I think they are talking about the previous captain that pointed them at the iceberg.

Brian Krzanich was cancelled/fired for sleeping with a coworker, so the then-CFO Bob Swan was made CEO after Intel tried to hire "externally" for a year or so. After MBA'fying Intel for a couple of years, he left to a16z, a perfect place for people like him. Pat Gelsinger then joined, probably too late, to try to steer the ship back in the right direction. Intel as an organization is finished. (I worked at Intel for 5 years through these changes)

> Intel as an organization is finished

this will age poorly.

Intel is already fighting back strongly and really only had 1-2 iterations where they weren't in some ways the performance kings. They'll be back, fabbing their own chips, while AMD and others pay TSMC to make them, and intel will make massive profits.

Intel 12th and 13th gen competes with AMD on performance and price and its still using yet another 10nm finfet process while AMD is using TSMC's latest whatever.

none of this is indicative of a 'finished' organization. It's just not quick, because nothing in basic research and chip design is quick.

This will age poorly. Performance king at unconstrained power is utterly irrelevant from a financial point of view, and requires very little engineering effort to boot: shoving amps into a package until it breaks is the job of a junior engineer frankly. The rapidly dying PC/DIY market will not save Intel.

The metrics that matter financially are performance/power and performance/area, and Intel is worst-in-class in both metrics in both CPU and GPU right now.

I worked in chip design at Intel for over a decade. In the 2016 culling, I noticed they laid off a ton of smart people, but all the terrible management and fake-it-til-you-make-it engineers survived. I left very soon afterwards. I suspect the 2022 massacre will be along the same lines. Intel as an organization is not just finished, it is terminally toxic and incapable of being fixed.

It's a little sad to hear that from multiple former Intel employees at multiple levels. They're all tremendously down on Intel. Maybe there's a bit of "refugee bias"? I really do hope Pat Gelsinger pulls through and defies our pessimism.

They have US fabs, they are too big to fail from the perspective of the US government.

Btw, they carefully never said the gender of the person who BK was porking. I'm convinced it was a man!

I don't think we should really care to probe into the details of people's lives like that, but also the WSJ clearly stated they were a woman: https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-ex-chiefs-affair-with-emp...