Look, we all know Pat stepped into a difficult situation.
The state of the company today is much a reflection of things BK did (and didn’t!) do to maintain process and design leadership over TSMC as anything else.
Unlike most other sectors, semiconductors require such a heavy investment that it was always going to take years to catch back up after taking our eye off the ball for so long.
Question is: who wants to be a part of the turnaround! Go Intel!
Does it really matter how Intel get here? Who's fault it was? Yes, we all know where the mistakes were made in the past.
At this point, Pat and the ELT OWN this. It is on their heads. Blaming anyone else is a major cop out. They all just need to nut up and take responsibility.
Bottom of the saddle? We are slightly behind the saddle, down a bit, under the tail. Giddyup!
If HR want to infiltrate this forum, they should realise their writing style is completely different to all the other posters here
True that opportunity cost is high. I just retired (long planned so alas no CPM) but if I had working years ahead of me I'd look elsewhere.
BK was the culprit. Bob was just filling in for his 2 years. But BK coming from manufacturing and let the lead slip ...
Pat indeed has stepped in at a difficult time.
I do think what Pat is doing is right. Without investing in manufacturing and foundry, Intel has little competitive advantage for future.
Anyone who believes the. IDM and IFS can be successful as well as really do 5 in 4 is clueless to what the current competitive environment is and competition.
As noted by another poster Intel was bold when it last transformed ditching DRAMs for x86. Went from competing against those ahead with bigger scale into a niche they owned. Now what they are doing would have been Andy deciding to compete in memory instead of pivot the company. You think Andy would be the legend he is now if he did that. Andy could have said we are returning to our engineer roots and will retake DRAM density and leadership and be the Samsung of today, yeah right. Andy would be same bucket as the Kodak, IBM, Motorola CEOs that nobody remembers.
Intel once had a chance with their 3-5 technology year leadership when Apple came calling as well as when they did a half a$$ed attempt at Foudry and fu€ked all their customers. If only BK, Bill and Sohail had vision. Well the inflection point has passed move on. Past glory can’t be recaptured when you had such a long line of failed BOD and leaders.
The BoD the last decade gets a total F in asking the hard questions and forcing a real strategic inflection move.
Today Intel is behind on technology, smaller in scale and will never have volume to justify the RD and CapEx required for the next node. Also beyond the economics the volume and product diversity needed to gain yield learning on leading node no longer is justified either with their late and uncompetitive pricing for their fabs.
Looks BK logged on and downvoted a response there.
OP is right about one thing: BK was in charge of TMG when the process train wreck seeds were sown and then as CEO when the flames burned.
Hard not to agree with the OP on the “stepped into” part, but I would use a different, I think more accurate term in place of “a difficult situation”.
The Intel of today is not the Intel of the heyday that could afford this heavy investment. It's more like the AMD of 10 years ago - the undercapitalized architectural and manufacturing laggard with falling sales, except Intel's way more bloated than AMD ever was making any turnaround even more difficult to effect.
"Unlike most other sectors, semiconductors require such a heavy investment that it was always going to take years to catch back up ......"
The heavy investment guarantees that once slipped, you will not be able to get back up to the leading edge of chip manufacturing. I don't know of anyone that did. Here is my list:
AMD
TI
IBM
Toshiba
Fujisu
UMC
Chartered
ST
...
Old Intel is about "Intel -- ligence". That intelligence guided Intel to ditch the DRAM business and focus on the CPU. It is this intelligence that Pat is expected to bring back, not a failed old IDM model that lasted this long solely by some inherited luck.
With so many well remunerative options elsewhere and the opportunity cost of staying at Intel being risky/high, why would you want to stay?
What if Intel is the saddle?