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Intel

Former CEO Blasts Intel's 'Decay': 'We Don't Know How To Engineer Anymore' (ft.com) 126

Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel CEO who was pushed out in late 2024 during a five-year turnaround effort, told the Financial Times that the "decay" he found when he returned to the company in 2021 was "deeper and harder than I'd realized." In the five years before his return, "not a single product was delivered on schedule," he said. "Basic disciplines" had been lost. "It's like, wow, we don't know how to engineer anymore!"

Gelsinger was also unsparing about the Biden administration's implementation of the 2022 Chips Act, legislation he spent more time lobbying for than any other CEO. "Two and a half years later [and] no money is dispensed? I thought it was hideous!" There's what Gelsinger carefully calls "a touch of irony" in how things played out.

Intel's board forced him out four years into a five-year plan, then picked successor Lip-Bu Tan -- who Gelsinger says is following the same broad strategy. Tan has kept Intel in the manufacturing game and delivered the 18A process node within the five years Gelsinger originally promised. Asked what went wrong, Gelsinger conceded he was "very focused on managing 'down'" and should have managed "up" more. He also would have pushed harder for more semiconductor expertise on the board, he said.

Former CEO Blasts Intel's 'Decay': 'We Don't Know How To Engineer Anymore'

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  • by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @09:08AM (#65827691)

    "Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel CEO who was pushed out in late 2024 during a five-year turnaround effort, told the Financial Times that the "decay" he found when he returned to the company in 2021."

    Gee, maybe you should have used that three-plus years to hire some people.

    • by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @09:46AM (#65827771)
      From what I understand, the internal politics were basically around whoever commanded the largest team. I dont know that hiring people would have fixed it.

      Intel diversified a lot, they have IT services, hosting services, GPU, CPU, motherboards, and chip manufacturing. Now they are building a new fab in Arizona, and used to be two other locations around the world.

      Their failures compounded from lack of innovative CPU architecture generation, which is their core business, their handling of a key flaw in desktop CPUs, and relying too heavily on their server CPUs for their larger income. AMD trounced them in home CPU, and if they ever build more 3d cache systems, for servers, they will see another boon.

      I believe they were also failing in IT/hosting services, which bled them even further.

      So having "large groups" as a political landscape, failing in productivity across everything except GPU, which was starting up, and stupid decisions which lead to PR problems is just compounded problems that destroy a company in short order.

      I think both CEOs are likely not going to bring Intel back. I think it will be divided up and sold, and I think we will lose out as consumers.
      • by Luthair ( 847766 )
        Internal politics are well within the control of the CEO, if he didn't address them its on him. That said, my impression has been that the root of Intel's problems is that something went awry in their fabs around a decade ago. Intel went from leading the industry in chip manufacturing to stagnating.
        • Internal politics are well within the control of the CEO, if he didn't address them its on him.

          How should the CEO have addressed that problem?

          • Internal politics are well within the control of the CEO, if he didn't address them its on him.

            How should the CEO have addressed that problem?

            - Leadership:
            i. Eliminate multiple layers of middle management
            ii. Get rid of senior executives who are more interested in their fiefdoms vs. the company well being
            iii. Put competent, diverse and industry specific leadership on your board instead of stacking it with multiple CEOs. (Intel's current board is terrible)

            - Employees:
            i. Incentivize rank and file who perform well. "We didn't meet targets as a company so nobody gets anything" is completely unacceptable.
            ii. Stop the constant layoffs fo

            • > Put competent, diverse and industry specific leadership on your board instead of stacking it with multiple CEOs. (Intel's current board is terrible)

              Yes and he actually stated that he regret not bringing in more semiconductor experienced people on the board, so it seems that he recognizes the failure on his side

              > i. Incentivize rank and file who perform well. "We didn't meet targets as a company so nobody gets anything" is completely unacceptable.

              Yup. Nothing kills motivation like the idiot or power-

            • ii. Get rid of senior executives who are more interested in their fiefdoms vs. the company well being

              I appreciate your ideas, but this will never work. Executives (and every other sane person at the company) will always be more interested in their own success than in the company's success.

    • He did, on the promise of the Biden CHIPs act money- the employees ballooned to 145,000 worldwide by October 2022.

      Due to CHIPs act not coming through as planned, in December 2022 they started rounds of layoffs, which Lu Tan is continuing

    • Gee, maybe you should have used that three-plus years to hire some people.

      Intel's staff count increased by close to 10% in 2021 and 10% again in 2022. They went on a massive hiring spree. Gee, maybe you should have done a quick Google before looking like an idiot.

  • by Tokolosh ( 1256448 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @09:13AM (#65827701)

    Maybe if he had spent less time panhandling for taxpayer money for products for which the market was already willing to pay handsomely?

    Maybe if he instead invested his time in engineering?

    If your business model is predicated on government bail-outs, you don't have a business.

    • That is the basic problem, they don't. Mass-producing semiconductors in the USA without subsidies is not economically viable. The CHIPS act (or equivalently, tariffs) is an effort to tip the financial scales in favor of maintaining domestic production, for national security (so we can't be "cut off" by other nations). But such a scheme will not work if it is not executed in a financially predictable manner.
      • When a product or service is deemed too expensive (for buyers), or too cheap (for sellers), what to politicians do? Why, they take taxpayer money and hand it out as subsidies, thus "correcting" the price. What they NEVER do, is to take actions that will correct the cost.

        Producing semiconductors in the US is not viable. THAT is the problem that must be addressed. Fixing the problem of a high cost, not artificially lowering the price.

        • OK, it could be argued the government is the problem in the first place, since laws are a big part of why production here is economically nonviable. The problem is how specifically to solve that? Each law is there for a reason. It's easy to dismiss regulation broadly but harder in each given case.

          If the US as a whole were a good place for this, a happy market solution would be for Intel to be eaten alive by another American competitor until either regains its competency or goes away. But surely you can

          • OK, it could be argued the government is the problem in the first place, since laws are a big part of why production here is economically nonviable.

            Well, of course. Environmental and anti-trust regulation and workers' protection laws, and all that stuff gets in the way... and let us ignore the cost of living (which is a much larger reason why it is not economically viable to create some stuff without subsidies.)

            • Right, what the free market wants to do is levelize our standard of living with our low-cost competitors, or import all the chips from them (with the security and supply risks that entails).

              Simply shaming Intel for seeking government handouts does not solve our problem - how to maintain a domestic industry including internal competition rather than government choosing the winners and subsidizing incompetence.

    • Maybe if he instead invested his time in engineering?

      CEOs don't engineer (nor do you want them to). Their job is to fund engineering and put in place management to ensure engineers are able to work at their best. Under Geisinger's time Intel massively increased it's engineering workforce, restructured the entire management chain, and ultimately looks like he brought the company on plan to deliver 18A.

      I'm really not sure what you're complaining about here.

      If your business model is predicated on government bail-outs, you don't have a business.

      Intel wasn't asking for a bail-out, never has. Intel was asking for a hand-out. There's a difference. It's

      • Agreed, hand-out is a better term than bail-out.

        But it's a sad situation when a high-tech company CEO's first job is to scrounge money from taxpayers, while delegating management of its very reason for existing.

        • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

          Another reason lobbying should not be allowed. The government should show up at Intel's door and tell them how much money they're going to get for accomplishing such and such goals and they can take it or leave it.

          • "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." -- P. J. O'Rourke

            Take away the power from Congress and the President, and they can lobby and buy elections all they want.

  • AI (Score:2, Funny)

    by pele ( 151312 )

    Will fix everything

  • by Lavandera ( 7308312 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @09:22AM (#65827731)

    "more semiconductors expertise on the board"

    This might be the explanation... MBAs running the company for years left it unable to do actual engineering... what a surprise...

    • by Moof123 ( 1292134 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @12:12PM (#65828061)

      If you talk to intel and former intel employees I'd argue the real rot is the dog-eat-dog internal company culture. I've heard from multiple people who describe an environment where you need to work for the biggest A-hole boss, since otherwise your group will get no resources, get canned, or otherwise perish. The teams compete instead of cooperate, and in a ruthless underhanded way.

      The result is that projects get essentially sabotaged from within, as this is often more effective a strategy to survive than out engineering a competing team.

      The fab has traditionally been focused on CPU's to the exclusion of all else. Completing a tape-out without deep internal knowledge and connections is essentially impossible. In one case OSU's engineering department was given a free tapeout run, which normally is a godsend to cash strapped universities. It was impossible to get a clean DRC taking months of fruitless effort by the beleaguered grad students, and a favor was called in from a friend who worked in layout there. It shipped with literally thousands of violations, but he was versed in what was real and what could be ignored. Compared to tapeouts at GF and TSMC this was all shocking.

      So you have a company that has had diseased culture with broken tools/fabrication that previously masked these issues with monopoly level income flows now facing declining sales, real competition, shifting customer focus, and no real stomach to fixed a deeply entrenched toxic culture. What could go wrong?

      • by Gavino ( 560149 )
        And yet, this is exactly the kind of company that governments tend to pour money into - Biden and Trump. No wonder the USA is 34 trillion dollars in debt.
      • If you talk to intel and former intel employees I'd argue the real rot is the dog-eat-dog internal company culture.

        And that was exactly Motorola's undoing, also.

    • Not to mention the millions spent on DEI hiring of marginal people based only on demographics.

      • Not to mention the millions spent on DEI hiring of marginal people based only on demographics.

        Citations needed.

        • I personally had a flame war on the internal messaging board called circuit with Richard Taylor, with regards to how the DEI programs they were enabling were illegal, and unfortunately brad avakian and state leadership were using carrot and stick tactics, threatening to hit intel with disparate impact claims, otherwise they could play ball and get a 30 year tax break, which required 10% of the amount be given to nonprofits (like the rainbow push coalition, feminist majority foundation, et al, who would then

          • Yep, I had writeups from those flame wars. They *REALLY* did not want it discussed. Governors Brown and Kotek continued the pay-to-play system, which is what lost Oregon the Ohio CHIPs foundry campus (before they realized that Biden wasn't going to pay out CHIPs act at all).

        • All one needs to see this is to be employed at Intel in June, when every single monitor becomes rainbows and the rainbow flag flies on campus every month.

  • by KalvinB ( 205500 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @09:22AM (#65827733) Homepage

    It’s telling that Gelsinger described a culture where “not a single product was delivered on schedule” — and yet, that might be more of a symptom than the disease. In many industries, the obsession with arbitrary timelines and “on-schedule delivery” metrics becomes corrosive. When deadlines are treated as fixed points rather than guides, quality and innovation become secondary to appearances of progress.

    Artificial timelines often create environments where teams are punished for realism and rewarded for overpromising. Engineering — whether of chips, cars, or code — demands time to iterate, test, and refine. When leadership values the schedule more than the product, people cut corners to meet goals that were never grounded in the reality of the work. Over time, that behavior institutionalizes mediocrity.

    What Gelsinger called “decay” often begins when organizations forget that timelines are supposed to serve the work, not the other way around. Real engineering discipline means being honest about what’s possible — and having the courage to move a date if that’s what it takes to deliver something that lasts.

    • by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @10:42AM (#65827863)
      While what you say is generally true about artificial deadlines, Intel’s problem is they were more than 5 years behind schedule. They were stuck on 14nm for years while TSMC and Samsung leaped ahead and are so far ahead that Intel was forced to contract TSMC to make some chips.
      • by KalvinB ( 205500 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @11:39AM (#65827989) Homepage

        That's the business not investing in the people and the resources to move ahead. "Missing deadlines" also often stems from demands exceeding resources.

        From the 1990's to the 2020's, Intel was more focused on profit and shareholders than investing in people and R&D.

      • This was a direct result of several things

        1) management decided not to jump on the EUV bandwagon early, thinking they could amortize their existing equipment longer than they could

        2) by the time they wanted to switch to EUV, they had already fired most of the old white men, based on diversity quotas and salary, which would be able to execute the switch, and they got stuck with the quartz mask absorbing too much of the light.

        • by the time they wanted to switch to EUV, they had already fired most of the old white men, based on diversity quotas and salary, which would be able to execute the switch, and they got stuck with the quartz mask absorbing too much of the light.

          Citation needed. While I don't doubt Intel got rid of older workers, the main reason is that newer, younger workers are cheaper. The fact they were old white men is more an artifact of the system where Intel hired mostly white men to be engineers decades ago.

    • Not delivering on schedule is absolutely a symptom; it's just a somewhat diagnostically tricky one since the failure can come from several directions; and 'success' can be generated by gaming the system in several places, as well as by successful execution.

      In the 'ideal' case things mostly happening on schedule is a good sign because it means both that the people doing the doing are productive and reliable and the people trying to plan have a decent sense(whether personally, or by knowing what they don't
    • Timelines are based on known knowns, unanticipated delays are based on unknown unknowns, and unfortunately alot of people there don't know shit. Sri Ramkrishna is all over business insider yesterday lamenting that he cant find a job, yet when i discussed with him the peril of AI in education, that students are graduating being unable to answer `what is a turing machine`, `what is a cosine` and how one employee is sending me (not an employee) git issues because they dont know how to bump a minor version in p

  • Process Paralysis (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2025 @09:42AM (#65827763)

    Process Paralysis is what kills these large companies. Process Paralysis is something that is the result of MBAs who think that engineering can be reduced to a flowchart of steps to do - boxes to check.

    So, engineering becomes a byzantine process where engineers spend 90% of their time complying with process requirements and only 10% of their time engineering, subject of course to the limitations and restrictions of "the process."

    I worked at Honeywell Aerospace for a few years and the one thing that became very clear to be early on is that they had spent decades implementing processes for everything under the sun. I practically had to fill out a form to go to the restroom. One of the directors, no lie, implemented a process for sending emails, where people were supposed to do a study on the cost vs. benefit to sending the particular email they wanted to send.

    This is what is strangling large companies that used to innovate.

  • Yep (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @09:58AM (#65827791)

    Intel was never good at CPU engineering. The last 15 years or so they could only keep up by doing unsafe and insecure things and because of superior manufacturing. All these advantages are gone and they find themselves without critical capabilities. Comes from arrogance, too high profits and customer stupidity. For another case of this, look at Boeing that cannot design new airplanes anymore, just (badly) customize old designs.

    • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      For most of my early life, Intel was about process engineering, not CPU engineering. They were usually a year ahead of other manufacturers so even if their CPU design was lacklustre they could win on the manufacturing process.

      Then they lost the lead there and now their problems with CPU designs have caught up with them.

    • Intel was never good at CPU engineering.

      In a way, yes. And I'm not even going Itanium here. But here's something I've been thinking about:

      Back in the days of yore, Intel had painted itself into the corner with the Pentium 4. It was way too power hungry, and had an unworkably long instruction pipeline. It was a dead end, proper dead dead. The way out came from the left field. They had thrown their Israeli branch office something they themselves could not be bothered with - the design of a mobile Pentium 4. Since the 4 proper was obviously not goin

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      As a long time AMD user I feel this isn't necessarily fair. Intel did cheat with their compiler, but I think the whole industry wasn't careful enough with chip design but hadn't yet faced the close scrutiny that had been happening for 20-years on the software side.
    • The last 15 years or so they could only keep up by doing unsafe and insecure things and because of superior manufacturing.

      Oh yeah this debunked bullshit. Sorry but literally everyone was doing "unsafe and insecure things" because that is how modern highly optimised CPUs are designed. AMD, Intel, and ARM have all been hit with a variety of these lab-only "exploits".

      The fact that you need to dig back to that ol' chestnut shows you've really not paid any attention in the industry for the past decade. Intel has done so much shit, and the only thing you fall back on is the one thing they actually didn't do badly / differently from

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Not debunked and not bullshit. It is just idiots like you that cannot accept reality. Yes, all got hit. No, it was not the same. They all were warned years before by a Microprocessor-Forum presentation. Intel got fully hit with practical exploits early on because the did not care one bit. AMD was careful and only had theoretical exploits for the longest time and it is not clear to me whether there ever were any practical ones for them.

        It is no surprise to me you are unable to see the difference between the

        • Except it is debunked bullshit. Despite virtually countless exploits being discovered there were precisely zero actually demonstrated outside the lab. Your concerns are just not worth giving a shit about unless you're the type of person running a virtualised environment for untrusted parties in a secure facility. In which case apply a patch an move on with your life.

          Yes, all got hit.

          Thankyou for admitting your original post was incorrect bullshit, I mean you did predicate it on the fact that Intel was cutting corners, but g

  • Of course, Kicking Pat Gelsinger had nothing to do with either leaving Intel in a sorry state, or helping it recover, once he was back. And especially, he has nothing to do with the preparedness of the organization during the couple of years he was away, because the way top management works is that actions only ever have immediate impact, which of course no longer applied once he was back.

    Sheesh.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @10:22AM (#65827831)
    That implies rot from within but this was really just top down Intel firing anyone and everyone in order to make quarterly targets.

    That was fine when AMD was struggling but AMD got their shit together in 2017. Intel kept firing people they actually need it all the way up to well, now.

    The problem is that your engineers are rotting it's that you don't have them because you fired them. Worse it's not as if you got to assassinate them or anything so they went off and got jobs at your competitors.

    This is why Nvidia has always been so strong they hire the hell out of engineers in order to keep them out of the hands of competitors. It's a bit problematic because it's why AMD and Intel have such a hard time competing in the GPU market space. They simply cannot afford to hire enough of the kind of engineers they need. Not with the budget the CEO gives them
  • statements like this are sure to fill the remaining engineers with pride and make them want to stay
    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      I wager engineers are willing to agree, as they see their work as solid but the business mismanaging things to make good engineering infeasible.

      "We (the broader company) doesn't know how to engineer, but *I* still do" I could easily imagine being the takeaway. I think most of us can relate to being part of a broader mismanaged whole.

  • Maybe they can use AI to replace actual engineering talent. :P

    According to Valve's annual hardware survey more than 42% of users are running AMD CPUs, which represents Intel's lowest market share among gamers since 2008.

  • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday December 01, 2025 @11:19AM (#65827939)

    I'd say the big thing is they took their core product as granted, and focused a great deal of their income on almost anything else, aiming/hoping for some horizontal growth instead of investing to preserve their processor market share. Intel is flush with cash and could either invest in CPUs, or, say, buy McAfee, a brand that had lost most of it's value a decade prior. Or maybe acquire some HPC products to try to build an in-house all-in-one HPC solution to compete with their partners, then decide that was a bad idea and mostly abandon that expensive effort. Or maybe buy an ethernet switch chip company, and then promptly do nothing with it. Since it worked out so swimmingly the first time, do the exact same thing with another ethernet switch chip company and again just shrug and never do anything with it. Maybe spend a boat load of money trying to make "Optane" a thing, including heavy evangelizing to try to convince people to fundamentally rework core concepts of how they work to justify the apparently awkward in-between of PCM which was never going to be as fast as SDRAM nor as cheap as NAND. Along the way spend money on all sorts of weird random projects someone had without any target customer expressing interest in the hopes they stumble upon some unexpected Model T moment in a new market segment.

    Intel just assumed their position in the market was unassailable and went about trying to start *something* else because protecting their core business wouldn't deliver adequate growth (they pretty much had the market cornered). So you have a lot of big 'lottery ticket' investments with inconsistent execution on top of dubious justifications in the first place. They failed to coalesce around a common accelerator/GPU strategy leaving them critically disadvantaged compared to AMD and nVidia, their CPUs surpassed by AMD, their fabs long passed by TSMC and none of their gambles paid off, so now they are just boned. I suppose on the upside, *now* they have growth opportunity in their core competency since they ceded so much ground...

    • What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus
      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        I had heard that conceptually, they couldn't find a benefit for having the FPGA on-package but it was a big thermal/power challenge. So the integrated case was actually worse.

        On the Omnipath side, similar story though they actually shipped a version... It got watered down to PCI-e attached even while on-package and so it was just a pain with zero benefit for being on-package. Very weird board/cooling design needed to let cable go straight to CPU, having to share the TDP budget between the loosely logically

    • by Gavino ( 560149 )
      Optane is/was fucking awesome when it came to using it as a ZFS SLOG, L2ARC and/or Special VDEV. It turbocharged ZFS like nothing else! So sad it folded. Us storage geeks really miss it.
      • Intel screwed Optane by limiting it to very few chipsets of their own (not even able to use with all Intel systems, if you wanted).

        If they had wanted Optane to take off, they would have openned it up, so it could be used by all Intel chipsets, and allow AMD and anyone else who wanted to use it, to also use it.

        They would have made alot more money making Optane if there was higher demand, and it could still be around.

        Too bad they tried to restrict it to such a small number of systems that it eventually had to

  • They clearly have too few executives. They need to hire a hundred more and also pump up the middle management with thousands more MBAs. They can pay for it by sacking most of the engineers and selling off the fabs for pennies on the dollar.

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Oddly I was thinking about this the other day. I have a vague recollection of hearing stories of McDonald's at one point being proud about how their executives would have come up through the business as a fry cook in high school, manager, etc. I suspect this is no longer true their, or really anywhere in corporate america. One wonders whether corporations would do better if their senior management actually had experience in the business they worked in.
  • "not a single product was delivered on schedule,"

    I get why upper-management dislikes this, but did they consider that trying to deliver things, especially complex things like CPUs, on a schedule is part of their quality problem?

    • by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

      Yeah, it's really got nothing to do with management how things are going, though, you know?

      Those guys have it tough enough at it is - why put this on them too? Lol.

      It's not like they are supposed to drive the strategic vision of the company AND put in place the people to do so, that THEY picked to do so.

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