alt Hacker News 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.
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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.
He similarly killed VMware during his tenure there. Now it's a subsidiary of Broadcom and a shell of its former self.
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."
> 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.
>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.