Will Gelsinger, former engineer, save Intel from crisis?

Pat Gelsinger’s new Intel CEO. [사진 인텔]

Intel, a semiconductor company facing the crisis of’Intel Outside’, replaced the CEO. Intel announced on the 13th (local time) that CEO Bob Swan will resign on the 15th of next month. Instead, the CEO of cloud computing company VMware, Pat Gelsinger (pictured), was selected as the new command tower. In fact, it is hard to blame. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said, “Swan’s tenure is the shortest of all Intel CEOs.

[AP=연합뉴스]

At one time, Intel was called’the most important company in the world’. Intel was the company that developed the microprocessors needed to run almost any electronic product. The advertising phrase’Intel Inside’ showed the power of Intel to move the world. However, it gave Nvidia the position of the number one semiconductor company in the US based on the market cap of the stock market last year.

In November of last year, Apple unveiled its own CPU M1 for the MacBook.[EPA=연합뉴스]

Intel’s business has been in full swing since two years ago. As large-scale customers one after another declare’Tal Intel’. Amazon, the strongest cloud service provider, is developing and using its own central processing unit (CPU) in 2018. Microsoft (MS), which once formed an alliance with’Wintel’ (Windows + Intel), also plans to use its own semiconductor. Apple also decided to install its own CPU (M1) on the MacBook (laptop).

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA.[AP=연합뉴스]

The semiconductor industry believes that Intel’s failure to properly read the changes in the market is the cause of the crisis. Amazon, MS, and Apple were able to create their own CPUs thanks to ARM, a British semiconductor design company. ARM is a company that makes profits by providing semiconductor design licenses. ARM has secured technology that works for server and PC semiconductors, which once served as the’shout’ of Intel. For major information technology (IT) companies, it has become more advantageous to create their own CPUs using ARM’s design license. The New York Times said, “The low-power ARM technology fascinated the industry.” Nvidia, a rival with Intel, acquired ARM in September last year.

‘Semiconductor Kingdom’ Intel history. Graphic = Reporter Jaemin Shin [email protected]

In recent years, Intel has struggled to convert the process from 14nm (nanometer, 1nm = 1 billionth of a meter) chip to 10nm chip. It is far behind TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung Electronics in Korea, which have already reached the 5nm level.

AMD CEO Lisa Su is presenting at the CES 2021 event on the 13th.[CES 2021 유튜브 캡처]

Recently, semiconductor companies are dividing into design companies (fabless) and consignment manufacturers (foundries). This is an unfavorable situation for IMDs that do semiconductor design and production together like Intel. Passmark Software, a market research firm in the IT sector, predicts that Intel will fall behind rival AMD in the desktop CPU market in the first quarter of this year.

Intel lost the No. 1 desktop CPU market to AMD. Graphic = Reporter Jaemin Shin [email protected]

The industry sees that Intel’s choice of Gelsinger as the new CEO is an expression of its determination to break through technological limitations. Gelsinger joined Intel in 1979 and has led technology development for more than 30 years and has become the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). WSJ said, “Gellsinger, who is an engineer rather than Swan, who is a financial officer, may be more suitable for solving Intel’s issues.

Intel’s move in the future could also affect the Korean semiconductor industry. Bloomberg News recently reported that “Intel is negotiating to entrust some of the production to TSMC and Samsung Electronics.” On Wall Street in New York, USA, on the 21st, Intel is likely to present a semiconductor consignment production plan when it announced its fourth quarter last year.

Reporter Seungho Lee [email protected]