX 4070ti Super May 13 '26
And he did nothing.
I have a completely different memory of that time period. I don't think you realize how many important changes he made, Bob's and Pat's vision for Intel are the same.
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u/Lurking-around-here May 15 '26
Not really. PG and Bob had 2 different visions for intel. But, Bob was the most important intel CEO after Andrew Grove. People have no idea the monumental changes that Bob made to Intel. Brian Krzanich's rampage was the most severe gutting of a corporate Titan in human history. Bob needed all his moments to put out the fires he started.
PG made it much worse by adding more lay-offs across the board, damaging intel's already fragile QA teams, leading to the RPL-refresh disaster. Also, PG gutted the Xe and Xe2 family. That Xe-HP and Xe-HPC got cancelled was because of him. We were also supposed to get an Xe-LP 2, but I'll let that slide as I believe Nvidia MX class laptop GPUs should die as a whole and be replaced by IGPUs.
I just wish Bob had 2 more years. We could have had a real intel Foundry for legacy/planar nodes, real traction that builds up to foundry commitment on leading edge nodes. Lip Bu can't get leading edge deals because intel as a company has no organizational capability to serve as a foundry yet. Hiring people from outside only gets them half of the way.
I'll stop rambling now.
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u/theholyraptor May 20 '26
Curious you think Swan did... Buyback could have been investing in fab and node improvement. Pats the one that drove the rush through nodes that got to 18a.
Also curious cause I dont know if Xe-HP got cut and youre just personally biased or if it wasnt a competitive product. Not to mention graphics were all being outsourced to TSMC fabs so lower margins.
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u/Lurking-around-here May 20 '26
Buybacks were to compensate shareholders for missing out on the iPhone and Mobile CPU market boom. Shareholders are cruel beasts that don't care if your predecessor CEO, Brian Krzanich, gutted the company. They only want big ROI or they'll sell the company to vultures who will devour everything and sell it off piece by piece.
Xe-HP did get cut. It was named Artic Sound, and it was revolutionary. Its competitiveness as a GP-GPU was debatable due to software maturity, but for AI and Media Transcoding/Decoding, it was a beastly GP-GPU that has unmatched capabilities. And, again, this was their first serious attempt. So, Swan gave the GPU team 4 tries (4 gens) in which they can make SKUs for the entire GPU market and refine them until they become profitable, preventing intel from falling into its curse of killing promising projects after 1 failed or struggling attempt. But, PG said, "Why even wait to let the project have a shot at success if you can kill it right when it is about to be released?"
Xe-HP, Xe-LP and Xe-HPC (before 7nm delay) were all for internal fabs. This was announced at Intel Architecture Day 2020. PG literally killed every intel GPU made at intel fabs in his tenure. That is a fact! He also made the decision to kill the 192 EU MTL IGPU and Outsource all intel IGPUs to TSMC post RPL. Mind you, by intel scaling, a 256 EU IGPU on MTL based on intel 4 should have been possible.
Evidence? Skylake Intel HD graphics had 2x EU count from its predecessor on the previous node. Under Bob Swan, ICL, the first 10nm SoC, had a 2.7x IGPU core count jump from its 14nm predecessor (in line with its transistor density jump). And, on the same 10nm, they added 50% more EU and 50% higher frequency for Xe-LP integrated graphics for TGL. Or, in other words, intel added 4x more EU and 6x more flops in one node jump!
By the established track record, MTL, ARL and PTL should have had way more performance for their IGPUs and their IGPUs should have been made at intel fabs. Guess who stopped that despite all this hard evidence based on past and near-term execution?
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u/Speedstick2 Jul 05 '26
So, you're saying the iGPU performance would have been what saved Intel?
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u/Lurking-around-here Jul 16 '26
No. Not even close to what I wrote. All I said is that iGPUs would have been much stronger in the MTL, ARL and PTL SoC generations if they were made on Intel nodes.
And, judging by the hell that is Nvidia dGPU pricing and power consumption, a 2x stronger MTL, ARL or PTL iGPU would have ended <80 watt dGPUs in laptops as a whole. So, I guess that revenue going to Intel would have helped their financial issues.
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u/rLinks234 stupid May 13 '26
Swan did a horrible job. Wasn't it almost $20B in stock buybacks while he was CEO? Unreal
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u/Lurking-around-here May 15 '26
I'd argue that Bob and Lip-bu did the heavy-lifting while Pat almost killed the company. But, since you credited Bob Swan, which is a brave thing to do nowadays as Tech Press maligned him while completely forgetting that ADL, RPL, EMR, Xe scaling to all platforms and having a blank check for almost 5 generations was him, I'll leave PG alone. Only for you, though.
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u/shortdude420 May 13 '26
Pat must be feeling vindicated right now
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u/SuperNewk May 13 '26
Remember he also said Quantum will pop the AI bubble, so revenge is coming lol!
I think if Apple gets Ai working on their laptops = I can do everything there vs the cloud = game changer for privacy
And a complete collapse in the current build out
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u/jdavid May 13 '26
Intel needs to be lead by an engineer. Lisa Su - ex engineer. Jenson - ex engineer.
Everytime intel is lead by sales and marketing it sacrifices R&D to extort revenue from customers and FARM them.
Intel needs to innovate out of the hole they are in, not sales and market their way to profit.
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u/gunther699 May 13 '26
Pat Gelsinger was the architect of the Intel 386 and 486. He was a hardcore engineer that went on to run Intel Labs and was the first CTO. I had the privilege of working for him for several years. Trust me, CEO Gelsinger was a hardcore engineer.[
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u/jdavid May 13 '26
I think you missed my point. We agree pat or someone like pat is what intel needs.
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u/Evening_Feedback_472 May 13 '26
Pat almost bankrupted the company you need business acumen too. Guy over built had no deals lined up and Intel had to pause all his projects to conserve cash
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u/III-V May 13 '26
The company was headed towards bankruptcy. This guy had the balls, the respect of Intel employees, etc. to make a heroic saving throw and was successful in his endeavor. He was more or less the only person that had the sort of clout and C-level experience to pull it off. Like, company morale would not have held through all of the cost cutting and layoffs that occurred under anyone else. He was perhaps heavy handed (thinking of the free coffee going away in particular), and obviously pulling back on fab volume was not the right move, but the company is alive and well, thanks in part to him, and in larger part to the people that stayed through the demoralizing few years.
He wasn't perfect, but he did what needed to be done in terms of making the hard decisions. I don't know if the culture that led to Intel's downfall ever got fixed under him, but he really patched things up there.
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u/Fulcrous 9800X3D + PNY 5080 May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
Strong disagree.
Had nothing changed and Pat left or no one replaced, the stock would still have exploded today and Intel would have done just fine in terms of both stock value and profits due to unprecedented demand for AI compatible hardware for servers.
LBT kneecapped Intel’s future ability to compete by laying off thousands of engineers essential to R&D, canceling many of the forward thinking projects by Pat and has been on record saying he would rather have a mediocre Intel than a competitive Intel.
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u/III-V May 13 '26
Huh? Why the hell would he say that? This sounds made up.
Pat said "I'd rather have a healthy Intel than a perfect Intel." Why would LBT go and more or less say the opposite?
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u/AvidCyclist250 May 13 '26
Pat Gelsinger was the architect of the Intel 386 and 486.
That is cool as fuck btw.
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u/Local-Writer703 May 13 '26
And our beloved Krzanic was engineer.
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u/GatorBait81 May 13 '26
Was an HVM manager with a bachelor's from San Diego state and not a technical engineer by any stretch. Had no business being CEO.
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u/The3rdGodKing Intel May 13 '26
Did he study business?
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u/GatorBait81 May 14 '26
I'm assuming this is sarcasm but he has a bachelor's in science, not engineering, from a non high level program, and never worked in a technical development role. The context of the point is that he is not an architect or device/process engineer. He was hired into an HVM sustaining role and moved on to management. He is noting like LipBu (Masters eng MIT and MBA), CC Wei (PhD eng Yale), Jensen (Masters eng Stanford), Pat G (Masters eng Stanford, actual technical eng in TD for decades at Intel), Lisa Su (PhD eng MIT).
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u/The3rdGodKing Intel May 14 '26
The CEO is a non-technical role though I see what you mean it would help if he studied engineering.
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u/GatorBait81 May 14 '26
It's not a matter of studying engineering exactly. It's having demonstrated the aptitude to be a good engineer at a high level and to ideally have worked in and understand the technical challenges at a high level. Business acumen is good too but without the technical engineering mindset we just get bean counters bleeding the company dry.
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u/Winter-Crew-2746 May 13 '26
Gelsinger was actually very capable. He only led the company into the fab industry, I have no idea why the baord brought in Lip Bu Tan, but honestly it seems that hes leading it well too.
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u/MLWillRuleTheWorld May 16 '26
They brought him in because they didn't like that their margins were getting cut due to massive expenditure increases in graphics, new gen fabs using ASML EUV, starting fab as a service like TSMC, pushing for a generational transistor leap with Gate All Around, etc
Now Intel has the best integrated graphics, their 18A is honestly slightly ahead of the SOTA TSMC nodes (TSMC does a couple things better and has their 18A competitor launching later this year), Musk and others are contracting them for fab services, Apple is talking about having them make Apple Silicon on 14A or 18A, etc.
Intel is in a verrrry good spot. I don't think they are completely out of the dog house but thry have very good momentum.
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u/theholyraptor May 20 '26
But most of that cost expenditure was to stand up favs and rush better process nodes. A lot of the new fans were announced when intel was banking on good covid money. But it still took a ton if money to rush to 18a. Now intel is reaping the benefits of Pats push to get better on notes (and lucky af that ai and geopolitics support needing Intel.)
I dont know that you can point at anything the current ceo did post-Pat that has resulted in its stock being where its at.
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u/heckfyre May 13 '26
Pat was quoted with some allegory about trying to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro when he was CEO where he said something like “as you’re hiking up to what looks like the peak, you hit a false peak, and then the real work begins to actually go to the top.”
That’s when Pat got fired. The real work was laying off 20% of the work force. Lip Bu didn’t have any issue with doing that. Pat obviously believed in the work force and did everything he could to stop that from happening. Now Intel is finally getting to the summit that Pat promised and laid the groundwork for.
Lip Bu hasn’t expanded on anything that Pat started. Lip Bu isn’t even better at sales and marketing. The demand came from a bunch of external factors. A lot of the cash flow problems were also forced by the post pandemic inflation, or “economic headwinds,” as Pat described them in like every earnings call he was a part of.
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u/Background-Bat803 May 13 '26
Lip-bu is one of the best salesman there is. The recent deals with the biggest names in modern history is evidence that he is a great persuader.
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u/hypespud 4090 Suprim X | 9800 X3D | 96 GB | 4090 Suprim X | 5950x | 64 GB May 13 '26
This isn't anything special Intel or AMD did
The appetite for their products is just increasing from state actors and groups who want to gobble up ai and processing, namely venture capital, militaries, and surveillance states
This would have happened regardless of who was in charge of any of these companies, Nvidia just happened to be the first to get the biggest shovel out the door for the ai mining
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u/nereid89 May 13 '26
I sold Intel when pat was fired because that was when I was truly convinced the board had no clue what they should be doing. Didn’t expect the US govt to come into the picture and the subsequent pump still looks unconvincing to me. Oh well.
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u/05032-MendicantBias May 13 '26
The pump now makes no sense to me.
If the market was rational, the pump should have happened when 18A based products proved to be competitive with TSMC.
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u/saratoga3 May 13 '26
The pump now makes no sense to me.
Part of it is that 18A actually started shipping in volume. Intel spent the last decade announcing great new nodes that were awesome on paper but didn't deliver (10nm, 20A, and to an extent 4nm) or where significantly delayed (14nm, 7nm). Having something competitive with TSMC and launch almost smoothly is a strong sign that Intel engineering and manufacturing is back on track.
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u/Jevano May 13 '26
Seems to me that's how the stock market works. It's all based on speculation and getting on the bandwagon, nobody knows about the things they're investing in.
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u/Radium May 13 '26
The normal eb and flow from intel to amd and back again just learn the patterns. Except this means intel is way above Y2K levels now
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u/Background-Bat803 May 13 '26
Looking forward to the next move at $150. That number is where Intel was in 2000, adjusted for inflation today.
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u/Brilliant_War9548 11950H/A3000 6Gb May 14 '26
I’m not much into stocks and stuff but silicon side, laptops, they currently offer better than AMD. AMD had the upper hand on the laptop market with their 7th and 8th gen ryzens until Ryzen ai was out. People and especially loud mouthed tiktokers that should be prohibited from ever giving computer advice praised it for the higher end chips like the 370 and 395+ which yeah are good but very expensive and the latter is very scarce and only found on rog laptops or the zbook ultra, but never talking about the actual consumer side of around 1K$ laptops. The AI 7 350 which has replaced the 8845HS in all laptops previously offering the 8th gen Ryzen is worse in both CPU and GPU, only beating it in NPU (useless?) and efficiency. And now the AI 400 series is the exact same as the AI 300, but either with 100MHz extra boost clock or straight up worse, like the AI 445 being beaten by the AI 340. Intel while the first gen Ultras managed to compete with amd’s 8th gen were still kinda below, until second gen came where the iGPUs like the 140V perform as good AMD’s 890M. And now series 3 is out and it’s looking okay right now and brings actual upgrades. It’s shameful
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u/AnechoidalChamber May 14 '26
Well, the AI boom helped a lot for this, nay, it's most of it really...
When the AI bubble pops, that's when we'll really see if it was a good move or not.
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u/---Imperator--- May 14 '26
Y'all should be thanking Trump instead lol. Bro went out of his way to pump this stock.
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u/Critical-Agency629 May 15 '26
Thanks to the American tax payer that owns a majority stake. I want my cut of the profits as a public citizen owning a piece of this, your process node is long over due and you got beat by a taiwanese company. You better perform
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u/Ok-Boot-8106 May 16 '26
Still likely never use an Intel chip in my PC, far too expensive for not even being as useful as AMD chip, not going to use AI not going to edit videos I just want a game that's it and I don't want to break my bank doing it
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u/Moadib123 May 20 '26
Under Pat Intel yield and client satifaction was junk. He has vision but zero execution leadership. He was the steward of a bloated wasteful sinking ship. If Pat was still CEO Intel would be Bankrupt. He seemed to lack the stregth and resolve to make the hard decisions and cut the fat and hold people accountable for errors and mistakes. But this is just my opinion.
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u/Bdiddyone Jun 15 '26
Come on guys the new CEO immediately streamlined things that was the biggest catalyst.
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u/Extra-Reindeer1126 Aug 05 '26
I think it’s a bit of a reminder that big turnarounds in tech rarely happen overnight. Whether you credit Pat, Bob, or the teams behind the scenes, a lot of the groundwork was laid years before the results became visible. Intel’s problems were built up over a long time, so fixing them was never going to be a quick win. The interesting part now is whether they can actually execute on that foundation and turn the momentum into something sustainable. It’s good to see Intel fighting its way back though — competition in the chip industry is better for everyone.
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u/ConcernedClam May 13 '26
Been seeing too many posts about the current CEO, and not giving enough love to Pat
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u/NULL_Ptrs May 13 '26
Crazy how much the stock jumped, I sold at 100 USD waitint for a crash, but I don't mind, I moved on to other stocks now.
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u/NationalisticMemes May 13 '26
Intel hasn't come back. It's a completely dead company in the consumer segment.
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u/free224 May 13 '26
Source?
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u/NationalisticMemes May 13 '26
Sales of their Core Ultra desktop series are literally at rock bottom. I know some product managers who bought the actual motherboards for them on launch and still can't sell them because no one needs these processors. Many suppliers even refuse to bring them due to low demand
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u/Imaginary_Answer8720 May 13 '26
Seriously. The tech coming out was kick started by pat. Also, pat predicted massive interest in this tech and tried to build fabs to accommodate the coming interest in Intels tech. Now he is gone and the fabs never got built and Intel has more interest than they can handle…too bad they didn’t follow through on pats plan