Intel Ousts CEO Bob Swan After Only Two Years

Denpepe said:
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?
Click to expand...

Hmm...

Well, the PC market had been in long decline - largely due to new work at home and school at home, it finally had a positive growth year last year, growing about 10%.

Enterprise/Server market has grown, but not consitently over the past 3 years. According to Gartner and IDC, 2018 was 32%, 2019 was only about 7%, 2020 was back up to around 20%. But all were positive.

So that's the total possible sales. It isn't quite double, but not too far off - maybe 70% total growth in the market spaces... so I can't really dispute "Doubled production in the last 3 years" - as the market almost follows that.

I'm not even factoring in AMD. I know they are outselling Intel in some markets now, but over the past 3 years, it probably isn't hugely consequential, so I'll just conveniently ignore that as a rounding error and say that yeah, @Denpepe has a decent point about production.

That said, I don't think Intel's biggest issues are production. They are having culture issues keeping talented staff around - that's big. They've had a lot of turnover at high profile positions, that creates a lot of stress on the organization. And they've been stuck on 14nm and Skylake derivatives for... a long time now. So you have stagnation at the innovation level. And there's been a large lack of focus: Intel has long been trying to diversify away from x86, they just can't seem to hit anything else in stride. x86 (between Client and Enterprise) represents the vast majority of Intel's revenue, and they've tried everything from mobile to storage to anti virus to Internet of Things to graphics to drones to ... they are clearly just throwing everything at the wall to see if anything sticks, and so far none of it has

None of those issues are isolated in a vacuum - I think all of them are interrelated in some way. Just a mess that will take a while to unwind, no single silver bullet to fix all those problems. Honestly, I think Intel is headed the same way IBM is -- they won't ever die because they have too much invested into patents, but they will wither into mostly insignificance in everyday culture. If they ever start selling off patents - that's when you know they are getting spun off into dissolution.
 
LazyGamer said:
It's very hard to overstate just how very lucky AMD and TSMC are that Intel took the wrong route to <14nm!
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've been saying this ever since AMD fanboys started salivating over the first Zen chips.

The current Zen chips are great, but Intel is still a juggernaut in CPU design. Once they can manyfacture again, either through manufacturing outsourcing or fixing their process AMD will need to be ready, or we are back to AMD lagging behind again.

But as others have pointed out, there is a real chance alternative architectures like ARM may make inroads. The x86 wars may not be as relevant any more.

I'm a little disappointed AMD abandoned the ARM K12 arch. They were ahead of the curve when they started. Unless internal work has continued behind the scenes, it's a shame to see them give that up.
 
Brian_B said:
Hmm...

Well, the PC market had been in long decline - largely due to new work at home and school at home, it finally had a positive growth year last year, growing about 10%.

Enterprise/Server market has grown, but not consitently over the past 3 years. According to Gartner and IDC, 2018 was 32%, 2019 was only about 7%, 2020 was back up to around 20%. But all were positive.

So that's the total possible sales. It isn't quite double, but not too far off - maybe 70% total growth in the market spaces... so I can't really dispute "Doubled production in the last 3 years" - as the market almost follows that.
Click to expand...
That's not all that Intel fabs, though, right?

Brian_B said:
I'm not even factoring in AMD. I know they are outselling Intel in some markets now, but over the past 3 years, it probably isn't hugely consequential, so I'll just conveniently ignore that as a rounding error and say that yeah, @Denpepe has a decent point about production.
Click to expand...
In order to say that AMD is 'outselling AMD in some markets', you have to get real specific about the 'market' in question.

I'd spitball Intel selling 10 CPUs for every CPU AMD sells. I wouldn't also hesitate to state that for most of those Intel sales, AMD probably has a better product, but that's even harder to prove since both companies are selling what they make. Perhaps the biggest indicator is that Intel appears to be keeping their prices fairly competitive.

Brian_B said:
And they've been stuck on 14nm and Skylake derivatives for... a long time now. So you have stagnation at the innovation level.
Click to expand...
If Intel's 10nm process had rolled out as planned, i.e., Kaby Lake was a new architecture on 10nm as opposed to a quick Skylake respin, would we be having this conversation?

Can't say no, but I'd rate it as not nearly as likely.

Brian_B said:
And there's been a large lack of focus: Intel has long been trying to diversify away from x86, they just can't seem to hit anything else in stride. x86 (between Client and Enterprise) represents the vast majority of Intel's revenue, and they've tried everything from mobile to storage to anti virus to Internet of Things to graphics to drones to ... they are clearly just throwing everything at the wall to see if anything sticks, and so far none of it has
Click to expand...

Mobile didn't pan out because Intel's parts weren't better enough to present a case for a change. Same reason AMD doesn't suddenly get all the design wins and replaces Intel wholesale. Still, Intel's work on making their x86 IP lower-power has definitely panned out.

Storage hasn't been a loss either: Intel hasn't tried to 'out-Samsung' Samsung, and their Optane technology is truly world-class.

For anti-virus... no one wins anti-virus.

For IoT, Intel still has quite a bit to contribute. Not sure how far that'll go, same for drones, but both these markets are rather undeveloped.


Overall, it's hard to have a negative outlook on the company, despite the magnitude of their foundry failures.
 
Zarathustra said:
Yeah, I've been saying this ever since AMD fanboys started salivating over the first Zen chips.

The current Zen chips are great, but Intel is still a juggernaut in CPU design. Once they can manyfacture again, either through manufacturing outsourcing or fixing their process AMD will need to be ready, or we are back to AMD lagging behind again.
Click to expand...
AMD seems to be in a race to shore up their remaining CPU shortcomings, but the biggest one that they simply cannot easily overcome is their reliance on TSMC.

In terms of actual performance, it's more that their platform seems 'rough' around the edges than anything else. Much of that can be traced to motherboard manufacturers, where AMD bears the blame for lack of leadership.

Zarathustra said:
But as others have pointed out, there is a real chance alternative architectures like ARM may make inroads. The x86 wars may not be as relevant any more.
Click to expand...

Apple is demonstrating with the M1 something we already knew: most users do not need the general compute performance that modern x86 CPUs provide. Not by a long shot. Further, those modern x86 CPUs aren't as fast at the things that most users actually do, so the logical course of action is to build application-specific logic to handle real user workloads, and scale out according to use case or market.

Zarathustra said:
I'm a little disappointed AMD abandoned the ARM K12 arch. They were ahead of the curve when they started. Unless internal work has continued behind the scenes, it's a shame to see them give that up.
Click to expand...

They wouldn't do any better than Intel would. ARM CPUs themselves are nothing special; tuned for lower-power from the ground up and not x86 (well, not CISC), but that's about it.

What matters, what sells, is everything around the ARM cores on the SoC, and how well that logic is integrated into operating systems and user applications. We've seen what it's taken for Apple to make that all work, and they control their whole stack!
 
I always figured that Kicking Pat was destined for the CEO chair. Though, I figure when he moved to EMC/VMWare it was no longer a possibility.
 
Don't forget all the security holes Intel left in their chips to increase performance. Now that those have to be mitigated, their Skylake derivatives aren't as potent as they were originally.
 
David_Schroth said:
I always figured that Kicking Pat was destined for the CEO chair. Though, I figure when he moved to EMC/VMWare it was no longer a possibility.
Click to expand...
Having worked under him, I can say one of the safest rules is never bet against pat Gelsinger. He doesn’t like to lose. This will be interesting.
 
hubaduba said:
Don't forget all the security holes Intel left in their chips to increase performance. Now that those have to be mitigated, their Skylake derivatives aren't as potent as they were originally.
Click to expand...
The mitigations decrease performance, but only because they break things.

The security lapses essentially arose from Intel engineers using a design that was intended as a proof of concept for the production design. Fixing them in hardware requires very little change and realistically could have been done from the start.

The other part of this is that Intel themselves didn't expect Skylake to run beyond the 6000-series. Instead, they've had to rely on it for four more 'generations', and now the entire world runs on it! The reality is that if the architecture had been replaced on schedule, security researchers (and bad actors) would have moved on. Intel's fab foibles made Skylake the #1 targeted architecture.
 
Don't cry too hard for Bob Swan, he got paid 67 MILLION in 2019.

salary at INTEL CORP | Salary.com

Salary, bonuses, stock options and other compensation for , at INTEL CORP. How much did make in
www1.salary.com

Also you know he got a giant golden parachute departure package, but don't see details of how much on the net yet.
 
Riccochet said:
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.
Click to expand...
AMD havent you know. I not only couldnt buy one, I found they dont perform as expected.
I had no choice but to buy a new CPU around the time of Cyberpunks launch and wanted to get a 5800X.
They were impossible to find so I was forced to buy Intels similar chip, the 10700K.
This has proven to be faster running Cyberpunk and I suspect it will be for other games.
This is despite all the reviews showing the 5800X excels overall.
Not everything is as it seems.
 
AntiQuark said:
This is despite all the reviews showing the 5800X excels overall.
Click to expand...
This isn't an untrue statement though.

I'd also expect the real-world gaming performance margin between these two CPUs to be around an order of magnitude below what a user would notice unless something was particularly broken with a specific game.

That being said, my 9900K does 5.0GHz across all cores with AVX, and that's basically as fast as one can get for gaming without going to extremes, including financial extremes.
 
AntiQuark said:
AMD havent you know. I not only couldnt buy one, I found they dont perform as expected.
I had no choice but to buy a new CPU around the time of Cyberpunks launch and wanted to get a 5800X.
They were impossible to find so I was forced to buy Intels similar chip, the 10700K.
This has proven to be faster running Cyberpunk and I suspect it will be for other games.
This is despite all the reviews showing the 5800X excels overall.
Not everything is as it seems.
Click to expand...

If all you are going to base a CPU on is one game that's rather sad. The AMD is faster in most instances and stomps the Intel in multi-threaded workloads.
 
Riccochet said:
If all you are going to base a CPU on is one game that's rather sad. The AMD is faster in most instances and stomps the Intel in multi-threaded workloads.
Click to expand...
One game is perhaps a touch too simple, and @AntiQuark mentioned that they were looking for a 5800X first.

Still, I tend to base my purchase decisions on gaming as well; not because I don't do other stuff, but because games are the only thing that I really care about how fast I can work.
 
Riccochet said:
If all you are going to base a CPU on is one game that's rather sad. The AMD is faster in most instances and stomps the Intel in multi-threaded workloads.
Click to expand...
I bought what I could and found it to be the best.
I havent found it delinquent in other games but havent compared their framerate, there was no need.
I'm sorry you are sad.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Become a Patron!
Back
Top