Intel Announces Jim Keller's Departure, Other Leadership Changes

[t.s.]

Intel Lakefield everyone?

[Guest]

Intel Lakefield everyone?

It's cool, I'd love to see an Android tablet with it. We'd get a nice consumer device, and when software support stops it's much easier for the community to support newer Android versions (thanks to open source drivers), or use some Linux distro on it.

It's suitable for basic use, but I definitely wouldn't try to develop software on it.

[angrypie]

Intel Lakefield everyone?

Leakfield? Sure.

[Alliancemd]

Intel has fantastic engineers/developers but absolutely horrific management and marketing team...
Swapped around that management, gonna change much, lol.

[AndyChow]

Too far away from California. Maybe he joins Nuvia to revolutionize the data center once more with high performance ARM cores. It would suprise me if he went for IBM to further their POWER agenda. But that would be a new ISA for him to learn, maybe that is a motivation? (I consider that to be unlikely but I don't know which challenge he would like to take).

Huawei has research labs in California, and not small ones. It always amazes me that people think Huawei is a small company. They have 200k employees, i.e. twice the number Intel has.

[ms178]

Huawei has research labs in California, and not small ones. It always amazes me that people think Huawei is a small company. They have 200k employees, i.e. twice the number Intel has.

I didn't know that they have a presence there. Also without TSMC as a partner their future looks not that bright (as China's SMIC is far behind in process technology).

[AndyChow]

I didn't know that they have a presence there. Also without TSMC as a partner their future looks not that bright (as China's SMIC is far behind in process technology).

They may not make a good investment, but they aren't going out. They have huge contracts with the Chinese government, and a lot of support from the very top. Whatever ban is currently going on might just be a negotiation tactic, not uncommon for any government worldwide depending on the industry (look at the airplane manufacturing, every single country that manufactures aerospacial equipment puts bans on several procurements channels).

If the ban is permanent, they won't be able to be competitive right now except the cheap market class, but their internal customer base in China is assured. Since they have research labs all over the world (California, but also they have a huge research complex in Canada, and several other countries, and they often have connections with universities, to get the best future candidates). It's just engineering right, so they have a lot of time to figure it out.

And they seem to be doing a double bet. If the hardware side doesn't improve and they always end up with slower chips, they have plans for an alternate OS that could be optimized for their own internal hardware. They made the Kirin 960 in 2017, so I doubt they would find it impossible to implement in another FAB, perhaps not as fast or efficient, but at least in a working state.

This would all seem like a joke if it wasn't for the incredible fact that they have such a massive amount of engineers working on the various problems. Really an incredible company, the scale of Apple or IBM. No one knows the future but I'm pretty sure they will survive one way or another.