Friday, January 15, 2021

Intel Change CEO 2020

Intel Change CEO 2020


Intel ousts BoB Swan as CEO and replaced with Pat Gelsinger. Pat Gelsinger was CEO of VMWare.

Intel is not important anymore, why am I writing this? Just for recording purpose.

There was one time, everyone was using Intel chips, especially when Apple switched to Intel. Windows, Mac OS, Linux, even SUN Solaris can run on Intel chips.

Now Wintel (Windows-Intel) alliance is not as strong bonded as before, Microsoft has tried to run Windows on ARM platform. Many others will follow Apple footsteps, switching to ARM base platform. Even Linux developers are focusing more on the ARM platform as well.

Intel semiconductor production can't match with Taiwan TSMC. Taiwan TSMC already mass production with 5nm, while Intel still with 7nm (refer Intel's 7nm is Broken here). Intel is not so experienced in SoC, where CPU, GPU and memory are integrated into 1 chip.

Intel still can do 1 more thing, license ARM instruction sets and make their own ARM chips. Qualcomm has their own ARM based chips, SnapDragon. Amazon has its own ARM server offer with their AWS services called Graviton2.

Intel owned ARM CPU before, which is StrongARM and renamed to XScale, that was around year 2000. StrongARM is a product of Digital Equipment Corporation that works together with ARM. Intel acquired StrongARM as a settlement of a lawsuit with DEC.

StrongARM/XScale chips are used in some mobile devices like the HP iPAQ handheld device. Intel decided to sell off StrongARM/XScale to Marvell Technology and focus on its own low power Atom cpu. I don't see Atom cpu going anywhere now.

Intel is going down trend and going nowhere, if Intel is not going to do something right, it is just a matter of time.

Reference:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/13/investing/intel-new-ceo-pat-gelsinger/index.html

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