Gelsinger opens up about Intel troubles amid talk of possible split Intel chief Pat Gelsinger has acknowledged the chip giant's financial woes and said he is working to address investor concerns amid talk that the company is considering spinning off its foundry business and delaying expansion of its fabrication plants. The Santa Clara megacorp has been having a rough ride this year. It …
>He is said to have resigned over frustration at the company's risk-averse and bureaucratic culture and what he saw as its bloated workforce, with too many middle managers instead of engineers, according to reports.
Unfortunately this could be said of just about any mature corporation. The problem's been identified as the "MBA Culture" but it likely predates the invention of this qualification, the MBA merely being a systematization of a corporate mindset characterized by excessive focus on "shareholder value" (and, by extension, C-Suite reward) causing a disconnection between management and the actual business of the business. In extreme cases you end up with "a bank that flies aircraft as a sideline", as one major US airline was described (it made more money from credit cards and mileage arbitrage than it did from actual operations).
I don't know how to fix this. I've always been a worker bee, usually in smaller companies which are either too young or too small to support layers of management (although I've witnessed their spontaneous generation -- it seems to be a very human thing). I've also been an "accidental Intel employee" (got acquired), an interesting experience and a not entirely positive one.
you are correct. i have old timer silicon valley ex-intel vet friend who has gone through a few start ups after his time at intel. he shared with me that silicon valley's success comes from people who are naive. they aren't bogged down by bureaucracy typical of large corporation. old intel seemed to be just that. they were paranoid that someone was coming for them. but since paulo took over they lost their focus and really lost it under brian and bob. intel people will know. create an external facing slide with partners put 1/2 page of disclaimers that no one would read. $100's of M of ineffective corp initiatives.
martin -- wish you, Gel and intel the very best. maybe it is time for them to split. multiple phoenix to rise from intel's SiO2 ashes leaving the mbas sieving through the rubble. I hope you are one of those who leaves and builds the next big thing.
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How will layoffs, splits and divesting, halting fabs, fix what seems to be a massive issue in quality control, and arguably innovation?
If your CPUs can only achieve their performance at competitive levels if you power them with a fusion reactor and cool them with half the Antarctic's ice sheet, you've fallen quite a bit behind your competition. Remember, it's only acceptable for GPUs for mining and "AI" that're allowed to require the combined energy intake of a Dyson sphere, not mere CPUs!
If they spin off the foundry biz I suspect that the Intel name will be relegated to the dustbin of history, I can't imagine how a chip producing company can be successful when someone else actually makes the chips, it doesn't make sense. Intel is not dead (yet) and I think they have a good shot at maintaining relevance, but being the leader in microprocessors has passed them by. There is money to be made designing and manufacturing chips, and some companies will lead the charge by producing new and innovative products, while others will just be suppliers, I see Intel more in the latter camp right now. Hard to turn an aircraft carrier..
Are there any CPU manufacturers other than Intel and Samsung that fab their own chips now?
Apple is probably the premier CPU company right now in terms of overall efficiency per watt. They contracts to TSMC and has probably considered doing it - they're one of the few comanies in the world who have enough money burning holes in their corporate pockets - but probably figures that it's not worth the hassle unless TSMC starts screwing up as much as Intel did.
AMD also contracts to TSMC, as does Nvidia.
Fabless is the rule now, not the exception.
"I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact." --Diane Sawyer
"Time heals nothing, it merely rearranges our memory." --Gary Numan
"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it." --Michel de Montaigne
And by lean, I don't mean cheap. I mean efficient. There's a difference. You could probably drop the management / administratvie headcount of most large companies by 75% and run them better. If you look at the ROI for the individual activities that many people are doing, it's outright negative: compiling TPS reports that nobody reads, etc. If you've sat through enough executive meetings you'll realize that at the end of the day they either wind up winging it or bowing to some milquetoast consensus that provides minimum personal career risk to everyone in the room - unless they're fortunate to have a badass or two with strong enough personalities to actually do the leadership thing *and* do it reasonably well. The badasses are driven by passion and commitment to actual product / service excellence as opposed to the words written in some statement of corporate values that produced mountains of infinitely detailed spreadsheets badly explaining poorly-gathered information. When you talk to the badasses they're usually tell you they're ignoring everything they learned at university. I haven't met one who said they were so thankful for their MBA, assuming they have one (in my field they usually start out as engineers who happened to have some extra talents).
I'm to the point where I think we should just scrap university degrees for business and start doing paid internships instead, with trade school-style classes for mathematics, writing, and whatever other ancillary subjects individuals might benefit from (or they can watch online videos or whatever works best for them).
A secondary problem is that ever increasing computing power makes most managers obsolete and results in excess numbers flailing around trying to justify their own existence - something that happened to British Leyland well before computers
White Collar jobs are the ones most at risk and when the jobs in question are at higher levels in a company there are all sorts of tactics used to hide their obsolescence
Well, with Foundry, you are all in or all out. And if you join the TSMC club, all product will converge and have little to differentiate. Big CEO's should not be paid for run of the mill incremental improvements, that are not ahead of others (Apple Broadcon). Maybe not AMD as they just keep adding cpus. Were it not for the Chinese trade boycott, Intel's relative position would be even lower. Looks like the days of riding out technical defects for CPU's are going. Apple need not laugh - that MMIO backdoor.
>He is said to have resigned over frustration at the company's risk-averse and bureaucratic culture and what he saw as its bloated workforce, with too many middle managers instead of engineers, according to reports.
At last - a true analysis of the paralysis that will kill Intel. Just needs to add that most of the middle management is both useless and grossly over-paid (I suffered life at Intel for a very short stint)
Intel have been unable to get out of their own way for years.
I've worked at a few tech companies now, and Intel take the cake for an overabundance of process, bureaucracy, and simply not getting things done.
It's not that there aren't some smart folks there -- definitely there are -- it's that they're often smothered by layers of busybody management and heavyweight process. And meetings, bloody meetings.
Intel are also more enamored of codenames and acronyms than any outfit I've seen, possibly excepting the military. Plus co-opting non-tech or real-world acronyms for their own purposes, either a deliberate duplicate or completely unrelated -- flip a coin. And you won't know which without asking. Never let plain language or explanation get in the way of an opportunity for gratuitous acronyming.
Arm was no slouch in the pursuit of codenames - about the most popular page on the internal Wiki was an informally maintained one mapping old codenames to externally-visible product names and explaining that a new codename was 'direct successor to A57' or 'R7 with more reliability features for automotive'.
It makes some degree of sense to pick a codename that looks nothing like a marketing name, use it throughout the codebase, and let marketing decide that what comes after 57 is 72 and what comes after 55 is 510 and then maintain the lookup table; getting into a position where you have to change code in a myriad places and break everyone's unmerged work because of urgent diktats from marketing is to be avoided.
it's that they're often smothered by layers of busybody management and heavyweight process. And meetings, bloody meetings
Wasn't (isn't?) it IBM where your level of work is measured by how many meetings you attend?
Lets have a meeting to plan the pre-meeting for the startup meeting for the actual meeting!
Get stuff done? Heresy! It'll get in the way of my next meeting!
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