Yesterday Intel did the obvious and appointed Lip-Bu Tan as their new CEO. SemiAccurate has mixed feelings about this move, more because of what happened earlier than what is happening.
Intel is in Turmoil, most of which is self-inflicted. When the company unceremoniously fired CEO Pat Gelsinger last December, SemiAccurate thought it was exactly the wrong move at the wrong time. We still do. Pat was doing the right things for the right reasons even if the finances didn’t show it yet. That ‘yet’ is a big but critically important caveat. Intel didn’t have a technical problem when Pat took over, they had a cultural one, the technical issues were a symptom of the culture which Pat was deep into changing for the better.
You can trace most of Intel’s current woes back to three things, finance/non-technical leadership, a pathetically weak and out of touch board, and the reversal of Intel’s vaunted technical culture. What you see in the utter failure of their process development exemplified by the 10nm woes is the symptom, the problem was much deeper and more pernicious. Changing it was a long multi-year process and only then could product development get back on track. From there it would take years more to get those products to the market. Ironically, at the time when those products are just starting to break cover, Pat was shown the door.
That brings us to Lip-Bu Tan, the new Intel CEO. He is technical, as CEO of Cadence he worked closely with Intel, and the bio Intel posted says he, “drove a cultural transformation centered on customer-centric innovation”. Sounds like a good match to keep the good things Pat put in place going forward. If Lip-Bu does that, and can calm Wall Street, things are looking up. If he takes a hard turn in strategy, things could go very differently. Time will tell.
Then there is the elephant in the room, why Lip-Bu was unceremoniously bounced from the Intel board last summer and what it has to do with any potential Intel breakup. While that is a topic for another article, lets just point out that the board did a complete 180 turn between last August and December, something SemiAccurate does not think bodes well for stable leadership and coherent long term planning.
Whatever the case may be, Lip-Bu Tan is now the CEO of Intel. He is technical, his resume says he understands cultural dynamics in a large silicon company, and obviously has the board’s backing. Will he continue the good Pat was doing? Will he change everything? Right now there is no telling which way it will go, stay tuned.S|A
