An Interview with Pat Gelsinger | Hacker News Reader

An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

morethanmoore.substack.com

109 pointszdw72 comments

Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel. Panther Lake is quite a good CPU and 14A looks like it'll be a competitive process. IMO, it vindicates the decisions that Pat made a few years ago and wasn't able to see through to completion.

"Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out." (Robert Palmer, former DEC CEO)

Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy.

Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.

Was it Pat or Brian? If I recall correctly, it was under Brian when Intel had one of its worst periods of stagnation, when the 10 nm process all the bets were on turned out to be a non-starter, and when Meltdown and Spectre erupted. It's easy to overlook this because Intel had fairly no competition around then, but that doesn't mean the company was in a good shape.

I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was chosen to clean up the mess when the whole place was already up in smoke and the smell was only starting to leak out. I liked his strategy, was disappointed to see him booted out.

BK really destroyed the company and Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision. Pat was the visionary who saw the value of the fabs but it took a long time to turn things around.

>Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision

Let's be fair to Bob, he has the vision, but dont know how to execute it because he lacks the technical knowledge.

He was also the one who finally settled the argument I had for 5 years, if Intel were to made 250M Modem for Apple, where is the additional Capex for capacity expansion on their Fabs. The answer, only to be told by Bob in a 2020 interview was they never really planned for it.

I think the 5G modems were intended to be manufactured by TSMC even before they sold the division to Apple.

I don't understand what you mean. Stock price has tripled since last August based on Intel finally having a competitive architecture and a competitive process again, no? At least that in combination with various geopolitical circumstances. Sounds like Pat's decision resulted in Intel's stock price rising?

“The stock price has tripled since last August”

That’s just a statement of fact. I offered no other analysis.

This seems like analysis? "Pat killed Intel’s share price."

I suppose if you just look at a chart…

Then what?

>Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet.

Let's face it. Everything he cut, and products / department he sold were what he wanted to do on day one. He had to force his hand, make the stock price worst and ultimately force the board to allow him to do it.

You could argue he laid all the foundation for today's Intel to thrive.

Yes, I am pointing the fingers at the board. Although words on the street was the board also have their hands tied as they were also beholden to large institutional investors. It is all a Game of Cards.

Much like a president, most of their decisions take years to really be felt. The major changes Pat made weren’t going to change the balance sheet for years.

What exactly has Intel done that’s dramatically different than Pat’s vision that you feel is increasing share price?

Or is it just that they sold their soul to Trump combined with Pat’s choices finally bearing fruit?

me personally, I wouldn't bet against companies like Intel that have full government banking.

soon or later they were gonna turn things around with military precision specially with DOD, Intelligence folks giving advice.

What makes the DoD qualified to give advice about manufacturing microprocessors?

I think the implication is that if they're doing this, they'll probably be buying some things from them, and the DoD has quite a lot of money.

  Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel.

My speculation:

* Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.

* Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there are rarely any delays or cancellations. When you looked at an Intel roadmap, expect 30% of them cancelled, 50% delayed by 1-2 quarters, and 30% switched to a different node tech.

* IFS strategy under Pat amounted to nothing. Fab cancellations or on hold. Cancelling 20A altogether. Not being able to woo any notable customers. Not hiring the right people for external customers. There were reports that he didn't know how to run an external fab, which is why the board decided to hire Lip Bu Tan who came from Cadence.

* He missed on AI boom, crypto boom, said AMD was in rear view mirror, politicized TSMC in order to win government grants while still still using TSMC nodes themself.

> Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.

That's nonsense. Intel's problems were caused by falling behind TSMC, which was not the fault of Pat Gelsinger. Quite the contrary, he did a lot to turn things around, but this takes time, a lot more than three years.

They had far more problems than just falling behind TSMC. See my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706423#47738977

Under Pat, Intel overestimated the covid boom, which nearly put them into bankruptcy. They hired many more employees while their revenue tanked. He went on an IFS spending spree while he lacked execution on actually winning external customers. He didn't stop dividends until 2024 which tells me he lacked awareness of where Intel was as late as 2024.

LBT was hired because he could actually see Intel as what it is today, instead of the Intel dominance that Pat thought he was still operating in.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/revenue

Pat has been on record many times that he was against dividends but the board declared them anyway.

If having $54 billion dollars is "near bankruptcy", I think a lot of people wish they were nearly bankrupt.

Intel’s market cap was trading below their assets. Investors were pricing in bankruptcy risk.

Sure, if they tried to spend all of their assets on buying back all of the existing stock that would be a sign they might be going bankrupt. Alternately, maybe the market cap isn't a perfect representation of how much a company is worth and it's a reflection of a complex array of factors that aren't easily explained away in favor of a simple narrative.

Issuing a dividend is a terrible sign for the market. It's telling investors "we have so much money that we have no idea what to do with, please take some of it yourself and invest it somewhere other than Intel."

For a blue chip that's reliably issued one for years, it's also a major part of the reason to own the stock. Throwing that away will not have a good impact on the value even if it's justified.

But value is meaningless. The ultimate purpose for a producer in a market is to provide infinite value for no cost.

Of course that is a pipe dream, so it should provide the highest value for the lowest cost.

For those who want to argue it should be a balance: consider the opposite position. A producer should provide no value at infinite cost. In this case, everything withers. If party A and party B need each other's products to survive, they can do that when the value is infinite and the cost is zero, but not when the value is zero and the cost is infinite.

The last few decades have shown that giving the finger to the customer and going all in on shareholdermaxxing has nothing but terrible effects and is like sticking a spanner into the wheel of capitalism.

Have always felt stock buy-backs are equally terrible.

“We have all this money but we have no long term vision for how to grow the company. We’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing prop up our share price instead”.

It is a tax efficient way to return profits to share holders

That's better than companies that have poor visions for growing the company where the money gets spent on projects that and don't generate an ROI for investors.

On a broader societal basis, it's often better for companies to stay in their lane, return profits to shareholders, and let shareholders invest in new companies with more growth potential.

As others have noted, there was over hiring. I think part of it was driven by Pat’s desire to get governments to give subsidies but in retrospect, it led to too many empty shells being built and too many people getting hired. Intel Foundry eventually got Intel 18A node out and that is a promising node. However, the demand for it is now predicated on the AI boom continuing and TSMC being constrained for capacity. Once that goes away, who knows what happens for demand for non TSMC nodes.

He similarly killed VMware during his tenure there. Now it's a subsidiary of Broadcom and a shell of its former self.

>He also didn't cut dividend until 2024.

He was not allowed to cut dividend until 2024. Cutting dividend was the first thing he wanted before he even became CEO. The board said no.

Edit: Would have had ~$20B savings, $10B from early sell off, started the work 3 years earlier. In hindsight the best was probably hire someone to do the dirty work before Pat took over. But again, the board had no idea what they were doing. Or they have their hands tied as well ( Which I dont buy into it much. )

>Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. >Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there are rarely any delays or cancellations. When you looked at an Intel roadmap, expect 30% of them cancelled, 50% delayed by 1-2 quarters, and 30% switched to a different node tech.

He become CEO in 2021 Feb. He was also the one who sorted out Intel's roadmap from a mess to something comprehensible.

>IFS strategy under Pat amounted to nothing

No person on planet earth could have executed IFS in under 3 years. Especially with little to no cashflow. It was always a long term goal. That is why he has to play the government subsidy card, when he was, again not allow to cut dividend. Edit: And I might just add, getting Intel's IFS to have a separate balance sheet took longer than expected precisely because it would expose certain numbers that could affect stock price. cough Guess who were against it.

>He missed on AI boom, crypto boom

Considering how long the cycle of chip works. I am not sure how he missed any of it.

Gelsinger is unlikely to be a good source on this question.

I said it at the time and I reiterate it now. Pat had the right strategy and was the right person for the job. His decision are justified. He could have played the politics better with the board and externally and that is why I think he got fired, but he laid the ground work for where they are now.

I'm surprised that his fascination with "Christian AI" and the end of the world didn't come up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740664

Speaking of that, Anthropic is getting priests to try and teach Claude ethics

  https://observer.com/2026/03/the-catholic-priest-who-helped-write-anthropics-ai-ethics-code/

Who's going to teach the Catholic priests ethics?

Claude :)

Circular ethics, how appropriate for an industry fueled by circular financing.

Grok.

What a joke. Anthropic could just train a few more times on the Bible.

Matthew 22:36-40 (emphasis mine), "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Note the "as thyself" part. This part counters people who want to interpret "love" as "romantic love". Unfortunately, Catholic priests and many (fake?) Christians seem to not care about the "as thyself" part.

You should read Asimov ;)

I’ve seen the TV show but don’t know what you mean. If you want to say something then say it

Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of man. Oh wait that is Dune :).

I think what OP meant is Asimov's stories revolve around issues arising from loopholes or some interpretation of the three laws of robotics.

Correct, I meant it in a more general way.

Asimov’s favorite overarching theme is that whenever you try to constraint robot/AI ethics with rules, creative misinterpretations or misunderstandings tend to have outsized impact.

Yes, that is my main takeaway to. Adn that is why all the talk about AI alignment/safety seem pointless to me.

Oh no, it's not pointless. It's just doublespeak.

It exists so there's a way to respond to demands like 'no criticizing Israel', or 'Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory', or double negatives like 'no not agreeing to automated droning'.

Because if you do not have a way to agree with these, your business can and wil be targeted and shut down.

Asimov's 3 laws of robotics I assumed to be general knowledge around here, but here you go

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Gelsinger is a weird dude. Back in the late 1990's (early 2000s?) he had the pope bless a wafer which he then claimed was extended to the a fab. We were all a little uncomfortable about it when he announced it during a BUM (internal Business Update Meeting) like why does god care if our fabs will be successful because he met the pope? He always would bring his religion to work and it made everyone uncomfortable. (And the dude only has a honarary PHD, like Mike Tyson.)

Youtube version, with pushup contest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SauujHpNpXY

For anyone reading. Gelsinger won the contest. He took ~42 pushups.

I got to meet several of Intel senior management when Andy Grove was CEO, Gelsinger was CTO, and Avram Miller was CFO and a pioneer in corporate VC. Even somebody universally acclaimed as smart and hard-working as Lip-Bu Tan will find it impossible to capture the magic of a team like that.

Intel's current CEO was hired to explicitly not try to recapture that magic. The board thought Gelsinger's approach of do all the things was reckless. He was hired to take fewer risks, at the cost of putting a restoration of Intel's position in technology out of reach.

You probably met Intel management when they were booming in the old days. LBT was hired to replace Pat because the board needed someone who didn't have the rose colored glasses that old Intel management had and actually see Intel what it is today: losing in everything.

When LBT took over, Intel was on a path to bankruptcy. Although Pat wasn't solely responsible, he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy.

Intel over the last 15 years missed the following booms:

* Mobile boom

* Missed on chiplets and allowed AMD to take the lead

* Missed on EUV transition

* Crypto mining boom

* AI chips boom (A huge reason was Pat Gelsinger backed Larrabee, an x86 GPU, and failed to compete against Nvidia)

* Missed storage boom by selling SSD/3D NAND division

* Missing local LLM boom by not having an Apple Silicon, Strix Halo competitor

* Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago

Basically, if they reversed all their decisions in the last 15 years and invested wisely, they'd likely be worth 10x more today.

> he was financially reckless and failed to win any major customers for Intel's new IFS strategy.

So currently the IFS has a few potential customers was because of LBT and not Pat?

>* Now they're missing the fab boom by cancelling fabs a few years ago

Reckless in finance but also missing the Fab boom?

IFS now doesn’t have a major customer but it seems like companies are at least taking them seriously now. LBT doesn’t have the same arrogance that Pat had when it comes to courting external customers.

Yes, they over invested at the wrong time, cancelled fabs or delayed them. Had they saw the AI boom coming in 2023, he wouldn’t have cancelled.

Also because the Trump administration is twisting arms of big potential customers like Apple, in order to have a second source and reduce dependence on Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing. That's despite Lip-Bu Tan, whom Trump distrusts simply because he is ethnically Chinese.

Intel really needs to be studied for how it's spiralled into a possibly terminal state of dysfunction.

EPIC was Intel's first big folly that I remember and it almost killed the company. Years late, too expensive, motivated by Intel's desires rather than customer needs, software would've required significant rewrites at every level. The Gigahertz race (culminating in the Pentium 4) was near-fatal to AMD but then near-fatal to Intel and they only recovered because somebody went back to the Pentium 3 and bolted on AMD's x86_64 extensions. Still, for half a decade Athlon/Opteron were a huge problem for Intel..

But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork.

Many (including myself) thought Pat's appointment was a good sign for Intel, being an engineer. From the outside it seemed like Intel was organizationally broken, having descended into fiefdoms that didn't communicate let alone cooperate.

So this conversation is largely about what Pat's doing now rather than what happened at Intel. He's previously pointed the finger at Wall Street "short-termism" [1], for example.

It's interesting that they talk about the relationship with the current administration being positive and receiving funding from the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was passed in 2022.

But if we're looking ahead here, I'm a little disappointed China was only mentioned once at that was just with building solar capacity. I'm sorry but if you're in the chip space and not thinking about what China is doing, I don't know what you're doing.

China has been restricted by the US from buying the best chips and buying the latest lithography technology. So they're making their own and it's happening way faster than I think many of these industry types are telling you it will happen. A few years from now when China produces EUV chips, I guarantee you'll read news articles about how this came out of nowhere and nobody expected it.

[1]: https://wccftech.com/intel-ex-ceo-blames-wall-street-for-ame...

> But the next near death experience came in the 2010s with the years-delayed move from 14nm to 10nm processes. This came kind of a joke in the industry and it's honestly still not clear to me what went wrong. Intel had previously migrated to smaller and smaller processes like clockwork.

I'd love to see a post-mortem. Intel's 14nm came out with Broadwell in 2014, and it was their desktop/server node for seven years, until Alder Lake in 2021. But they got stuck on the micro-arch as well. They shipped what was essentially the same Skylake core for five years from 2015 to 2020.

I think every CEO should have the experience of posting a technical question to their company’s forums.

Intel makes Broadcom start to look good.

I always felt like they weren't properly paranoid in their decisions.

For instance, when the AI boom was heating up and they were shipping the ARC GPUs, they could have taken some business simply by making a 48GB or 64GB VRAM version.

There are some that are saying Panther Lake is a great CPU for laptops; will be a vindication of his 14A efforts if so.

I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff from official Intel accounts.

Source? I've only seen him post religious stuff on his personal social media.

If you are the CEO of Intel then posting from your personal account is the same thing - you are the CEO - it's not private.

This is just scratching the surface - his religious posts went on and on and on whilst he was Intel CEO.

https://gizmodo.com/things-are-so-bad-at-intel-that-the-boss...

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/intel-facing...

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1hb1imh/former_intel...

https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1891069258953576711

https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1820503612591919375

https://x.com/dylan522p/status/1701081984943227367

https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1820129317122080977

This looks like a motte-and-bailey. Your original comment, the bailey: "he posted much religious stuff from official Intel accounts". This comment, the motte: "he posted much religious stuff".

You could've just said, "I thought it was extremely strange that he posted so much religious stuff while CEO". That would've been a very defensible position. You didn't need the false part of posting from official Intel accounts.

Or, if it was an honest mistake, you should've written something along the lines of: "Sorry, I misremembered, it was his personal accounts. But when you're a CEO, I don't think the distinction matters much; anything you post will be read as 'Intel's CEO says'".

why is that the most important thing to comment about?

Because religion should not mix with business.

CEO's should be sufficiently self aware to understand that they should not be foisting their beliefs on the company and their employees and customers.

Being unable to recognize that is a very bad tell about a persons judgement.

Of all the openly religious people, Gelsinger did the least to mix business and religion. Whereas an irreligious person like Peter Thiel says some really wacky religious stuff.

Tim Cook is openly Christian and he has neither written a book about how “Jesus is his CEO” (and should be yours too) nor has he ever (to my knowledge) led his company in singing a hymn.

I didn't know about the book, but I'm finding nothing at all to indicate that he's ever lead employees in singing hymns. At Intel his boss was a secular Jewish man, and so was his CFO. That leads me to doubt that it ever happened especially not at Intel.

Based on my brief interactions with him, and my overall experience with Intel as a project partner at the time, I'd say he has exceptionally high integrity. I'd bet he didn't even have his books ghost written.

He definitely didn't have the book ghostwritten. It does have advice on issues that go beyond faith. But I think it's much more useful as a guide to the faithful than the non-faithful. We interviewed him last year about the book:

https://pnc.st/s/business-books/9720205c/the-juggling-act-wi...

He gets into many of the issues discussed in this thread: having faith while being a CEO and how to handle that.

I mean, Gloo is the counter to your point.

Person doesn't obey your arbitrary rule; you clutch pearls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com