CodeHorizon

Thanks! That’s a really interesting perspective. From the outside, it’s hard to get a full view of how Pat was perceived by potential foundry customers or what was happening inside the boardroom. I actually watched Lip-Bu reading from the teleprompter at that recent Intel conference, and yeah, maybe I see what you’re saying. The tone felt more grounded compared to Pat.

The only sad part is… it feels like Lip-Bu might now need another 4–5 years to fix things.. . basically restarting the clock.

I just finished reading the new shareholder letter from Intel’s freshly appointed CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, and I genuinely had to pause and ask myself: wait, didn’t Pat already say all of this?

The letter talks about accelerating the turnaround, focusing on customers, driving execution, cutting costs, and leaning hard into Intel’s IDM 2.0 strategy — the exact same themes we’ve heard from Pat Gelsinger for the last four years. There’s mention of 18A, Panther Lake, Nova Lake, Clearwater Forest, the foundry + product integration staying intact, and the importance of AI workloads and rack-scale systems.

It’s all there. The language might be a bit more “operational,” a little less inspirational, but it’s clearly the same blueprint.

Lip-Bu even references the 15% workforce reduction — which, to be clear, happened last year under Pat. He frames it as a necessary step, one that they’ll keep building on with ongoing cost-cutting and “portfolio simplification.” So far, though, no radical changes have been announced. It’s more like a continuation with maybe a slightly sharper knife.

The thing is: both Pat and Lip-Bu are engineers. They’re close in age. Neither one is exactly Steve Jobs in the charisma department. Both believe in Intel’s potential and have made it clear they want to keep the foundry and product businesses under one roof. Both are committed to heavy capital investment while streamlining operations. The core philosophy hasn’t changed.

And look — I get it. You can’t pivot a ship like Intel overnight. After four years and billions poured into foundry strategy, fabs, and long-term bets, no new CEO is going to walk in and say, “Let’s cancel everything.” That’d be insane. So of course Lip-Bu is going to continue most of it, at least for now.

But that’s what makes this feel strange. If the board was going to go as far as firing Pat — a public, major move — you’d expect something more than a change in tone or pacing. You’d expect a new direction. A clear shift in strategy. Something bold. But that’s not what we got.

So the only conclusion I can draw is that this wasn’t about the what, it was about the who. Maybe the board got impatient. Maybe they lost confidence in Pat’s ability to execute. Maybe there was a personal or operational disagreement behind closed doors. Could’ve been politics, or Wall Street pressure, or just frustration with the stock performance. Who knows.

But from the outside, it feels like they replaced the pilot without changing the flight plan.

Personally, I think Pat should’ve been given the full five years — maybe even more — to see his turnaround through. Four years just doesn’t feel like enough for the kind of deep transformation Intel is attempting.

Curious what others here think: - Was this about execution speed or internal politics? - Can a leadership change like this actually make a difference if the strategy is the same? - And does it make you feel better or worse about Intel’s direction going forward?

We may not have the power to fire anyone, but the overwhelming support for Pat shows we can still make an impact. Let the board know they made a mistake and leave a record of it: https://www.intc.com/board-and-governance/contact-the-board.

100% agree with your analysis. This won’t bring Pat back, but we can start by telling the board what we think: https://www.intc.com/board-and-governance/contact-the-board.

Claiming a prediction after the fact is convenient. It’d be more impressive if these predictions were shared beforehand, Bryan.

In that video, Linus says he used Pat Gelsinger's book, Programming the 80386, as a reference when working on parts of the Linux kernel.

It's cool to see how Pat’s work helped developers like Linus.

A promised microcode update for this month has already surfaced in the wild.

The Arrow Lake launch certainly didn’t make things easier for Pat.

Bring back Pat.

Was Pat perfect, no. But Pat acknowledged Intel’s problems - something Otellini, Krzanich, and Swan never did. These CEOs, all non-technical, focused on dividends, buybacks, and next-quarter results while Intel fell behind in advanced nodes and innovation.

Gelsinger inherited a disaster: 10nm delays, TSMC pulling ahead, and no GPU strategy. He had the courage to cut buybacks and slashed dividends. He poured billions into fabs in Arizona, Ohio, Germany, and Ireland. He delivered Intel 18A, powered on first silicon, released PDK 1.0 for Microsoft, and secured Microsoft and Amazon as customers. There were even rumors Apple might join.

Contrast this with Nadella at Microsoft back in 2014. He didn’t reboot the company by tearing everything down. Instead, he built on Ballmer-era wins like Azure, Office 365 while shifting Microsoft’s focus to the cloud. Gelsinger had to start from scratch in many ways, tackling years of neglect while facing harsher challenges.

Yes, Intel’s stock dropped $150 billion, but Gelsinger was upfront - it wouldn’t turn around before 2025. He was trained by Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, and while some saw him as arrogant, that confidence came from decades of technical leadership.

The real issue? The board. Full of people like Boeing execs. They don’t get engineering. Trusting them to fix Intel is like hoping a plane door won’t pop open mid-flight. They’re the ones who should be replaced.