We are following the state of affairs with Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, very closely. Even though he was an Intel employee for 30 years, rising to the rank of CTO and then taking away from the company for 12 years, his arrival is received with praise across the spectrum, given his background and past successes. He will only take on his new role on 15 Februarydehowever, its return is already causing a stir among Intel’s current R & D teams.
The news over the past 24 hours, based on public statements, states that Glenn Hinton, former senior fellow of Intel, who is the chief architect of Intel’s Nehalem CPU core in his list of achievements, is retiring to join the company again. to close. (Nehalem’s other chief architect, Ronak Singhal, is still working with Intel on the next generation of processors.)
Hinton is an old Intel hand with 35 years of experience and leads the micro-architecture development of Pentium 4, one of three senior architects of Intel’s P6 processor design (which led to Pentium Pro, P2, P3), and eventually one of the drivers for Intels. Core architecture that is still at the forefront of Intel’s portfolio today. He is also a chief micro-architect for Intel’s i960 CA, the world’s first super-scale microprocessor. Hinton has more than 90 patents on 8 CPU designs from its efforts. Hinton spent another ten+ years at Intel after Nehalem, but Nehalem is listed in many places as his primary public performance at Intel.
On his social media posts, Hinton says he will be working on an exciting high-performance CPU project. The accompanying commentary also says that ‘if it had not been for a fun project, I would not have come back – as you know, retirement is quite a nice thing’. Glenn also announces that he has been thinking about the move since November, and the reappointment of Gelsinger helped complete the decision. His peers also believe that Glenn is probably not the only former Intel architect who might return to the business. We know a few architects and specialists who have left Intel in recent years to join Intel’s competitors, such as AMD and Apple.
There are some important things to note here that are worth considering.
The first is that exiting from a major CPU project is not an insignificant thing, especially not for an Intel Senior Fellow. Given Intel’s successes, one would assume that the financial situation is not the main driver here, but the opportunity to work on something new and exciting. On top of that, these kinds of projects take years of development, at least three, and so Glenn is recording for a long time, even though he has already left to retire.
The second point repeats that the last rule – no matter what project Glenn works on, it will be a long-term project. Assuming Glenn talks about a new project in Intel’s R & D ecosystem, it will take 3-5 years before we see the fruits of labor, which also means we need to create a design aimed at a variety of process node technologies. Glenn’s expertise as chief architect is likely to apply to any stage of an Intel R & D design window, but is perhaps best served from the outset. As Glenn seems to put it, it could be a black-ops style design. It also does not determine if it is x86, leaving the door open for speculation.
This is the third place to admit that Intel has a number of process design teams in-house, and despite the delays in the manufacturing process, they were not yet idle. We saw a refresh after the refresh of Skylake’s Intel portfolio, and while the first versions of the 10nm Cove cores hit the market, Intel’s in-house design teams would have been working on the next generation and the next generation after that – the only the barrier to deployment would be manufactured. I remember a discussion with Intel’s engineers around Kaby Lake time, when I asked about Intel’s progress with IPC – I requested a + 10% increase in gene-on-gene over the next two years, and I was told that those designs were done and baked – they were already working on those out there. These designs were probably Ice / Tiger Lake, which is why Intel’s core design teams have made progress despite manufacturing issues, and I wonder if there is now a 3-4 year delay (or more) on some of these designs. If Glenn points out that a project goes further, we can wait even longer.
Fourthly and finally, one of the critical elements mentioned by a number of analysts at the announcement of Gelsinger’s arrival was that it would not have an effect more than 3+ years later, due to the operation of the product. . I completely rejected the premise, saying that Pat could immediately penetrate the elements of Intel’s culture and sit in the room with the engineers involved and discuss product design at a level that Bob Swan cannot. Pat has the opportunity to arrange the leadership structure and instill new confidence in the structures, some of which have allowed the greatest architects to retire in the past instead of building on exciting projects.
As we can see, Pat already has an effect before his name even stands at the head office at the door.
Today is also the financial announcement of Intel at the end of the year, at 17:00 ET. We expect Intel’s current CEO, Bob Swan, to talk about what another record year of revenue looks like, and probably the state of affairs for Intel’s own 7nm process node technologies. That last point is somewhat questioned given the CEO’s new announcement and when Gelsinger was called. It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post.