Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan Says Company Will Spin Off Non-Core Units (msn.com) 40
Intel Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan said the chipmaker will spin off assets that aren't central to its mission and create new products including custom semiconductors to try to better align itself with customers. From a report: Intel needs to replace the engineering talent it has lost, improve its balance sheet and better attune manufacturing processes to meet the needs of potential customers, Tan said. Speaking at his first public appearance as CEO, at the Intel Vision conference Monday in Las Vegas, Tan didn't specify what parts of Intel he believes are no longer central to its future.
"We have a lot of hard work ahead," Tan said, addressing the company's customers in the audience. "There are areas where we've fallen short of your expectations." The veteran semiconductor executive is trying to restore the fortunes of a company that dominated an industry for decades, but now finds itself chasing rivals in most of the areas that define success in the field. A key question confronting its leadership is whether a turnaround is best served by the company remaining whole or splitting up its key product and manufacturing operations. Tan gave no indication that he will seek to divest either part of Intel. Instead, he highlighted the problems he needs to fix to get both units performing more successfully. Intel's chips for data center and AI-related work in particular are not good enough, he said. "We fell behind on innovation," the CEO said. "We have been too slow to adapt and meet your needs."
"We have a lot of hard work ahead," Tan said, addressing the company's customers in the audience. "There are areas where we've fallen short of your expectations." The veteran semiconductor executive is trying to restore the fortunes of a company that dominated an industry for decades, but now finds itself chasing rivals in most of the areas that define success in the field. A key question confronting its leadership is whether a turnaround is best served by the company remaining whole or splitting up its key product and manufacturing operations. Tan gave no indication that he will seek to divest either part of Intel. Instead, he highlighted the problems he needs to fix to get both units performing more successfully. Intel's chips for data center and AI-related work in particular are not good enough, he said. "We fell behind on innovation," the CEO said. "We have been too slow to adapt and meet your needs."
Short of NICs and CPUs, what else has succeeded? (Score:3)
Short of NICs and CPUs, what else has Intel done well with? I remember decades ago them trying to do switches and routers. They have a history of products they start only to abandon.
Re: (Score:3)
They made some piss-poor wifi cards at one point
Re: (Score:3)
I hope the GPUs survive. They've been coming along nicely and if I could get a B580 for MSRP online I'd be up for it, but I don't have it in me to fight the scalpers.
Re: (Score:2)
AMD is doing very nicely with their GPUs nowadays, because nVidia basically exited the gaming market. Sure, they have the top dog GPUs, but that's it - they aren't concentrating on selling those cards very much hence all the shortages. That's because gaming GPUs make up a tiny amount of nVidia's revenue so they're concentrating less on gaming, and more on AI and other things.
It's why they just price their top end GPU at $2000 and call it a day - they don't care if people buy it or not. If gamers want to pay
Re: "nicely" (Score:2)
I have to disagree.
The reason AMD had only 10% market share is MUCH more complicated, and really it goes back 10-20 years to the basic architecture of the GPUs AND Nvidia's lock-in with developers and software tuned for CUDA and Nvidia.
Nvidia has a stranglehold with CUDA.
Intel otoh appears to have some ideas on how to break that. Gelsinger said last year that the industry, namely Intel, was "coming for CUDA" and seems to have meant Intel tech. Their performance and architecture are bearing that out in AI wo
I think the biggest problem AMD has and had (Score:2)
Also AMD has a tough time with board partners either using substandard electronics resulting in GPUs that can't get their targets without unde
Re: (Score:2)
Except that Intel sold that to Apple, who managed to turn them around into a surprisingly decent modem in the C1 chip on the iPhone 16E.
It's apparently quite competitive with the Qualcomm modem, except lacking the mmWave support to achieve the ultra-high-speed transfers.
Re: (Score:3)
They made some piss-poor wifi cards at one point
But they worked on Linux when the other manufacturers ranged from hit and miss to totally non-functional.
What was so bad about them anyway? I never had issues.
Re: (Score:2)
I think it was the 3100 series of wifi adapters I had performance issues with.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yeah, the chipsets I used were later series than that.
Re: (Score:3)
Good question. I remember IC chips with Intel on the label. I had an Ethernet to parallel printer box long ago.
It's a short list isn't it.
Re: (Score:3)
I fondly remember their motherboards back in the day. They were a bit more expensive but rock solid. I still have a few of those motherboards and they run perfectly. In fact, I don't remember ever coming across one with issues.
Re: (Score:2)
I fondly remember their motherboards back in the day.
I still have one running as a home server. The bios on the board is from 2009, so it's probably 15 years old now.
Re: (Score:2)
They were exceptionally good boards. Going through my NAS driver archive I see I utilized at least 26 various models of their motherboards over the years. AN430TX, D101GGC, D850GB, D865GBF, D865GLC, D865PERL, D875PBZ, D915PCY, D945GCNL, D945GZIS, D955XCS, DG31PR, DG33BU, DG41RQ, DG43NB, DH55HC, DH57DD, DH77DF, DX58SO, DZ68DB, D915G, D915GEV, DB75EN, DG35EC, DG41TX, DG43GT, DH61CR. Phew, I built a LOT of custom computers over the years. These are just the Intel boards I used. The other usual suspects are inc
Re: (Score:2)
Intel nics are quite (in)famous for bugs and long erratas.
Re: (Score:2)
Intel bought Altera for their FPGA business. It was an interesting idea, you could put a reconfigurable array of gates on a CPU and then have a software defined application accelerator for specific tasks. But the industry wasn't interested and just uses GPUs for everything. Presumably Altera will be spun off again now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ironically, the Altera Stratix line of high-end FPGAs were originally a product Intel spun off because it wasn't aligned with their core business.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Altera has actually been spun off already, 3 months ago. :)
Re: (Score:2)
They did a great line of motherboards, which they abandoned not because they weren't a success but because they were worried about the impact on their customers - ie other motherboard makers. About the only complaint anyone had about them was the lack of overclocking, they were solid and TBH I've not had a mobo since that stood up the way their's did.
They've also apparently started doing decent graphics cards after years of prevaricating about whether to do that or not. I never did understand that, clearly
Re: (Score:2)
I was working there when they came out with the Bad Axe motherboard.
Broken drivers, horrifically ugly and broken "xtreme" configuration apps, flaky overclocking.
In less than a year, they were unsupported and left to die.
The chip engineers were top notch, but sales and management was full of clueless
expense account eaters, all waiting for the 90's to return so they could cash out stock grants.
Stock Buybacks for the L! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Stock Buybacks for the L! (Score:2)
God if only someone could have seen the failure coming from decades away ...
They did, you just werenâ(TM)t paying attention⦠https://youtu.be/mRfSM-lv55I?s... [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think the problem is R&D spending. It's not like Intel didn't spend tons of money on R&D, especially in comparison to Nvidia, Qualcomm, and AMD. It's not like they would've been successful if they just hired twice as many people and spent more money.
This is the kind of comment that people who've never led (or even worked on) and engineering project make. "If they had just spent more money." "If they just had more people working on it." I'm not saying that those aren't true sometimes, bu
Re: (Score:2)
Welp... (Score:3)
... there goes the Arc cards. Once again, discrete graphics will die at Intel. Just as they were starting to get the hang of things.
What's the problem? (Score:1)
Re: What's the problem? (Score:2)
Part of me thinks this is just posturing for the stock market. Intel knows they're fine, it's just PR and they will continue on a similar path as before
Re: (Score:1)
Kill McAfee FFS! (Score:2)
John is dead. RIP
The company/product shouldn't exist anymore.
It's a good thing that Intel hired will.i.am (Score:2)
It's a good thing that Intel hired will.i.am as Director of Creative Innovation back in 2011.
The forward thinking by management is really going to pay off now, when they need him the most.