Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed what he believes are Intel’s three greatest mistakes when asked by Digit in an interview last month. Pat clearly identified Intel’s failed early bid to get in on the mobile phone industry as a big loss. At the time, in 2008, Intel was producing its Atom processors for mobile devices but failed to secure a long-lasting foothold there with it. Next, he pulls no punches in bringing up Intel’s acquisition of no-less-than five AI companies which still did not yield a GPU, work that he’d begun work on with Larrabee before being forced out. Lastly, Mr. Gelsinger has no issue in pointing out the need for Intel to develop what he calls a “great foundry”.
“Obviously, we missed the mobile wave. We had like five different AI acquisitions, and when I was pushed out of the company we killed the one that would have made all the difference in the world. Those are the two monster trends that Intel missed, and we were fundamentally biased to building a great foundry. Those to me are the three massive opportunities that Intel was uniquely positioned to benefit from, and we’ll do our best to bring us back into position on those fronts,” Gelsinger said to Digit.
The clip below is just an excerpt that Digit has shared online of the interview with the Intel CEO.
From foundries to GPUs
Gelsinger was quite frank about Intel’s ability to succeed in building a “great foundry” where, even if it wasn’t profiting from its own designs, it could still benefit from revenue in producing chips for NVIDIA or other companies. He said that Intel had been fundamentally biased in its bid to build a foundry but that approach seems to be experiencing a course correction with its new partnership with ARM, as it takes aim to challenge TSMC and Samsung.
“The majority of the wafer usage in foundries today and well over 50 percent of the world’s foundry revenue is based on ARM,” said Gelsinger, in no uncertain terms. “We viewed ARM as a competitor in the past, but now they’re a critical collaborator since we announced a partnership back in April 2023 and I’ll just say it’s going very well. We were one of the foundational investors in their IPO recently, and we’re getting very good results from the preliminary design work we’re doing on Intel 18A process node,” said Gelsinger to Digit.
Meanwhile, Intel continues to expand its Arc GPU division, having launched its first line of Alchemist discreet graphics cards in 2022 and is on track to succeed those with Battlemage in 2024.