john_alan 2021-01-21 16:37 UTC link

Good! Intel need Engineers back at the helm. Too long it was run by bean-counters.

I'm not a big fan of Intel, but this type of news makes for exciting possibilities from Intel again.

Though the performance per watt of the M1 I type this on, is going to take some beating.

clubdorothe 2021-01-21 16:41 UTC link

They've probably lost[1] few months ago their most talented chips engineer, Jim Keller[2]. Ironically, Jim suggested to outsource the manufacturing of their chips, what the new CEO just did [3].

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)

[3] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319301-report-intel-wi...

klelatti 2021-01-21 16:43 UTC link

Architect (singular) and Gelsinger didn't rehire - his move back as CEO was a factor in the individual concerned's decision to rejoin.

Pretty disappointing headline from Anandtech.

ItsTotallyOn 2021-01-21 16:48 UTC link

Except he didn't re-hire him. As noted in the article itself, the architect was already in negotiations since November. Also, new CEO doesn't step in until next month. Clickbait title.

liquidify 2021-01-21 16:48 UTC link

Wondering if this will really create meaningful change. It would be nice to see a refocus on simplification and speed while eliminating things that involve taking shortcuts or adding backdoors for NSA.

Also, it would be interesting to see significant changes with the instruction set.

But I personally doubt Intel will get back on the path to greatness any time soon. However, any steps in the right direction will bring more competition in the market, which will ultimately benefit consumers. So this has to be a win, even if it only shows us that Intel is going to keep fighting.

PragmaticPulp 2021-01-21 16:49 UTC link

This is an encouraging move.

My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company.

I've been part of a similar downhill slide at a smaller company in the billion dollar revenue range. To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more than they are, the pressure to reduce engineering compensation is strong. Frankly, there are plenty of engineering candidates on the market who are happy with median compensation. Many of them are even great engineers and great employees.

However, being a top company in a winner-take-all market requires the top engineers. The only way to attract and retain them at scale is to offer high compensation. I'm hoping that's part of what's happening here.

AcerbicZero 2021-01-21 17:22 UTC link

VMware seemed to make a lot of progress refocusing their business under Pat, perhaps he can do something similar for Intel.

fbn79 2021-01-21 17:36 UTC link

Wikipedia tell that Gelsinger is the cofounder of "Transforming the Bay with Christ" group. So the right person because Intel need a miracle to keepup with competitors

amelius 2021-01-21 17:55 UTC link

They should also be hiring fabrication engineers, to get that 5nm process back on track.

sradman 2021-01-21 18:05 UTC link

In my estimation, Intel has four categories in which it is being outperformed by key competitors:

1. TSMC/Samsung - fabrication

2. AMD/Amazon-Graviton - Cloud Server

3. Apple-M1/AMD - Laptop

4. Nvidia/Amazon - Cloud ML/DL Accelerator

Intel has made giant blunders in the past (e.g. Itanium [1], Atom [2], WiMAX [3]) but I'm not sure that any of these past challenges were equivalent to the current four-front war. I would not count Intel out at this point but it will be several years before we know if they were able to right the ship.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(system_on_a_chip)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX

Goosee 2021-01-21 18:13 UTC link

A bit off topic but I remember when Intel set up a special career fair presentation for my major.

I forget the specific role the manager was hiring for, but it sounded like a quality/reliability engineer. Basically run a bunch of tests, identify and analyze errors on newly manufactured equipment.

I immediately lost interest when the manager said the role would either work until 9 PM or start the next day at 4 AM due to an important (daily?) 7 AM meeting where the results would be presented. Ontop of that, it was required that you be on call during every weekend and most holidays. You would be required to do this for your first two years as an entry bachelor degree worker. Entering masters level students wouldn't need to be on call.

After that, he mentioned this role would pay ~$65,000 USD. Bonus < $5000. To live in the bay area. Then he bragged to us about the ability to buy intel stock at a 15% discount or something like that.

The manager presented in a room with fully qualified people to work at any FANG/Graphics/Aerospace company.

I sold all my intel stock the next day [late 2019], it made up most of my portfolio at the time. I just did not see how intel would attract talent if it over-worked and under-compensated entry level employees like that. Compared to the FANG employee getting free meals, game rooms, huge salary, etc.

b2hhaQ 2021-01-21 18:32 UTC link

From what I've heard, Intel has started throwing out some really strong offers lately. Hope they're able to be successful; they sure have a lot of work to do.

intricatedetail 2021-01-21 18:57 UTC link

It's interesting, but because they used to be at Intel that was on the path to today's misery, isn't that a bit worrying that they may be thinking inside the box and looking to again rehash tired and old architectures? Why not looking for someone fresh?

aniskand 2021-01-21 19:22 UTC link

Makes sense, it's clear brain drain has been a big part of their downfall.

Nokinside 2021-01-21 20:53 UTC link

I bought Intel stock when I heard they hired Gelsinger.

While all this is a good news, microarchitecture is not the bottleneck for Intel. At least now there are guys in charge who are only one level away from the real problem and used to talking to them.

Intel failed in foundry business.

---

Intel FY 2020 results just came out

    Revenue up 9%
    Gross margin     56.0%  
    Operating margin 30.4%

boboche 2021-01-21 22:21 UTC link

Intel’s last tick before joining DEC, MIPS, PowerPC and other amazing architectures that sat on their successes and ultimatel woke up too late.

I’ve been through 2 architecture deaths in my life, at least this one wont be as painful as I stopped viewing this as a religion and more like tools.

Ice_cream_suit 2021-01-22 06:59 UTC link

We pay our reception staff ( nice people, with no formal training ) around the amount that Intel pay their engineers.

Intel appear to be deep into a death spiral.

systemBuilder 2021-01-22 09:00 UTC link

I heard that when the high school graduates with marketng degrees took over the company 7 years ago they laid off all the CPU architects. The funny thing is Intel has actually made a lot of really horrible architecture mistakes in the past! Think about Itanium or Pentium 4!

I give it a 50/50 chance they are still alive in 10 years! Having so many clowns running the company for the last 10 years is likely to destroy them forever. Tech Industry is very unforgiving of stupid ...

Traubenfuchs 2021-01-22 09:49 UTC link

Alternative title: "struggling to find new and young talent, Intel turns to retired engineers in a desperate attempt to stay competitive on the market"

rswail 2021-01-22 13:02 UTC link

People commenting on this topic need to understand the concept of Purchasing Power Parity [1]. A common example from The Economist is the Big Mac Index that compares the cost of a Big Mac in different economies, converted to USD.

One way of comparing your own purchasing power is to take a basket of goods and services that you use, including rent, power, local taxes (as an indication of local government services) and convert that to how long you have to work to earn that money, net of federal taxes.

People earn a lot of raw money in SV/FAANG but the cost of living is very high and the lifestyle of SV and surrounds may not be what you enjoy.

herodoturtle 2021-01-21 16:53 UTC link

Yeah I tend to agree with you.

They did say right at the end: As we can see, Pat is already having an effect before his name is even on the door at HQ.

But the way I read this headline, it kinda sounds like Pat actively rehired folk.

mattashii 2021-01-21 17:16 UTC link

Your [3] is (still) a rumour, and although signs of it have been around since at least July 2020, this has not been confirmed nor would I qualify it as 'something their new CEO just did' as it has been talked about by their current CEO as well.

IanCutress 2021-01-21 17:24 UTC link

The effect of Gelsinger taking the CEO role pushed a hire that was on the fence into accepting the role. It means he's having an affect already. That's what the title is meant to convey.

langitbiru 2021-01-21 17:25 UTC link

Reading all comments grilling MBAs in HN is one of my guilty pleasures. I think I need to collect them all and put them in one place.

dehrmann 2021-01-21 17:35 UTC link

I agree that you need someone with a strong engineering background somewhere in leadership. Bean counters are useful when you're more interested in efficiencies than innovation. Even when you're interested in innovation, don't discount MBA-types too much. Look at Sun. They had a lot of interesting engineering going on, but they got displaced by commodity hardware and software, never really found their new business, and got gobbled up by Oracle so their bean counters could extract licensing fees.

95014_refugee 2021-01-21 17:39 UTC link

“Losing” Keller is a net win.

Hinton, OTOH, is the real deal. I had the privilege of spending some time with him and the gang back in the Nehalem days.

Hinton and Keller don’t belong in the same conversation.

lmilcin 2021-01-21 17:52 UTC link

I left Intel years ago to get almost 3x the salary as a software developer at... a bank.

At Intel engineers are paid supposedly similar rates at similar levels and similar locations. And given my level (two levels above Senior Developer) I estimate I was paid better than at least 90% engineers.

Where I worked in R&D the doors were constantly revolving and many people admitted they wait to register enough of prestigious time at Intel on their CV to get hired at a much better rate for another company.

--

I don't see these moves as encouraging, more like signs of complete and utter panic. You go to these moves when whatever you do isn't working and you don't have strategy to do something new so you try to default on what has worked in the past (this both for the choice of CEO as well as bringing retired people).

This doesn't necessarily mean it is a wrong move (see Steve Jobs coming back to save Apple as a proof it doesn't have to be bad) but I wouldn't call it encouraging.

Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that already are there. And that is usually bad news.

Add to it outsourcing CORE competency to competitor (https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/intel-TSMC-5nm) and it seems that if there is a plan it is to keep the ship afloat for a little while longer.

Hopefully the ship is going to be afloat for as long is necessary to reshape the organization, but I think we haven't yet seen any concrete moves to see what is the strategy.

tgtweak 2021-01-21 17:57 UTC link

Divine intervention is required to put things on the right path. Hopefully this happens for the sake of consumers getting some innovation.

speby 2021-01-21 17:58 UTC link

> To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more than they are, the pressure to reduce engineering compensation is strong.

Unfortunately, this feels all too true. I believe this kind of mental bias trap is true and widespread.

mediaman 2021-01-21 18:07 UTC link

It's weird for me to hear all these stories about MBAs. While I'm not an MBA myself, I was in investment banking and planned to get an MBA before I left finance and did something else instead.

I regularly pay engineers more than I pay myself as a CEO (granted: I am not really interested in draining the company's coffers for my own benefit, since I have equity). It just seems obvious that, at the end of the day, so much of the business's success turns on the engineering quality of the product, of the production lines, of the efficiencies, of the final delivered product quality.

While I take time to try to understand engineering issues, I am not an engineer by training and recognize that these people are much, much better at it than I am. So it's strange to see all these MBAs -- the types of people I used to work more closely with -- simply not get it. In most industries, you simply can't paper over operational and engineering incompetence with a slick marketing plan. So you need great engineering and operational chops. For many industries, more than a slick marketing plan.

klelatti 2021-01-21 18:08 UTC link

5. AMD/TSMC - desktop x86

1-6 2021-01-21 18:17 UTC link

Your list is skewing toward Amazon, but point well taken. If you include Google and Microsoft, they're all chip-designers as well because they can simply license ARM's designs. Imagine if Netflix decided to hire chip designers. All that's left is fabrication and Intel is exiting that.

nolok 2021-01-21 18:49 UTC link

You forgot their main market, AMD - desktop x86/windows

But the first point on your list is where their real loss is, it's historically the source of their strenght and they've never been losing at this one.

tachyonbeam 2021-01-21 19:11 UTC link

I'm kind of questioning whether it even makes sense for Intel to try to compete with Nvidia and AMD when it comes to GPUs or deep learning accelerators. They just need to really win in one area in a sense, or at least to have a product with a really compelling price/performance ratio. Though you could argue there's a certain synergy between laptops, desktops and servers (people will generally favor running the same architecture they develop on).

whymauri 2021-01-21 20:59 UTC link

It's incredible to me how often recruiters will shoot themselves in the foot when discussing WLB. When I was an undergrad, I had a lot of management consultancies reach out for technical/engineering roles. I thought - hey, there's a reason why people want to work at Bain, BCG, and McKinsey, right?

So I spoke to a recruiter and opened with: so what's the work life balance look like for technical ICs at your company? The recruiter literally laughed at me like I was doing stand-up comedy. Well, uh... ok? Waste of time, lol.

smeyer 2021-01-21 21:07 UTC link

>I sold all my intel stock the next day [late 2019], it made up most of my portfolio at the time.

Sorry if this is too off-topic, but why did it make up a sizable fraction of your portfolio in the first place?

scottlamb 2021-01-22 02:04 UTC link

5. Phones/tablets, back in 2016 and before. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/227816-how-intel-lost-... If they were competitive there, maybe the M1 wouldn't have happened either...

systemBuilder 2021-01-22 09:13 UTC link

The i3 is Intel's most hated product as the margins are the lowest. So it sounds like giving the i3 to an outside foundry is just a way for them to get rid of their least profitable work and is not a sincere effort to move the company forward! When I worked for Google I learned that the i3 was not allowed to be designed into corporate-grade laptops and by that I mean Chromebooks. Because of this Google would never approve an i3 Chromebook for internal corporate use!

tharne 2021-01-22 14:31 UTC link

> To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more than they are, the pressure to reduce engineering compensation is strong.

I work in a different industry, but it's the same story everywhere. MBAs are the worst thing to ever happen to American business. We've created an entire class of people with large egos and expensive credentials who don't actually know anything practical, and we've put them in charge.

We've come up with this weird idea that you can abstract running a business away from the nuances of a particular business and industry, but that's completely untrue. Business are not these clean theoretical constructs you see in business school or an economics class, they're real, they're messing, and it's not always crystal clear why a particular business works or doesn't work.

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