An Interview with Pat Gelsinger (morethanmoore.substack.com)
97 points by zdw 3 days ago
scrlk 10 hours ago
Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion.
"Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert Palmer, former DEC CEO)
melling 9 hours ago
Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy.
Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.
m132 9 hours ago
Was it Pat or Brian? If I recall correctly, it was under Brian when Intel had one of its worst periods of stagnation, when the 10 nm process all the bets were on turned out to be a non-starter, and when Meltdown and Spectre erupted. It's easy to overlook this because Intel had fairly no competition around then, but that doesn't mean the company was in a good shape.
I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was chosen to clean up the mess when the whole place was already up in smoke and the smell was only starting to leak out. I liked his strategy, was disappointed to see him booted out.
osnium123 7 hours ago
ksec 3 hours ago
>Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet.
Let's face it. Everything he cut, and products / department he sold were what he wanted to do on day one. He had to force his hand, make the stock price worst and ultimately force the board to allow him to do it.
You could argue he laid all the foundation for today's Intel to thrive.
Yes, I am pointing the fingers at the board. Although words on the street was the board also have their hands tied as they were also beholden to large institutional investors. It is all a Game of Cards.
mort96 8 hours ago
I don't understand what you mean. Stock price has tripled since last August based on Intel finally having a competitive architecture and a competitive process again, no? At least that in combination with various geopolitical circumstances. Sounds like Pat's decision resulted in Intel's stock price rising?
melling 7 hours ago
aurareturn 8 hours ago
Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel.
* Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.
* Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there are rarely any delays or cancellations. When you looked at an Intel roadmap, expect 30% of them cancelled, 50% delayed by 1-2 quarters, and 30% switched to a different node tech.
* IFS strategy under Pat amounted to nothing. Fab cancellations or on hold. Cancelling 20A altogether. Not being able to woo any notable customers. Not hiring the right people for external customers. There were reports that he didn't know how to run an external fab, which is why the board decided to hire Lip Bu Tan who came from Cadence.
* He missed on AI boom, crypto boom, said AMD was in rear view mirror, politicized TSMC in order to win government grants while still still using TSMC nodes themself.
ksec 3 hours ago
>He also didn't cut dividend until 2024.
He was not allowed to cut dividend until 2024. Cutting dividend was the first thing he wanted before he even became CEO. The board said no.
Edit: Would have had ~$20B savings, $10B from early sell off, started the work 3 years earlier. In hindsight the best was probably hire someone to do the dirty work before Pat took over. But again, the board had no idea what they were doing. Or they have their hands tied as well ( Which I dont buy into it much. )
>Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. >Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there are rarely any delays or cancellations. When you looked at an Intel roadmap, expect 30% of them cancelled, 50% delayed by 1-2 quarters, and 30% switched to a different node tech.
He become CEO in 2021 Feb. He was also the one who sorted out Intel's roadmap from a mess to something comprehensible.
>IFS strategy under Pat amounted to nothing
No person on planet earth could have executed IFS in under 3 years. Especially with little to no cashflow. It was always a long term goal. That is why he has to play the government subsidy card, when he was, again not allow to cut dividend. Edit: And I might just add, getting Intel's IFS to have a separate balance sheet took longer than expected precisely because it would expose certain numbers that could affect stock price. cough Guess who were against it.
>He missed on AI boom, crypto boom
Considering how long the cycle of chip works. I am not sure how he missed any of it.
osnium123 7 hours ago
As others have noted, there was over hiring. I think part of it was driven by Pat’s desire to get governments to give subsidies but in retrospect, it led to too many empty shells being built and too many people getting hired. Intel Foundry eventually got Intel 18A node out and that is a promising node. However, the demand for it is now predicated on the AI boom continuing and TSMC being constrained for capacity. Once that goes away, who knows what happens for demand for non TSMC nodes.
x3n0ph3n3 3 hours ago
He similarly killed VMware during his tenure there. Now it's a subsidiary of Broadcom and a shell of its former self.
zozbot234 7 hours ago
Issuing a dividend is a terrible sign for the market. It's telling investors "we have so much money that we have no idea what to do with, please take some of it yourself and invest it somewhere other than Intel."
BobbyTables2 5 hours ago
AlotOfReading 5 hours ago
cubefox 7 hours ago
> Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.
That's nonsense. Intel's problems were caused by falling behind TSMC, which was not the fault of Pat Gelsinger. Quite the contrary, he did a lot to turn things around, but this takes time, a lot more than three years.
aurareturn 7 hours ago
natbennett 6 hours ago
Gelsinger is unlikely to be a good source on this question.
dzonga 8 hours ago
me personally, I wouldn't bet against companies like Intel that have full government banking.
soon or later they were gonna turn things around with military precision specially with DOD, Intelligence folks giving advice.
dieortin 7 hours ago
What makes the DoD qualified to give advice about manufacturing microprocessors?
voxadam 10 hours ago
I'm surprised that his fascination with "Christian AI" and the end of the world didn't come up.
fooker 10 hours ago
Speaking of that, Anthropic is getting priests to try and teach Claude ethics
https://observer.com/2026/03/the-catholic-priest-who-helped-write-anthropics-ai-ethics-code/voxadam 10 hours ago
Who's going to teach the Catholic priests ethics?
fooker 9 hours ago
Xenoamorphous 6 hours ago
huijzer 9 hours ago
What a joke. Anthropic could just train a few more times on the Bible.
Matthew 22:36-40 (emphasis mine), "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Note the "as thyself" part. This part counters people who want to interpret "love" as "romantic love". Unfortunately, Catholic priests and many (fake?) Christians seem to not care about the "as thyself" part.
fooker 9 hours ago
polkapie 4 hours ago
Gelsinger is a weird dude. Back in the late 1990's (early 2000s?) he had the pope bless a wafer which he then claimed was extended to the a fab. We were all a little uncomfortable about it when he announced it during a BUM (internal Business Update Meeting) like why does god care if our fabs will be successful because he met the pope? He always would bring his religion to work and it made everyone uncomfortable. (And the dude only has a honarary PHD, like Mike Tyson.)
IanCutress 2 days ago
Youtube version, with pushup contest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauujHpNpXY
leosanchez 11 hours ago
For anyone reading. Gelsinger won the contest. He took ~42 pushups.
Zigurd 8 hours ago
I got to meet several of Intel senior management when Andy Grove was CEO, Gelsinger was CTO, and Avram Miller was CFO and a pioneer in corporate VC. Even somebody universally acclaimed as smart and hard-working as Lip-Bu Tan will find it impossible to capture the magic of a team like that.
Intel's current CEO was hired to explicitly not try to recapture that magic. The board thought Gelsinger's approach of do all the things was reckless. He was hired to take fewer risks, at the cost of putting a restoration of Intel's position in technology out of reach.
aurareturn 7 hours ago
You probably met Intel management when they were booming in the old days. LBT was hired to replace Pat because the board needed someone who didn't have the rose colored glasses that old Intel management had and actually see Intel what it is today: losing in everything.
When LBT took over, Intel was on a path to bankruptcy. Although Pat wasn't solely responsible, he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy.
Intel over the last 15 years missed the following booms:
* Mobile boom
* Missed on chiplets and allowed AMD to take the lead
* Missed on EUV transition
* Crypto mining boom
* AI chips boom (A huge reason was Pat Gelsinger backed Larrabee, an x86 GPU, and failed to compete against Nvidia)
* Missed storage boom by selling SSD/3D NAND division
* Missing local LLM boom by not having an Apple Silicon, Strix Halo competitor
* Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago
Basically, if they reversed all their decisions in the last 15 years and invested wisely, they'd likely be worth 10x more today.
ksec 3 hours ago
> he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy.
So currently the IFS has a few potential customers was because of LBT and not Pat?
>* Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago
Reckless in finance but also missing the Fab boom?
BobbyTables2 5 hours ago
I think every CEO should have the experience of posting a technical question to their company’s forums.
Intel makes Broadcom start to look good.
shrubble 6 hours ago
I always felt like they weren't properly paranoid in their decisions.
For instance, when the AI boom was heating up and they were shipping the ARC GPUs, they could have taken some business simply by making a 48GB or 64GB VRAM version.
There are some that are saying Panther Lake is a great CPU for laptops; will be a vindication of his 14A efforts if so.
jmyeet 7 hours ago
Intel really needs to be studied for how it's spiralled into a possibly terminal state of dysfunction.
EPIC was Intel's first big folly that I remember and it almost killed the company. Years late, too expensive, motivated by Intel's desires rather than customer needs, software would've required significant rewrites at every level. The Gigahertz race (culminating in the Pentium 4) was near-fatal to AMD but then near-fatal to Intel and they only recovered because somebody went back to the Pentium 3 and bolted on AMD's x86_64 extensions. Still, for half a decade Athlon/Opteron were a huge problem for Intel..
But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork.
Many (including myself) thought Pat's appointment was a good sign for Intel, being an engineer. From the outside it seemed like Intel was organizationally broken, having descended into fiefdoms that didn't communicate let alone cooperate.
So this conversation is largely about what Pat's doing now rather than what happened at Intel. He's previously pointed the finger at Wall Street "short-termism" [1], for example.
It's interesting that they talk about the relationship with the current administration being positive and receiving funding from the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was passed in 2022.
But if we're looking ahead here, I'm a little disappointed China was only mentioned once at that was just with building solar capacity. I'm sorry but if you're in the chip space and not thinking about what China is doing, I don't know what you're doing.
China has been restricted by the US from buying the best chips and buying the latest lithography technology. So they're making their own and it's happening way faster than I think many of these industry types are telling you it will happen. A few years from now when China produces EUV chips, I guarantee you'll read news articles about how this came out of nowhere and nobody expected it.
[1]: https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-ame...
rayiner 6 hours ago
> But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork.
I'd love to see a post-mortem. Intel's 14nm came out with Broadwell in 2014, and it was their desktop/server node for seven years, until Alder Lake in 2021. But they got stuck on the micro-arch as well. They shipped what was essentially the same Skylake core for five years from 2015 to 2020.
wewewedxfgdf 10 hours ago
I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff from official Intel accounts.
KK7NIL 10 hours ago
Source? I've only seen him post religious stuff on his personal social media.
wewewedxfgdf 9 hours ago
If you are the CEO of Intel then posting from your personal account is the same thing - you are the CEO - it's not private.
This is just scratching the surface - his religious posts went on and on and on whilst he was Intel CEO.
https://gizmodo.com/things-are-so-bad-at-intel-that-the-boss...
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing...
https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1hb1imh/former_intel...
https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1891069258953576711
https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1820503612591919375
mort96 8 hours ago
newsclues 10 hours ago
why is that the most important thing to comment about?
wewewedxfgdf 9 hours ago
Because religion should not mix with business.
CEO's should be sufficiently self aware to understand that they should not be foisting their beliefs on the company and their employees and customers.
Being unable to recognize that is a very bad tell about a persons judgement.