Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger “Retires” ▉

Emma Smith, the Verge:

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired after over four decades at the company and stepped down from the board of directors effective December 1st, 2024. A report from Bloomberg says that after meeting with the board to discuss Intel’s progress in catching up with Nvidia and regaining lost market share, Gelsinger “was given the option to retire or be removed, and chose to announce the end of his career at Intel.”

Gelsinger rejoined Intel as CEO in February 2021, taking over from Bob Swan to turn around the already struggling chipmaker — an effort that hasn’t gone as planned. It’s largely missed out on the AI chip boom that fueled Nvidia’s rise, failed to launch new technology on schedule, struggled with recent CPU instability issues, and was skipped over as Microsoft’s launch partner for AI PCs.

It’s a shame to see Pat go as he was one of the engineers that had helped build Intel into the name it is today. The 80486 processor was amazing for it’s day and I actually had high hopes that he could trun the company around. Alder Lake (12th Gen) was a step in the right direction but Raptor Lake and it’s refresh were disappointments. So are the more current lineup of CPUs, especially Arrow Lake on the desktop.

It’s tough because I feel like Pat was given a really rough hand to play. When he came on board as CEO it was probably way too late to cancel 11th Gen Rocket Lake and the company was already heading towards dire straights. Add to this the disappointments that are 13th and 14th gen. I can see how these things add up.

Arrow Lake was supposed to be the beginning of a major core architecture change through Jim Keller’s Royal Core project, exploring things like Rentable Units, but that was cancelled and apparently broken out into smaller projects.

Thinking about this as I’m writing it, perhaps whoever is in charge of Intel next should give Keller a call. He’s worked at Apple, Tesla, and AMD and arguable saved AMD with the Zen series of processors.