Intel CEO Gelsinger spells out five-year renewal plan inspired by iconic leaders Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger is an admirer of the company's iconic leaders – Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Andy Grove – and has a five-year plan to bring back their values and the spirit they created. "We're rebuilding that Grovian execution, as we call it, bringing back that heart of Andy Grove, the confidence, the engineering …
I've seen enough reunion concerts to know that mojo can be fleeting
OTOH, it worked for Steve Jobs, so I'm willing to give Gelsinger the benefit of the doubt. At least he's picked the right Intel idols and his actions since the beancounters were demoted give me hope.
It may be a cheesy analogy, but as a (non-CPU) engineer in Intel I can tell you that the atmosphere is very different from a year ago. And yep, pay has also risen to stop the attrition. Gelsinger is the real deal, an engineering leader, and that is affecting the perspective of the entire management chain.
Which is irrelevant if he can't deliver.
He can't pay $$$$ to outbid Apple or Microsoft, never mind TSMC/Samsung, for talent because he has 100K existing employees who are going to want the same.
Stock price is going nowhere so he can't give new hires $1M in options, so he has to pay cash.
He also has to find $100Bn to spend on fabs to even be on the same page as TSMC - nevermind their 5year lead.
Alternately he can lobby that all Federal IT spend has to be on American (designed) chips, and get the states to pay for a new fab while stringing a Xeon monopoly along until the last enterprise customer goes to the cloud
Excuse me, but I seem to recall that, if we ever needed discrete graphics in the first place, it is because integrated graphics were shit in performance.
It used to be the case that if you were using integrated graphics, it was because you were working on a server and the only thing on screen was the console - text version. Integrated graphics were good enough for that, but not much more.
These days I acknowledge that integrated graphics can actually show a Windows GUI properly, without much in matter of lag, but if you think that you're going to persuade me that your integrated graphics can boast of GeForce RTX 30-level performance well, I'm sorry, I'm not drunk enough to buy that.
They are talking about package-scale integration - putting a GPU die next to the processor die (which AMD are probably already doing) & with the transistor doubling due to a die shrink it should be feasible to get midrange graphics performance from such a device. Both Intel and AMD are nibbling at the bottom end of the discrete GPU market with Tiger Lake and the Ryzen "G" parts. Hence my guess that with a die shrink they might get into what we now consider to be midrange graphics performance.
The main limit to performance will be (as usual) getting rid of the heat.
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