Kim Kulish via Getty Images
Robert “Bob” Swan, Intel’s seventh full-time CEO, will leave on February 15th only two and a half years after taking office.The current VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger (above), who has served Intel for 30 years in the past, takes over. Gelsinger’s main achievement at Intel that year was the development of the 80486 chip, and he was also well-known among the leaders of the technology industry. It was once rumored that Steve Ballmer might have him take over when he stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2013. Gelsinger is facing one of Intel’s most severe challenges in many years, to solve the crisis of backward manufacturing process and rival AMD.
In a statement, Intel Executive Chairman Omar Ishrak stated that the board hopes that Gelsinger can use his expertise to lead Intel through a “critical transition period” from a “CPU company to a multi-architecture XPU company.” In other words, it is the PC and server chips that focus on X86 to extend the antennae to other types of chip markets.
Swan was originally Intel’s CFO. After the former CEO Brian Krzanich resigned due to an extramarital affair with the company’s employees, he first served as acting CEO for 7 months, and then became a regular employee in June 2018. The development of Intel in the past two years is really not very good, but the root of many problems-such as the 10nm process that has been uncertain-is a problem left over from the Krzanich era, and it cannot be said to be Swan’s pot. However, it is an indisputable fact that Intel has gradually declined from market dominance under the leadership of Swan to have dealings with AMD, and even catching up in some markets. However, the recent major customer Apple has abandoned Intel processors and switched to chips developed by itself, which is most likely the last straw.
In any case, Swan is regarded as a more business and financial supervisor, while Gelsinger is a more engineering supervisor. Perhaps under Gelsinger, Intel can find the right direction and get back on track!
—
