An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

(morethanmoore.substack.com)

60 points | by zdw 2 days ago

8 comments

  • scrlk 2 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)

    • aurareturn 7 minutes ago

        Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel.
      
      My speculation:

      * 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 codes themselves.

    • dzonga 15 minutes 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.

    • melling 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

      • mort96 14 minutes 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?
  • Zigurd 8 minutes 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.

  • voxadam 2 hours ago
    I'm surprised that his fascination with "Christian AI" and the end of the world didn't come up.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740664

    • fooker 2 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 2 hours ago
        Who's going to teach the Catholic priests ethics?
        • fooker 1 hour ago
          Claude :)
          • voxadam 1 hour ago
            Circular ethics, how appropriate for an industry fueled by circular financing.
      • huijzer 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
          You should read Asimov ;)
  • IanCutress 2 days ago
    Youtube version, with pushup contest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauujHpNpXY
    • leosanchez 3 hours ago
      For anyone reading. Gelsinger won the contest. He took ~42 pushups.
  • wewewedxfgdf 2 hours ago
    I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff from official Intel accounts.
  • throwaway498213 3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • 818828383 1 hour ago
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  • Rahulghoti 2 hours ago
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