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In CEO Search, Intel Still Hasn't Found What It's Looking For (bloomberg.com)
Intel has been trying to fill the most prominent role in the $400-billion chip industry for more than six months. The company's board still hasn't found what it's looking for. From a report: Intel directors have ruled out some candidates for the vacant chief executive officer post, passed up obvious ones, been rejected by some and decided to go back and re-interview others, extending the search, according to people familiar with the process. Chairman Andy Bryant told some employees recently that the chipmaker may go with a "non-traditional" candidate, suggesting a CEO from outside the company is a possibility.
Whoever is chosen will take the reins at a company that's churning out record results, but is facing rising competition. The new CEO will have to convince investors that Intel's loss of manufacturing leadership -- a cornerstone of its dominance -- won't cost it market share in the lucrative semiconductor market. He or she will also have to deliver on the company's promise to maintain growth by winning orders beyond personal computer and server chips. "The new CEO will have many difficult decisions to make in a short amount of time," said Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. "The company can perform well in the near term due to good demand for PC and servers, but longer-term decisions and strategy need a CEO soon."
Whoever is chosen will take the reins at a company that's churning out record results, but is facing rising competition. The new CEO will have to convince investors that Intel's loss of manufacturing leadership -- a cornerstone of its dominance -- won't cost it market share in the lucrative semiconductor market. He or she will also have to deliver on the company's promise to maintain growth by winning orders beyond personal computer and server chips. "The new CEO will have many difficult decisions to make in a short amount of time," said Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. "The company can perform well in the near term due to good demand for PC and servers, but longer-term decisions and strategy need a CEO soon."
Too bad for them, eh.
I'm sure my CV must be the next one on the list
Intel is going to have a few rocky years ahead of them. They rested on their laurels and didn't take the competition seriously. They also threw a lot of money at useless projects and tried to shoehorn x86 into every possible market rather than trying to build the best product for that market.
They need a CEO that will put an end to the idiocy and refocus Intel, but no one wants to be the one that has to go out back and shoot Old Yeller. Hopefully they do find someone, because as much fun as it is to see Intel eat some humble pie, if they don't get their shit together AMD will eventually turn out the same and we'll just be back to a stagnant computer market.
n/t
I'll run it into the ground, get my golden parachute, and retire at some tropical island.
>> Intel's loss of manufacturing leadership -- a cornerstone of its dominance
If you think manufacturing is the cornerstone of Intel's dominance, then you haven't been paying attention. MARKETING the "Intel" brand (slapped onto almost every PC for a while) and the "duh duh duh dun" sound is the cornerstone of Intel's dominance. Once the masses realize(d) that you could get the same or similar chips from other places, cheaper, and without giving up much (if any) performance, Intel was in trouble.
Hiring another CEO to be your CEO sounds as traditional as it gets, unless you mean the OLD traditions, like pre-war era. Something like calling your Christmas Tree non-traditional because it has electric lights on it.
They'll hire someone who is already a CEO, regardless of how badly they've screwed up their previous companies.
They'll have the cleanest storage closets of any corporation, and by the looks of it, the emptiest refrigerators as well!
The Chicoms will buy a first rate CPU design from Fujistsu and sell it at 1/10th of cost ($50) and steamroll the competition.
It cannot be that they had products about as performant as IBM or HP, but sold it at 1/10th of price. Including the mainframe stuff, which is even more expensive.
trump is going to be out of a job soon. As long as Intel doesn't mind him working remotely from his prison cell.
They simply haven't offered Lisa Su enough money yet.
Intel inside? Idiot outside. 7 nanometers? I only got 10 nanometers, what do you want 14 nanometers for?
If you think manufacturing is the cornerstone of Intel's dominance, then you haven't been paying attention.
Manufacturing absolutely has been the cornerstone of Intel's dominance for a long time. The main reason AMD could not compete with Intel on CPUs was because Intel had an absolute cost advantage because of their manufacturing. The only reason Intel didn't put AMD out of business a long time ago was because of anti-trust concerns. For a long time they could sell their x86 CPUs for less money than AMD's cost while still making a profit. Intel didn't get to be the biggest chip maker in the world by accident or clever ads.
MARKETING the "Intel" brand (slapped onto almost every PC for a while) and the "duh duh duh dun" sound is the cornerstone of Intel's dominance.
Sigh... You are hugely overestimating the power of marketing. This is utter nonsense. Intel's primary customers are definitively NOT end users. Apple, HP, Acer, Asus, Samsung, etc are the ones buying the majority of their CPUs and they aren't going to be impressed by their TV ads. What you are talking about is the branded ingredient strategy Intel rolled out years ago.
Once the masses realize(d) that you could get the same or similar chips from other places, cheaper, and without giving up much (if any) performance, Intel was in trouble.
The masses aren't the ones buying Intel's products and it's only been fairly recently that competitors could compete with Intel on cost when it comes to chip manufacturing. The problem Intel has right now is that other chip makers have caught up on cost and chip tech and their cash cow (the PC market) has been surpassed by the mobile market where they don't have very good product offerings. Intel is still hugely profitable but their growth prospects are constrained by their absence and problems in mobile. Has NOTHING to do with marketing and everything to do with product design and manufacturing prowess of competitors. Intel's biggest threat is not AMD in the PC space. Intel's biggest threats are ARM, Qualcom, and Taiwanese chip fabs. The mobile market is where the growth is and Intel doesn't dominate there.
Have they climbed the highest mountains?
Have they run through the fields?
Have they scaled these city walls? (These city walls!)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Nobody willl notice the difference from a PHB.
U 2?
Right now their biggest advantage is inertia. Having the best product isn't instantly turning into wins across the board for AMD in the enterprise space.
That's because AMD doesn't have a cost advantage in manufacturing CPUs for PCs. AMD is reliant on other companies to actually make their chips. They have to pay these companies for the chips and importantly a profit margin. Intel has several advantages. 1) They don't have to pay the profit margin to a third party. All other things being equal this gives Intel a 10-20% cost advantage right out the gate. 2) Intel also has technology advantages and manufacturing scale advantages that increase this cost advantage in that segment.
Remember Intel is literally over 10X the size of AMD by revenue. It didn't get that much bigger by accident and certainly not merely through a clever ad campaign. AMD bought ATI to diversify away from competing with Intel on CPUs because it was a game they could never win in the long run. Intel just had unbeatable cost and scale advantages and AMD knows it. They occasionally would poke ahead on performance for a brief bit but they don't have the resources to sustain that advantages. Their current generation chips are good performers but I wouldn't hold my breath thinking they can maintain that advantage because they never have for the last 30 years.
AMD chips on the other hand wipe ARM and crush Intel in multiprocessing which is what it is all about in the enterprise space.
Enterprise computing is FAR more complicated than who has the best multi-core performance on the latest gen chips. What matters in the enterprise space is cost for performance. Sometimes individual chip performance matters most but when a company like Google is buying computers by the truck load, what they are looking for is the best price that meets their performance needs. That doesn't necessarily require the best performing chip. And in spite of recent problems, Intel remains hard to beat for price/performance for PC CPUs. But unless they get their shit together they won't be able to keep their market share because the enterprise market is ALL about cost at the end of the day and the market dynamics have changed in recent years.
The new CEO will have to convince investors that Intel's loss of manufacturing leadership -- a cornerstone of its dominance -- won't cost it market share in the lucrative semiconductor market. He or she will also have to deliver on the company's promise to maintain growth by winning orders beyond personal computer and server chips.
The list of demands and assurances for the new CEO are too long. They just need someone who can walk on water.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
There is one better choice ... Jim Keller. He led the design of Athlon's x86-64 which took the lead from Intel the first time. He was VP over the design of Apple's A4 and A5. He designed AMD's Zen architecture. And he's now working for Intel.
I guarantee I could fuck them into irrelevance in 6 months for the right golden parachute. Although I do understand Marisa Mayer is on the market too if they need to pander to the diversity crowd.
The semiconductor industry is a slow moving market, surely intel can use the same node for a couple years without investing in their main architecture without falling behind
Intel's success is down to one factor, and one factor alone- the fact that IBM chose the WORST of all the 16-bit processor designs at the time for their first IBM PC, simple down to Intel's desperate need to sell at any cost. In comparison, Motorola's 68000 was at least FIVE years more advanced than the 8088/8086.
After Intel started making mountains of cash, thanks to its monopoly in the merging PC-compatible market, it sank much of this money into two key areas:
1) R+D focused entirely on improving the x64 design and fabrication
2) a slush fund to pay off court fines when Intel's mass STEALING of the patents of other companies finally resolved against them. 100% of Intel's first RISC design, the Pentium Pro/Pentium 2 (NOT the Pentium(1), which was a standalone orphan architecture perfecting CISC) involved stolen patents from the various RISC innovators.
Intel's strategy was to hurtle ahead as quickly as possible to keep potential x86 competitors wrong-footed. Even so the only viable competitor, AMD, was ahead of Intel on at least 3 key occasions. And this is a key part of understanding just how bad Inel is. For Intel's R+D spend was always HUNDREDS of times greater than AMD, for a lead that was often tiny, and often no lead at all.
After AMD hit a supreme lead with the first 64-bit x64 design, and the first TRUE dual core, Intel was on the verge of ruination- but hyper corrupt top managers at AMD started stealing the working capital of AMD via mega-bonuses, and forced AMD to persue a 'Netburst' type design for the 'Bulldozer' successor to the Athlon 64 design. Bulldozer, based on Intel's Netburst patents, was intended to cheapen design work at AMD to maximise financial pay-outs to the top managers. But anyway, it meant the massive tech lead AMD had had over Intel was squandered.
Meanwhile Intel used the Athlon 64 patents and crossed them with the Pentium 3 architecture to create 'Core 2', the hyper-successful follow-up to the disaster that had been Netburst. Both AMD and Intel did this LEGALLY cos of their cross-patent agreements.
Eventually AMD's rotten corrupt management was replaced and AMD got back on track. And that marked the end of Intel. After 'core 2' came the even more successful 'core' architecture (who came up with these codenames?). But Intel has ridden the same 'core' design for EIGHT+ generations now, and AMD's Zen architecture has killed it stone dead.
Intel's strategy of unprecedented R+D spend to one up everyone crashed and burned with Intel's FinFET project. Intel has failed to shrink to 10nm (for good chips) even tho they initially had a process lead of approaching FIVE years. Intel's 100-to-1 R+D cash advantage no longer delivers.
The last saviour of Intel had been the American government FORCING AMD to use Global Foundries, the US alliance operation that combined all American non-Intel state-of-the-art chip fabrication. GF is a STRATEGIC US government operation (hence it does not matter how much GF loses), but with GF like Intel totally failing with the current process shrink, AMD has been allowed to move its leading edge production to Taiwan's TSMC, and the lead TSMC has over Intel and GF is extraordinary.
A few days ago, AMD demonstrated a MID-RANGE Zen2 CPU thrashing the latest state-of-the-art Intel 9900K (drew equal in performance at half the power).
And, of course, all current Intel CPUs have been revealed to contain ZERO thread security- meaning that a rogue NSA thread can access any data used by other threads BY DESIGN. This lack of thread security gave Intel massive dishonest advantages in memory latency, power and max clock frequency. Zen has total thread security built into the hardware.
Now lets look at Intel's biggest non-x86 project, the graphics chip know as Larabee. This project matters for when it began, every tech site promised readers that Intel would destroy Nvidia and ATI (now AMD)- the (then) graphics leaders. Intel spent more on Larabee than the combined R+D spend of both Nvidia and ATI across their enti
They are doing fine without a CEO, so not like
a CEO does anything useful in giant corps.
Why not just have no CEO, and have all decisions voted by the board.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Quoting the parent comment: "They need a CEO that will put an end to the idiocy and refocus Intel..."
... has become Zombie-like in that it has been minimally connected with reality."
I posted this comment 12 1/2 years ago: "It's very, very sad to see Intel on the way down." (2nd paragraph)
Quote: "Self-destructive behavior at Intel did not start with Otellini. Long ago, Intel closed its consumer division because it could not manage it effectively."
Another quote: "Intel's marketing
Intel's marketing is that way NOW. I get weird emails written by people who don't seem to have any understanding of technology. The emails are written as though the reader is a child and the writer is an imcompentent parent.
Get security correct on the next CPU products.
Have the skilled people who can do security review the CPU before production and sale.
Understand what people want to do with 4K and 8K games and content.
Have a CPU that can support games with the needed speed and be used for content creation and encoding.
Speed and cores.
Get every part of the CPU to keep up with the CPU speed needed for the new games in production.
Make every part of the CPU ready for new games and tell CPU and game reviewers that.
A new fast CPU sold should make all games play great.
Have clear marketing and a way to sell each design of CPU.
Paying more and seeing a bigger "number" on a consumer CPU should be easy to understand by consumers and reviewers.
Want a different CPU line for content creation, servers, games and low end computing?
2 Options exist:
1. Make more product lines that are very different and very easy to understand.
2. Have one product line thats easy to follow.
Dont mix different slow and low cost product lines in together with difficult to understand product names.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Why Robert Swan (interim CEO) doesn't want the job is probably the more interesting story.
Intel is going to have a few rocky years ahead of them
Why don't they create a dual-CEO positions and give 'em to Donald J. Trump and Xi Jin Ping?
I'm sure, until the tutelage of both Donald J. Trump and Xi Jin Ping, Intel gonna enjoy a spectacular "Make Intel Great Again" revival and the "Intel Dream session.