GelsingerがIntelの栄光への回帰の舞台を整える

Pat Gelsingerは、Intel CEOとしての最初の週を、同社が半導体の栄光に戻るための調子を整えることから始めました。Pat Gelsinger began his first week as Intel CEO by setting the tone for the company’s return to semiconductor glory. “We need to bring back some of the Groveian disciplines for direct, transparent, and data-driven decisions and accountability,” he wrote in a memo to staff, evoking Andy Grove, who, alongside Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, founded Intel in 1968. Gelsinger himself is something of a legend within Intel. The engineer-turned-CEO spent nearly three decades at the company where he served as CTO, helped architect the 80486 processor, led 14 different microprocessor programs, and played key roles in the Core and Xeon families. He left Intel in 2009 to take over as president and COO of Dell EMC and later spent eight years as CEO of VMware. Gelsinger has repeatedly evoked Intel’s founders since announcing his plans to leave VMware and return to Intel where he replaced CEO Bob Swan. “Inspired by the leadership of Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Andy Grove, I’m excited to step into my dream job,” he wrote. In the memo, Gelsinger outlined four simple — but not insignificant — goalposts for the company moving forward. These included restoring Intel’s position as a market leader, executing “flawlessly” on commitments, focusing on rapid innovation, and attracting and enabling top-tier engineers. “I know Intel’s best days are in front of us,” he wrote in closing. “Let’s get started.” While these points may appear aspirational at first glance, they underscore four of the biggest challenges facing the chipmaker. Over the past year, Intel has been accused by many of becoming complacent in its position as the world’s foremost chipmaker, suffered repeated delays to its 10- and now 7-nanometer manufacturing processes, hemorrhaged talent and leadership, and lost considerable ground to competing chipmakers in key verticals. Gelsinger’s emphasis on these issues in his first days back at Intel should, however, come as no surprise. His hire came amid intense pressure from activist investor Three Point LLC, which had threatened to begin installing new members on Intel’s board if the company didn’t take steps to address its “human capital management issue” and manufacturing delays. But while there is still much to do to stem the loss of talent, Intel claims its ill-fated 7-nanometer manufacturing process is back on track after a six-month delay. Speaking during the company’s earnings call in January, before he officially took over as CEO, Gelsinger expressed optimism that the majority of the chipmaker’s product 2023 portfolio would be built on the 7-nanometer manufacturing process. Shortly before announcing Gelsinger’s return to Intel, the company had reportedly entered into talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics to produce its top-end chips on a 4-nanometer node. “Given the breadth of our portfolio, it’s likely that we will expand our use of external foundries for certain technologies and products,” Gelsinger said on the call. However, the company’s decision to stick with its own 7-nanometer chips may have more to do with timing as it’s unlikely third-party fabricators could have chips ready for Intel in time. Despite these challenges, analysts see Gelsinger’s return as a positive one for Intel. Gelsinger’s desire to return to the “Groveian” disciplines of Intel’s early days stood out to Wayne Lam, senior director of research, Americas at CCS Insight, who worked at Intel from 1996 to 2000. “The Groveian discipline is more of a corporate culture,” he said. “When I joined in 1996 that culture was slowly morphing into something else altogether un-recognizable.” Lam notes that returning to this kind of corporate culture could prove difficult for Intel. However, looking to the future, Dell’Oro analyst Baron Fung said that Intel’s success will be highly dependent on hitting several key targets in the near term. These include executing on the company’s next generation of Xeon processors, avoiding delays that have plagued previous generations of Intel chips, and investing in emerging verticals like artificial intelligence and edge compute. Intel is still very well positioned in the data center market, despite AMD’s recent gains and the emergence of Arm-based chips from the likes of Ampere, Fung said, adding that while AMD has made great strides in the data center space, he believed that most “cloud companies are using AMD as a sort negotiating tactic to put pricing pressure on Intel.” Intel’s revenues in the space will likely benefit from the next round of cloud and hyperscale expansion. “Many cloud providers are just coming out of a digestion cycle and moving toward the next expansion phase,” Fung added. But, this will mean ramping production of the company’s 10-nanometer Icelake Xeon Scalable processors at a competitive price and without further delays, he emphasized. Intel’s opportunities aren’t limited to data center either, though it remains their largest revenue driver. Intel has a diverse portfolio that also includes networking, cellular communications, and artificial intelligence (AI). According to Fung, there are several emerging market opportunities that Intel should be careful not to miss including artificial intelligence and edge compute. And thanks to Gelsinger’s experience running Dell EMC and VMware, Intel’s new CEO is well aware of what customers want on the software, silicon, and hardware level, Gartner analyst Alan Priestley said, in an earlier interview. Setting Gelsinger’s return aside, Intel still has an eventful year ahead of it. AMD, Intel’s largest CPU competitor, is expected to begin shipping its third-generation EYPC data center chips later this quarter. Intel’s answer to EYPC 3 is the long-delayed Icelake Xeon Scalable family of processors. The 10-nanometer chips are expected to reach customers early this year. In a presentation last month, Gregory Bryant, executive VP and GM of client computing at Intel, said the chips had entered volume production with shipments expected to begin later this quarter.