Pat Gelsinger was just named as Intel’s new CEO earlier this week, and apparently it’s off to a bold start after a recent employee meeting where Gelsinger told his employees that Intel must deliver better PC products than anything made by that “Cupertino lifestyle company”. Au.
After a shaky tenure bogged down by multiple delays in Intel chip development and several major falls in the stock price in 2020, many analysts asked for Intel replaces outgoing CEO Bob Swan.
A former Intel employee and one of the original architects of Intel’s 80486 processor, Gelsinger – who is leaving his previous position as CEO of VMware – is seen as a product-focused expert many hope can bring Intel back to the days when its chips enjoyed significant performance advantages over competitors such as AMD and ARM.
According to the Oregonian, reporting on the recent employee meeting, Gelsinger will have to steer Intel’s future processors as the company tries to decide whether or not to outsource chip production to outside foundries owned by TSMC or possibly Samsung. With companies like AMD, Apple and others recently moving to 7nm and 5nm nodes for their latest chips, Intel’s ongoing battle to switch to its own 7nm process has resulted in countless hits for Intel, both in terms of performance as overall market share. .
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More importantly, Apple has become quite adept at chip design and recently started the transition of the full PC lineup Instead of its in-house designed ARM-based chips, Intel is missing out on a significant portion of its revenue, as Apple is estimated to represent a whopping 5% of Intel’s annual revenue. Additionally, with Apple looking to gobble up more of the desktop and laptop market and AMD outperforming Intel’s CPU in a performance-per-dollar ratio, Intel will need to take some strong steps to straighten out the ship.
“We need to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than anything that a lifestyle company in Cupertino could possibly have,” said Gelsinger. “When done properly, [our research and manufacturing] has made Intel a leader in every aspect. “
But for a company that has faced significant setbacks in both manufacturing and chip design, even for one a respected veteran like Gelsinger, bringing Intel back to its former glory is a daunting challenge.
Gelsinger’s official tenure as Intel’s new CEO begins February 15.