Intel Ousts CEO Bob Swan After Only Two Years

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After only two years on the job, Bob Swan has been ousted from his role as chief executive officer of Intel. Swan’s removal was confirmed by a press release shared by Intel today, which noted that his last day would be February 15. Replacing Swan is VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, whose 40-year experience in the industry will hopefully be enough to right what some critics say is a slowly sinking ship.



“I am thrilled to rejoin and lead Intel forward at this important time for the company, our industry and our nation,” said Gelsinger. “Having begun my career at Intel and learned at the feet of Grove, Noyce and Moore, it’s my privilege and honor to return in this leadership capacity. I have tremendous regard for the company’s rich history and powerful...

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Not sure everything that has happened at Intel is his fault - there's been a lot wrong over there for a while, and a ship that big takes a bit to turn around. But I don't know enough about what happens in the boardroom to play too much armchair QB over it -- I will say this was the loudest announcement anyone made for CES though.
 
Not sure everything that has happened at Intel is his fault - there's been a lot wrong over there for a while, and a ship that big takes a bit to turn around. But I don't know enough about what happens in the boardroom to play too much armchair QB over it -- I will say this was the loudest announcement anyone made for CES though.
Agreed. One of Intel's issues, their "diversity" initiative, started in 2015 before Swan took over.
 
I think their biggest issue was complacency. For the past 14 years they told people what they needed instead of giving people what they wanted. AMD came along and gave everyone what they wanted. Regardless of what Swan did there was no righting that ship in 2 years.

Gelsinger going come in and sell you a 16 core CPU, but only allow you to use 4 cores and make you buy licensing for the remaining 12.
 
Regardless of what Swan did there was no righting that ship in 2 years.

Yeah, this is my take too.

Intel's problem is twofold.

1.) Once they crushed AMD with their mix of illegal business practices and the Core architecture, they became complacent. Their business culture forgot how to be competitive, innovate and succeed. They essentially turned their business into a cash cow, misleading themselves into thinking it would last forever. Now both AMD and ARM are slowly turning into real threats.

2.) Spectacular failures in process node development. This was one of the ways they traditionally stayed ahead, with process excellence, and they just dropped th eball completely. I don't know what the root cause here is. Poor Communication? Not hiring the right people? Not funding it sufficiently for the increasing complexities of smaller process nodes? Who knows.

What I do know is this. Process node development is a several year long effort costing billions. There is no way that could be fixed in two years. Changing a corporate culture is even more difficult. That is unlikely to be successful in two years either. Whatever Intel's board does they need to put the right person in place, and empower them to do whatever is necessary to fix the problems, and then be patient while they execute, because this is going to take a while.

As much as I hate what has become of MSI these days, Intel needs to do what MSI did in 2012. At that point MSI was slowly failing, failing to have adapted to the changing market. The founder, Henry Lu announced in a company wide meeting that they would be transitioning to a gaming focused company, because that was where the market was headed, and if anyone wasn't fully committed to this, they should leave the company. I hate the "gaming" aesthetic that has taken over th eindustry, but it was unquuestionably what they needed to do the business climate as it was and still is.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Intel needs to make gaming their focus, but they need to make it very clear that they are in crisis, that they are setting a new course (whatever that is) and that those who aren't completely on board should either leave, or they will be fired.

In an organization the size of Intel there are always middle managers and directors more focused on their internal power struggles and building their own little fiefdoms within the company that they have lost track of what it takes to make the entire organization successful.

Intel needs to set a clear course, clear objectives, and they need to make it clear that anyone who gets in the way will be out the door faster than you can say 14+++, and then they need to follow up on this and not make exceptions, regardless of how long Director X has been with the company or who they know or are related to. They need to cut out the cancer and they need to do it mercilessly. That is the only way.

This is often why organizations in turnaround mode hire outside CEO's. Existing company guys have often made too many cozy relationships and aquired too many pet projects along the way and can't bring themselves to ruthlessly do what needs to be done. Now Bob Swan was by no means a long term Intel guy, having only joined the company in 2016, but maybe that was enough time that he already had too many existing relationships in the organization. A complete outsider may be the best choice Intel has, and is probably what they should have done two years ago, rather than promote Bob Swan. I know nothing about him as an executive. He may be a great business leader, but turnarounds require a special subset of talents and lack of regard for "friends" inside the company, and maybe Bob Swan just didn't have it.
 
Yeah, this is my take too.

Intel's problem is twofold.

1.) Once they crushed AMD with their mix of illegal business practices and the Core architecture, they became complacent. Their business culture forgot how to be competitive, innovate and succeed. They essentially turned their business into a cash cow, misleading themselves into thinking it would last forever. Now both AMD and ARM are slowly turning into real threats.

2.) Spectacular failures in process node development. This was one of the ways they traditionally stayed ahead, with process excellence, and they just dropped th eball completely. I don't know what the root cause here is. Poor Communication? Not hiring the right people? Not funding it sufficiently for the increasing complexities of smaller process nodes? Who knows.

What I do know is this. Process node development is a several year long effort costing billions. There is no way that could be fixed in two years. Changing a corporate culture is even more difficult. That is unlikely to be successful in two years either. Whatever Intel's board does they need to put the right person in place, and empower them to do whatever is necessary to fix the problems, and then be patient while they execute, because this is going to take a while.

As much as I hate what has become of MSI these days, Intel needs to do what MSI did in 2012. At that point MSI was slowly failing, failing to have adapted to the changing market. The founder, Henry Lu announced in a company wide meeting that they would be transitioning to a gaming focused company, because that was where the market was headed, and if anyone wasn't fully committed to this, they should leave the company. I hate the "gaming" aesthetic that has taken over th eindustry, but it was unquuestionably what they needed to do the business climate as it was and still is.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Intel needs to make gaming their focus, but they need to make it very clear that they are in crisis, that they are setting a new course (whatever that is) and that those who aren't completely on board should either leave, or they will be fired.

In an organization the size of Intel there are always middle managers and directors more focused on their internal power struggles and building their own little fiefdoms within the company that they have lost track of what it takes to make the entire organization successful.

Intel needs to set a clear course, clear objectives, and they need to make it clear that anyone who gets in the way will be out the door faster than you can say 14+++, and then they need to follow up on this and not make exceptions, regardless of how long Director X has been with the company or who they know or are related to. They need to cut out the cancer and they need to do it mercilessly. That is the only way.

This is often why organizations in turnaround mode hire outside CEO's. Existing company guys have often made too many cozy relationships and aquired too many pet projects along the way and can't bring themselves to ruthlessly do what needs to be done. Now Bob Swan was by no means a long term Intel guy, having only joined the company in 2016, but maybe that was enough time that he already had too many existing relationships in the organization. A complete outsider may be the best choice Intel has, and is probably what they should have done two years ago, rather than promote Bob Swan. I know nothing about him as an executive. He may be a great business leader, but turnarounds require a special subset of talents and lack of regard for "friends" inside the company, and maybe Bob Swan just didn't have it.
Gelsinger probably knows more people at Intel than Swan, after working there for a few decades in the past. Hopefully he has enough perspective coming back to be impartial and make the right calls.
 
1.) Once they crushed AMD with their mix of illegal business practices and the Core architecture, they became complacent. Their business culture forgot how to be competitive, innovate and succeed. They essentially turned their business into a cash cow, misleading themselves into thinking it would last forever. Now both AMD and ARM are slowly turning into real threats.

2.) Spectacular failures in process node development. This was one of the ways they traditionally stayed ahead, with process excellence, and they just dropped th eball completely. I don't know what the root cause here is. Poor Communication? Not hiring the right people? Not funding it sufficiently for the increasing complexities of smaller process nodes? Who knows.

Honestly I see these two as tightly intertwined. The fact that Intel is still putting out competitive processing power with competent overall performance at 14nm is a testament to the rest of the company not dropping the ball completely.

But of course their 'cash cow' comes from being able to actually produce the stuff that they design.

AMD came along and gave everyone what they wanted.
AMD really hasn't even come close to that. Not that they could actually make the products if they did; they're more supply-constrained than Intel.


As examples: AMD could make Nvidia obsolete in the laptop space. The only reason that an eight-core APU with RTX2060-level performance doesn't exist is because AMD hasn't made it, when they very well could.

They could also put a basic GPU on their IO die, so that every Ryzen shipped with graphics hardware. Doesn't need a lot rendering horsepower, no more than Intel's IGPs, but it would need up to date support for transcoding video. And you know, the driver and software support to use that hardware, which we know AMD continues to struggle with.

Oh! And consumer APUs that support ECC. Thanks for going full Intel on that one, AMD. But wait, Intel has i3's that support ECC, when used with their server chipsets. Figure that juxtaposition out.

Last, despite AMDs supposed Linux prowess, switching between the graphics on an AMD APU and an AMD dGPU is apparently more assed up than it is with Intel / Nvidia.
 
Gelsinger probably knows more people at Intel than Swan, after working there for a few decades in the past. Hopefully he has enough perspective coming back to be impartial and make the right calls.

Ah, I didn't know he was a former Intel guy. Looks like it has been 12 years since he left Intel to join EMC.

I have no idea what turnover is like inside Intel. I know it varies greatly from industry to industry and company to company. There are companies I left 12 years ago I could walk into and not recognize a single face or project. Typical turnover in my industry befopre you get a better offer somewhere else is about 2-4 years. No one really ever stays longer than that. I wonce worked for an organization in a different industry, and there it was the polar opposite. Lots of people who had been with the company for 30+ years and had never worked anywhere else...

Hopefully he has been distant from it long enough that he can make the tough decisions that need to be made.
 
Honestly I see these two as tightly intertwined. The fact that Intel is still putting out competitive processing power with competent overall performance at 14nm is a testament to the rest of the company not dropping the ball completely.

But of course their 'cash cow' comes from being able to actually produce the stuff that they design.


AMD really hasn't even come close to that. Not that they could actually make the products if they did; they're more supply-constrained than Intel.


As examples: AMD could make Nvidia obsolete in the laptop space. The only reason that an eight-core APU with RTX2060-level performance doesn't exist is because AMD hasn't made it, when they very well could.

They could also put a basic GPU on their IO die, so that every Ryzen shipped with graphics hardware. Doesn't need a lot rendering horsepower, no more than Intel's IGPs, but it would need up to date support for transcoding video. And you know, the driver and software support to use that hardware, which we know AMD continues to struggle with.

Oh! And consumer APUs that support ECC. Thanks for going full Intel on that one, AMD. But wait, Intel has i3's that support ECC, when used with their server chipsets. Figure that juxtaposition out.

Last, despite AMDs supposed Linux prowess, switching between the graphics on an AMD APU and an AMD dGPU is apparently more assed up than it is with Intel / Nvidia.

We're not talking about GPU's. Intel doesn't make a GPU that's even remotely competitive with AMD. We're talking about CPU's. Zen 1 came along and people noticed. Zen 2 has Intel sweating. Zen 2+ started to curb stomp Intel. Zen 3 was a Mortal Kombat "finish him!".

People wanted more than 4 cores. AMD delivered. Can Intel recover? Sure, but it's going to take some time, all the while AMD is not slowing down their development.
 
People wanted more than 4 cores. AMD delivered. Can Intel recover? Sure, but it's going to take some time, all the while AMD is not slowing down their development.

Honestly, I don't think most people care about cores. They just want to know that their **** will run well.

I happen to use a Threadripper as my main system, but if I were completely honest, I'd choose fewer faster cores than more slower ones.

Though based on where we are today, we definitely need more than 4.

I was running Metro Exodus the other day, and in a few of the scenes that game REALLY hammered my CPU. I run it stock. It was boosting to 4.3Ghz with an overall CPU load of 54%... On a 24C48T chip.
 
We're not talking about GPU's.
You can try not to, but they always enter the conversation where it matters: common desktops and laptops.
Intel doesn't make a GPU that's even remotely competitive with AMD.
They make plenty, and plenty where AMD could produce a GPU but chooses not to. Sure, Intel's higher-end Xe products are still 'on their way', but we've seen enough to know that Intel can play in the 'not as good as Nvidia' space just fine alongside AMDs graphics.
We're talking about CPU's. Zen 1 came along and people noticed. Zen 2 has Intel sweating. Zen 2+ started to curb stomp Intel. Zen 3 was a Mortal Kombat "finish him!".
I guess the passing of events might look that way to someone determined to view corporate strategies and engineering failures as a narrative for a brawling game, but it's really more that TSMC stumbled on a way forward for smaller nodes and signed up AMD, whereas Intel stumbled. Had either of those events not transpired, AMD would be back where they always are. And where they're on the verge of being again.

Zen to Zen 2 has shown pretty solid improvements, some of which have brought competitive advantages, while also pushing AMDs perennial weaknesses back into the light. Thus there are some workloads for which I can't recommend anything other than AMD, and some for which I can't recommend any AMD product, and that's all on AMD.
 
Honestly I see these two as tightly intertwined. The fact that Intel is still putting out competitive processing power with competent overall performance at 14nm is a testament to the rest of the company not dropping the ball completely.

But of course their 'cash cow' comes from being able to actually produce the stuff that they design.
This is a big deal right now since TSMC is stretched so thin. Intel has product on store shelves that you can buy right now and is currently cheaper than the AMD equivalents. Despite people making fun of Intel for still being on 14nm and not having as many cores, they still manage to put out the better performing cores.
 
The thing is, we've seen how long problems like what Intel's facing now take to correct. Intel managed it last time in about five years. AMD took ten. I said it before and I'll say it again, Intel won't return to truly competitive form until 2022 or 2023 at the earliest. Why do I say that? That's how long any real competitive architecture would take to develop and manufacture. That may even be optimistic given their production node issues.

Skylake has been around forever, but Intel only started to pay attention to what AMD was doing with its Ryzen 1000 series CPU's. That was three years ago. We have at least two more to wait before Intel could even remotely possibly create another Core 2 type of situation. Again, that's being very optimistic. None of that is Bob Swan's fault, nor would he have been capable of righting the ship as it were in two years. That being said, we don't have a full picture of what's going on internally, and therefore he might not be doing a good job anyway. It's hard to say.
 
Looking back, it actually feels like Swan was a placeholder CEO. Intel raced ahead, then put its feet up, kicked back on its couch stuffed with money and said, "Let's see what everyone else is doing" before deciding it was time to get up, take a piss, and get back to work.
 
The fact that x86 has poor prospects, and everyone and their mamas are making their own cpus, is another problem for Intel. Intels actual market is s shrinking one, and so is AMDs potential market for that matter..., but AMDs can still be an expanding company within the shrinking sector being that they are way smaller.
Intel announcing outsourcing is most likely a short sighted disgrace. They should go the opposite direction, increase production massively and open their factory, give the manufacturer division independence, and let the design division just work with them as any other privileged client. In this manner one can ebb and flow up and down semi independent of each other.
If the outsourcing was announced in another context along with other plans (such a split of sorts), it could be a good thing, but it seems is in the context and beliefs that manufacturing is just not that worth it.
 
The thing is, we've seen how long problems like what Intel's facing now take to correct. Intel managed it last time in about five years. AMD took ten. I said it before and I'll say it again, Intel won't return to truly competitive form until 2022 or 2023 at the earliest. Why do I say that? That's how long any real competitive architecture would take to develop and manufacture. That may even be optimistic given their production node issues.

Skylake has been around forever, but Intel only started to pay attention to what AMD was doing with its Ryzen 1000 series CPU's. That was three years ago. We have at least two more to wait before Intel could even remotely possibly create another Core 2 type of situation. Again, that's being very optimistic. None of that is Bob Swan's fault, nor would he have been capable of righting the ship as it were in two years. That being said, we don't have a full picture of what's going on internally, and therefore he might not be doing a good job anyway. It's hard to say.
Intel's problem is not just the architecture, its the foundry. Intel lost its manufacturing process advantage. I won't say its behind TSMC or Samsung as the processes are not comparable, but its so behind schedule it doesn't even have a roadmap anymore.
 
Thinking about it though, Intel has known about this process issue for some time.

It was sortof made public 5 years ago when they sneakily abandoned the Tick-Tock model without indicating there was anything wrong. While we may not have realized it at the time, hindsight being 20-20 that was the first reall indication other than some late broadwell and skylake releases we had something was amiss.

Question is how long they knew about the problems internally. A year before that? I mean every broadwell and skylake release was about 6 months late, so it seems pretty clear Intel have been aware of these issues since at least early 2015.

They have had 6 years to fix this issue thus far and have not succeeded. That's not a flattering picture.

It's not surprising heads are rolling.
 
They should go the opposite direction, increase production massively and open their factory, give the manufacturer division independence, and let the design division just work with them as any other privileged client. In this manner one can ebb and flow up and down semi independent of each other.

They already doubled production in the last 3 years orso and still can't keep up with demand how are they supposed to take on even more production?

We are at a strange point where demand is far greater then production capabilities but by the time you get more production facilities this demand may be gone and then your factories are ideling which noone wants.

I also would not be suprised if intel already has some impproved chip designed, but they just can't make it yet, hence the backporting they did now which is a less then ideal solution and it may hhave most some of it's luster by the time they can get it out.
 
I also would not be suprised if intel already has some impproved chip designed, but they just can't make it yet, hence the backporting they did now which is a less then ideal solution and it may hhave most some of it's luster by the time they can get it out.
It shouldn't be a surprise, because they do. And have. But yeah, they can't make them, so the point is rather inarguable!

It was sortof made public 5 years ago when they sneakily abandoned the Tick-Tock model without indicating there was anything wrong. While we may not have realized it at the time, hindsight being 20-20 that was the first reall indication other than some late broadwell and skylake releases we had something was amiss.

To note: Skylake would have been the last 14nm product under Tick-Tock. All of the 7000-, 8000-, 9000, and most of the 10000-series are revisions of Skylake. Rocket Lake is the first real revision, and it's still on 14nm.

What should be notable is that Intel is appearing to maintain per-core performance leads with Rocket Lake, and logically since Rocket Lake is a dialed-back version of an architecture intended for a smaller process, Intel really does have the architecture lead on paper.


It's very hard to overstate just how very lucky AMD and TSMC are that Intel took the wrong route to <14nm!
 
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