> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-board-member-quit-a...
A lot of potential here!
The disagreement with the board was supposedly related more to elements of the board trying to parts up and sell off bits of Intel. Harder to report that directly. Good for him, food sign if true.
Today was a very very good day to be hanging out on TechPoutine podcast. Very fun to have this as breaking news at the end of stream. https://www.youtube.com/live/aSoYz9Qp1xI
He is no Pat. He is no Andy. He is a business guy with some hard science behind (not electronics per se). It doesn't feel right.
I think you need to look up Cadence and look into how the fabless industry works. Picking him means Intel is possibly about to spin off or spin out the Chip division and only focus on Fabless.
If true this would be very interesting. The most recent rumors were TSMC was trying to grab a part of Intel and have Nvidia/Broadcom/AMD take over the rest. Bringing in a CEO that literally left the board because he was against carving up Intel would be quite the signal from the board.
That aside, he doesn't have fab experience. I guess that's very hard to come by, especially outside Taiwan and Korea.
Intel is a publicly listed company.
https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/lip-bu-tan-remaking-our...
Sounds like he wants design and foundry to stay together.
Good sign.
https://irrationalanalysis.substack.com/p/make-intel-great-a...
>It’s over.
> If corporations are people, then Intel has decided to commit suicide and sell its vital organs.
Yet now the same guy seems more positive ("The best outcome has happened.... Lip-Bu Tan lacks the critical flaw that Gelsinger had… excessive kindness").
> A tsunami of decapitation (headcount reduction) is coming. However unpleasant the last several years has been… what is coming will be much worse.
> This will be a disorderly decapitation frenzy. Nobody is safe.
Did that happen? If not, did he say why he was mistaken? If not, then is this guy not overconfident and incapable of revising his own priors?
The author thinks that it's about to happen, so it's too early to expect any revision. In that earlier post they said that Lip-Bu Tan resigned from the board because he wanted to reduce headcount more than Gelsinger, and that in their opinion hiring him and carrying out that reduction would be the best outcome for Intel.
Given that Lip-Bu Tan got hired, I think it's reasonable to expect some reductions soon. Before this the author listed a couple of possible outcomes, and as I understand it, Lip-Bu Tan and his reductions are described as one of the less chaotic and "unpleasant" options for Intel, because his cuts would be more specific than cuts that would be the result of splits/mergers/bankruptcy.
Intel engineers: thank you for these amazing machines, for all these years. They shaped many lives. We salute you.
He's led Cadence for many years. You know, making tools to design silicone.
As a former Cadence employee, I really don't have any complains about his leadership, looking back at my time there.
He's been on Intel's board for a long time too.
I have no idea where you'd get that impression, so please elaborate.
The failure of Intel is in the board and terrible middle-managers. If Intel becomes fabless like AMD it will be left with the worse parts. They will make money in the sale but there will be nothing left.
Intel had a lot of cool tech recently like Optane and QAT. The failure to get market adoption lies squarely in management. Can you believe they put in-chip yearly licenses to enable QAT, that's INSANE (what if they 10x the license price next year?). And of course, almost zero reach out to open source. Only a PoC and calling it a day.
IMHO, Intel should concentrate in their core strengths. Fire most of the managers, get rid of the toxic board. Open all they can and invest heavily in documentation and software, guided by the community. But this is not going to happen. The board is firmly in place.
Understanding everything it takes to design a chip, after spending 15 years leading the company that makes software tools for chip design, perhaps.
Cadence Design Systems, that is. I worked there for a couple of years on computational lithography/optical proximity correction software that we licensed to TSMC and Micron. If you don't know about Cadence, well, you don't know about silicon.
Some of the biggest EDA tools come from companies that use them for a reason (NX by Siemens, CATIA by Dassault, ...).
Those are the same reasons that make Lip-Bu Tan a great choice for the position.
What do you mean? NX and CATIA are mechanical CAD systems, not EDA tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip-Bu_Tan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lip-bu-tan-284a7846/details/expe...
Oh, so he's only been leading one of the handful of companies making the full software suite for all stages of silicon design and simulation for 15 years, no biggie.
You're aware what kind of company Cadence is, are you?
Pat Gelsinger – ex-Intel, rehired as CEO, ousted.
Lip-Bu Tan – ex board member, ousted due to disagreements on how to turn the company around.
If Intel removed him over disagreements on turnaround, what will be different this time?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-board-member-quit-a...
> Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company’s large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel’s risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly. (...)
> To cut costs, Intel announced in August layoffs of more than 15% of its workforce (...). The layoff plan was one source of tension between Tan and the board, according to sources. Tan wanted specific cuts, including middle managers who do not contribute to Intel's engineering efforts.
> Gelsinger, who took over in 2021 as part of a turnaround plan, added at least 20,000 employees to Intel's payroll by 2022. To Tan and some former Intel executives, the workforce appeared bloated. Teams on some projects were as much as five times larger than others doing comparable work at rivals such as AMD, according to two sources. One former executive said Intel should have cut double the number it announced in August years ago.
There has been news about Broadcom and NVidia testing their designs on Intel process nodes. Which is arguably worse in at least two respects, they are behind TSMC in density and also proprietary software tooling at Intel. After the 13000/14000 CPU chip death issues possibly also in regard to reliability. But they still want to do it.
Although this page in the history books is not yet written, companies hedging their bets this way is a really bad sign.
Awful but true.
> There has been news about Broadcom and NVidia testing their designs on Intel process nodes.
Links? It makes sense to invest in second and third sources, even if it does mean handing money to a competitor. Especially given the instability of the global community right now.
Even when Intel was having record revenues year after year its stock price barely moved.
