"Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel CEO who was pushed out in late 2024 during a five-year turnaround effort, told the Financial Times that the "decay" he found when he returned to the company in 2021."

Gee, maybe you should have used that three-plus years to hire some people.

Maybe if he had spent less time panhandling for taxpayer money for products for which the market was already willing to pay handsomely?

Maybe if he instead invested his time in engineering?

If your business model is predicated on government bail-outs, you don't have a business.

Will fix everything

"more semiconductors expertise on the board"

This might be the explanation... MBAs running the company for years left it unable to do actual engineering... what a surprise...

It’s telling that Gelsinger described a culture where “not a single product was delivered on schedule” — and yet, that might be more of a symptom than the disease. In many industries, the obsession with arbitrary timelines and “on-schedule delivery” metrics becomes corrosive. When deadlines are treated as fixed points rather than guides, quality and innovation become secondary to appearances of progress.

Artificial timelines often create environments where teams are punished for realism and rewarded for overpromising. Engineering — whether of chips, cars, or code — demands time to iterate, test, and refine. When leadership values the schedule more than the product, people cut corners to meet goals that were never grounded in the reality of the work. Over time, that behavior institutionalizes mediocrity.

What Gelsinger called “decay” often begins when organizations forget that timelines are supposed to serve the work, not the other way around. Real engineering discipline means being honest about what’s possible — and having the courage to move a date if that’s what it takes to deliver something that lasts.

Process Paralysis is what kills these large companies. Process Paralysis is something that is the result of MBAs who think that engineering can be reduced to a flowchart of steps to do - boxes to check.

So, engineering becomes a byzantine process where engineers spend 90% of their time complying with process requirements and only 10% of their time engineering, subject of course to the limitations and restrictions of "the process."

I worked at Honeywell Aerospace for a few years and the one thing that became v

Intel was never good at CPU engineering. The last 15 years or so they could only keep up by doing unsafe and insecure things and because of superior manufacturing. All these advantages are gone and they find themselves without critical capabilities. Comes from arrogance, too high profits and customer stupidity. For another case of this, look at Boeing that cannot design new airplanes anymore, just (badly) customize old designs.

Of course, Kicking Pat Gelsinger had nothing to do with either leaving Intel in a sorry state, or helping it recover, once he was back. And especially, he has nothing to do with the preparedness of the organization during the couple of years he was away, because the way top management works is that actions only ever have immediate impact, which of course no longer applied once he was back.

Sheesh.

That implies rot from within but this was really just top down Intel firing anyone and everyone in order to make quarterly targets.

That was fine when AMD was struggling but AMD got their shit together in 2017. Intel kept firing people they actually need it all the way up to well, now.

The problem is that your engineers are rotting it's that you don't have them because you fired them. Worse it's not as if you got to assassinate them or anything so they went off and got jobs at your competitors.

This is why Nvidia has always been so strong they hire the hell out of engineers in order to keep them out of the hands of competitors. It's a bit problematic because it's why AMD and Intel have such a hard time competing in the GPU market space. They simply cannot afford to hire enough of the kind of engineers they need. Not with the budget the CEO gives them

statements like this are sure to fill the remaining engineers with pride and make them want to stay

Maybe they can use AI to replace actual engineering talent. :P

According to Valve's annual hardware survey more than 42% of users are running AMD CPUs, which represents Intel's lowest market share among gamers since 2008.

I'd say the big thing is they took their core product as granted, and focused a great deal of their income on almost anything else, aiming/hoping for some horizontal growth instead of investing to preserve their processor market share. Intel is flush with cash and could either invest in CPUs, or, say, buy McAfee, a brand that had lost most of it's value a decade prior. Or maybe acquire some HPC products to try to build an in-house all-in-one HPC solution to compete with their partners, then decide that was