He is no Pat. He is no Andy. He is a business guy with some hard science behind (not electronics per se). It doesn't feel right.
I think you need to look up Cadence and look into how the fabless industry works. Picking him means Intel is possibly about to spin off or spin out the Chip division and only focus on Fabless.
The important thing is that Lip-Bu is from the industry, and has contacts on the tools side of things as well as the customers for those tools which happen to be potential future customers for any Intel fab services. This is a step in the right direction for INTC which has a board where industry experience is severely lacking.
Cadence is a successful hardware company - they have an IP catalog available for licensing and sell design services.
Most hardware startups have to come up with new ideas, engineer good implementations of them, market them, and react to all kinds of competition. I'm talking companies like Habana or Cavium more than Cadence.
When I say hardware CEO, I meant one that ran a company like that where we know they'll be innovative and capable. Intel will need that since they're going to have to change so dramatically with so many product innovations. Whereas, running Cadence doesn't require (from what I know of them) that sort of innovation and it might have even hurt their entrenched position.
That said, I'm still positive about the new CEO. I hope his mindset and experience helps him do a lot of good. The letter he put out was great.
Who would you have as CEO?
There is no way to justify that a market leader would fall this bad this fast and couldn't recover and loose billions in process, except something was terribly wrong.
That's just how fabs are. Yeah, something went terribly wrong. That much is obvious.
Regardless of who was picked as CEO getting back to the cutting edge was always going to be horrendously expensive and take on the order of a decade. There was never a magical unicorn CEO that could avoid that.
The only obvious (at least to me) alternative is to sell off the foundry business. But someone is going to be running a cutting edge process at scale in the US. The federal government will presumably see to that.