Intel's CEO Role Could be Filled by Former Board Member Lip-Bu Tan

[AleksandarK]

The search for a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Intel has begun following Pat Gelsinger's departure on Monday. And it is not exactly an easy role to be filled. The tech giant's board is primarily considering external candidates to lead the company through one of its most challenging periods. Among the potential successors is Lip-Bu Tan, a former Intel board member and semiconductor industry veteran. Tan, who previously served as CEO of Cadence Design, left Intel's board in August 2023 after disagreements with Gelsinger over the company's strategic direction. Despite these past tensions, Intel's board has reportedly recently approached Tan to gauge his interest in the position. The search for new leadership is extremely difficult, considering the requirements and massive problems the new CEO would face.

Coming at a critical moment for Intel, which has experienced significant financial challenges under Gelsinger's tenure, the new CEO would need to get the Foundry business to pick up and maintain a solid product roadmap. The company's revenue dropped to $54 billion in 2023, marking a nearly one-third decline since Gelsinger took the helm in 2021. Analysts project Intel's first annual net loss since 1986 this year, with long-term signs of recovery. Gelsinger's exit, which came after the board presented him with the option to retire or be removed, reflects growing impatience with the pace of his ambitious turnaround strategy. The company has appointed CFO David Zinsner and senior executive Michelle Johnston Holthaus as interim co-CEOs while the search committee works to identify a permanent replacement.



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[Daven]

Tan, who previously served as CEO of Cadence Design, left Intel's board in August 2023 after disagreements with Gelsinger over the company's strategic direction.

I really would like to know the subject matter of these disagreements between the board and Pat. Was Pat for a division breakup or company-wide sell-off and the board against, the other way around or something completely different?

 

[Space Lynx]

I really would like to know the subject matter of these disagreements between the board and Pat. Was Pat for a division breakup or company-wide sell-off and the board against, the other way around or something completely different?

i hope it was over flagship gpu's and we have a rtx 4090 destroyer in december 2025

 

[Daven]

i hope it was over flagship gpu's and we have a rtx 4090 destroyer in december 2025

Lol. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the disagreement was probably not over making the best gaming GPU unless W1zzard is secretly the Intel Board Chair.

 

[Space Lynx]

Lol. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the disagreement was probably not over making the best gaming GPU unless W1zzard is secretly the Intel Board Chair.

let me dream

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

You might be more accurate than you think.

Pat has been pushing Arc. Arc has lost Intel a lot of money.

It is possible Pat wanted to push Arc harder to get an actually competitive product on the shelves in a competitive timeframe, or the board did, and the other believed it was a sunk cost fallacy.

It is unlikely that was the final straw but it is possible.

 

[Space Lynx]

You might be more accurate than you think.

Pat has been pushing Arc. Arc has lost Intel a lot of money.

It is possible Pat wanted to push Arc harder to get an actually competitive product on the shelves in a competitive timeframe, or the board did, and the other believed it was a sunk cost fallacy.

It is unlikely that was the final straw but it is possible.

yeah companies really struggle with long term thinking these days, gpu's are a very smart bet for Intel imo, especially considering the geopolitical situation

 

[Bobaganoosh]

I couldn't tell you how competent he really was or how much blame for issues rests solely on him, but Pat did seem like he was trying to push things for a bounce-back. I think they probably didn't do anywhere near enough to make sure the teams responsible for the work were capable of such things, but it did sound like Pat was pushing for improvements...which take time. I could very easily believe that there were arguments about how long the company could continue plunging in stock-price and market-share while those long-time fixes were being worked. What I don't have any clue about is what Intel could have done in 1-3 years that would have fixed all the issues they have/had. You can hire/fire any CEO you want and they're not going to right all of those wrongs in a year. Fabricating new CPUs and chips takes time. Making new fabs takes even longer.

 

[Hecate91]

yeah companies really struggle with long term thinking these days, gpu's are a very smart bet for Intel imo, especially considering the geopolitical situation

I agree on gpu's being a smart business decision, Intel has an uphill battle against Nvidia and AMD, I would assume the board didn't agree with the effort. Although I'd assume Pat making a bunch of promises on node advancements, IFS not having a stable working node, and then criticizing TSMC and losing the contract discount didn't go over well with the board either.

 

[igormp]

You might be more accurate than you think.

Pat has been pushing Arc. Arc has lost Intel a lot of money.

It is possible Pat wanted to push Arc harder to get an actually competitive product on the shelves in a competitive timeframe, or the board did, and the other believed it was a sunk cost fallacy.

It is unlikely that was the final straw but it is possible.

While Arc costed tons of money and could be a good bet in the long future (or an awful one), I don't think it was the bigger issue at hand.
Most of their revenue comes from the server market, which has been going down YoY. Pat's plan was to make their foundries a huge part of the company, and apparently their focus was mostly there were the other parts received way less attention.
Given how their IDM plan hasn't panned out (at least yet), I believe that's were most of the issue came from.

The consumer GPU market, while high in volume, is not really that profitable, specially the entry-level segment (where Intel is fighting). They have way less margins than AMD and Nvidia (just look at the size of their chips), and Nvidia has clearly shown that the money is in the mid-high level segments while using those same chips for datacenters and profiting even more. Intel couldn't get a foothold at the server market with their GPUs, Gaudi has been killed, and we shall see how Falcon Shores will do.

 

[Space Lynx]

then criticizing TSMC and losing the contract discount didn't go over well with the board either.

i forgot about this, yeah that's probably what did it

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

So...let's talk manufacturing and industrial vision. It's 2024, Q3. There are automotive projects that are still not off the drawing board (11 weeks behind) whose target release date to the public is early 2027. The "revolutionary" bit of these products is going from an ancient gentleman's agreement production in steel to a well defined production in plastic (the plastics process being well defined, and not revolutionary). This means that they have to figure out what they've agreed to off-book to get these to work, and actually discover what it is they need to succeed.

The Intel board expected their CEO to show significant progress in less time than it's going to take to produce a rather ordinary part in a well defined process. When they say "it's going to be tough" they actually mean that their candidate will have to either negotiate a golden parachute for the inevitable failure that could put them on the path to recovery, or they are going to have to be given insane latitude in a gigantic company who disappeared into bureaucracy decades ago. Either way, whomever accepts this job is basically going to be a human husk in four years, but will financially be set for the rest of their existence.


All I can say is that if I disagree with someone, and then was asked to clean-up the mess that they made, I wouldn't allow the people who proposed that monkey's palm wish to forget that they were the ones who dug their grave, and if they wanted me back it'd require rectifying the decision making processes which led to this failure so I never had to deal with it again. That said...if the previous CEO was on the right track it'd show up as progress for the current one well before any of their changes could come to fruition...so the best outcome would be to have a couple more bad years before things started getting better. That's....discouraging when most companies don't really invest more than a quarter or two into the future.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

1986

I suspect that was because of the rash of faulty 386s at that time.

I suspect it was because of the Raptor Lake failures.

 

[HisDivineOrder]

Probably had to get rid of the guy against selling off the company a la carte to shred it to pieces good and proper. If you think Nvidia's bad now, imagine Nvidia in a market where AMD is content doing CPU's and Nvidia is content doing GPU's, and both are acting like they're the only game in town.

 

[Nhonho]

There's only one guy I know who can save Intel's ship from sinking: Mr. Leather Jacket from Nvidia. But his greed is so big that, if he were Intel's CEO, he'd smash AMD (and other companies), just like he does in the GPU market.

 

[AnotherReader]

There's only one guy I know who can save Intel's ship from sinking: Mr. Leather Jacket from Nvidia. But his greed is so big that, if he were Intel's CEO, he'd smash AMD (and other companies), just like he does in the GPU market.

Why would he leave Nvidia, the company that he founded, for a sinking ship where he would have less control?

 

[Nhonho]

Why would he leave Nvidia, the company that he founded, for a sinking ship where he would have less control?

In the case of Nvidia buying Nvidia. If I were a large shareholder of Intel, I would like Intel to be bought by Nvidia under the command of the Mr. little leather jacket. But then Intel-Nvidia would be very strong and would crush several other companies, would dominate a large part of the home and server chip market, would greatly increase the prices of its products, the company would have very high profits... and people all over the world who are not Intel shareholders would be very harmed.

 

[mechtech]

"The company's revenue dropped to $54 billion in 2023,"

tough times indeed..............

 

[Wirko]

In before the friendly other site corrects this Freudian slip...

 

[chrcoluk]

You might be more accurate than you think.

Pat has been pushing Arc. Arc has lost Intel a lot of money.

It is possible Pat wanted to push Arc harder to get an actually competitive product on the shelves in a competitive timeframe, or the board did, and the other believed it was a sunk cost fallacy.

It is unlikely that was the final straw but it is possible.

They should be keeping ARC going, if Intel were expecting quick success from it then they had unrealistic expectations, but I guess that is Intel after all, when we look at all the stuff they abandoned, Optane etc.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

I think Pat had realistic expectations, but he has been moved on. Whether those who moved him on had realistic expectations is to be seen.

 

[Verpal]

yeah companies really struggle with long term thinking these days, gpu's are a very smart bet for Intel imo, especially considering the geopolitical situation

Although I do agree GPU are smart bets in long term, one could not dent the fact that 1st gen have huge hardware and software issue, it does nothing to build market share, it does nothing to build mind share, it does nothing to build AIB relationship.

One could easily argue Intel might be better off keep Arc cooking in oven instead of getting that 1st gen out as soon as possible, that's a lot of money got burned in the process.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Although I do agree GPU are smart bets in long term, one could not dent the fact that 1st gen have huge hardware and software issue, it does nothing to build market share, it does nothing to build mind share, it does nothing to build AIB relationship

Real world experience with AIBs and consumer feedback is absolutely priceless from a business perspective.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Among the potential successors is Lip-Bu Tan

Tan is not a good fit. Bad idea.

Real world experience with AIBs and consumer feedback is absolutely priceless from a business perspective.

While that's true, and very valuable, it doesn't make automagically for a great CEO.

I think Pat had realistic expectations, but he has been moved on. Whether those who moved him on had realistic expectations is to be seen.

Excellent points!

 

[Scrizz]

"The company's revenue dropped to $54 billion in 2023,"

tough times indeed..............

Don't make the mistake of thinking revenue is profit....

They should be keeping ARC going, if Intel were expecting quick success from it then they had unrealistic expectations, but I guess that is Intel after all, when we look at all the stuff they abandoned, Optane etc.

ooof yeah. Optane got killed off a a year or two before it would've been a money printing press for them. Optane would've been great for the whole AI/computational storage.