Intel Hires Pat Gelsinger as the New CEO

Intel has hired Pat Gelsinger as its next CEO, replacing interim CEO Bob Swan. Mr. Gelsinger had been the CEO of VMWare since 2012.

“Pat is a proven technology leader with a distinguished track record of innovation, talent development, and a deep knowledge of Intel,” Intel chairman Omar Ishrak says. “He will continue a values-based cultural leadership approach with a hyper-focus on operational execution. The board is confident that Pat, together with the rest of the leadership team, will ensure strong execution of Intel’s strategy to build on its product leadership and take advantage of the significant opportunities ahead as it continues to transform from a CPU to a multi-architecture XPU company.”

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For those wondering about the term XPU—I certainly was—it refers to a shift at Intel away from just CPUs, or central processing units, to “a mix of architectures across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators.”

Anyway, Intel also cites its “strong progress on its 7 nm process technology” and plans a public update on that progress at the time of its next quarterly earnings report, which should be within the next 30 days. Note that all of the four processor families that Intel announced this week for 2021 releases are 10 and 14 nm technologies.

As for Gelsinger, I think it’s fair to describe his tenure at VMWare as positive, and that he could be just the shot in the arm, pardon the pun, that Intel needs right now. It’s also worth noting that he was previously Intel’s first CTO, so he certainly has experience with the company as well.

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Conversation 8 comments

  • Daekar

    13 January, 2021 - 9:57 am

    <p>"Shot in the arm" – best pun I've read all week. </p><p><br></p><p>I'm glad to see that Intel is taking their precarious position seriously, hopefully they will be able to get their smaller process nodes ironed out. </p>

  • bluvg

    13 January, 2021 - 1:06 pm

    <p>Former CTO and CEO for a tech company seems like a wise move, especially right now. Gelsinger has always been impressive when giving talks, and comes across as a very decent person in general. There's a lot of opportunity right now for Intel if they can pull things together. For Intel's sake, hopefully he can turn things around.</p>

    • bkkcanuck

      13 January, 2021 - 3:46 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#607305">In reply to bluvg:</a></em></blockquote><p>The issue is he is a software guy (I am a "software guy" – software does not give me the deep background for chips), not an electrical engineer at heart… so maybe better, but I have my reservations…</p>

      • spraly

        Premium Member
        13 January, 2021 - 4:25 pm

        <blockquote><a href="#607340"><em>In reply to bkkcanuck:</em></a><em> Chip manufacturing is highly software driving, which Intel does In-house. Intel has a huge amount of software done outside of their IT department. Primarily because the IT has being so outsourced that core groups are deciding to do it in their own departments. Lots of in-house software work as silo's and require more software solutions to bridge and share the data across the company. Lots of software overhead. I think the process engineering, electrical, could use better software that is become rather old and slow.</em></blockquote><p><br></p>

      • hgriffith

        13 January, 2021 - 4:40 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#607340">In reply to bkkcanuck:</a></em></blockquote><p>Pat is only a software guy as it relate to the recent years. He came from Intel as the previous CTO, of which he was the first at a young age, and was on the design team for the 386 processors. He was partly responsible for the following chips Intel made as well as USB and Wifi. His credentials are impeccable as an engineer. With leaving Intel, going to EMC then to VMWare, he now has the broad experience with hardware and software to be the full package as CEO. I think Intel is going to make a lot of waves in the next couple years with him there.</p>

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