Intel CEO highlights three mistakes made by the company

In a recent interview with Digit , Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger talked about the company’s three biggest failures. The past decade has seen several innovations and major changes in the industry. Gelsinger seems to regret not taking advantage of their unique position to take advantage of certain opportunities. According to the CEO, Intel’s three mistakes are:

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger points to missed opportunities

In the interview, Gelsinger identified three different areas that he believes Intel missed. The first is Intel’s entry into the smartphone market. “Yes, we missed the mobile wave,” he said, essentially saying that Intel is not very involved in the smartphone market. If you remember, back in the day (2004), Intel chips were present in smartphones that used Intel processors.

An example is the Samsung i700, which is based on an Intel PXA250 CPU with a speed of 400MHz. This was several years before the first iPhone (2007). However, Intel is currently not involved in the smartphone market.

Intel’s CEO then talked about the Larrabee project, saying, “We canceled a project that would have made a huge difference in the world.” This was the American chipmaker’s attempt to make a proper graphics card.

Now, that vision has come true in the form of Intel Arc graphics, which has recently been significantly improved with new driver updates. Larabee was to be a graphics processor made from the original Pentium-based CPU. This was aimed at having enough ” GPGPUs ” (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units) to accelerate all kinds of graphics-intensive workloads.

However, the Larrabee project was shelved in 2009. The discontinuation of Larrabee graphics came shortly after Gelsinger was forced out of Intel . After a few years, he returned to Intel and became CEO in 2021.

Finally, Gelsinger talked about how Intel is ” fundamentally biased toward building great foundries .” Basically, Pat is trying to convey that Intel wanted to be a top-tier chip maker. However, this plan backfired somewhat.

Although we don’t know the exact details, perhaps this ambition has delayed the adoption of technological innovations and new manufacturing processes such as EUV lithography used for Meteor Lake chips. Intel’s 14nm node has been around for a long time. It was during this period that TSMC gained a huge lead alongside AMD, launching the Ryzen processors that are popular today.

Silicononomy is a term coined by Intel, which states that semiconductor manufacturing indirectly impacts $11 trillion of global GDP (direct impact is $3 trillion). Gelsinger also talked about how there are always missed opportunities because it’s difficult to get everything right. With the launch of the 14th generation Meteor Lake laptop chips coming next month, we’ll soon see the biggest change in Intel’s microprocessor architecture in years.

So, what do you think about Intel’s mistakes? Do you think they could have become a much bigger company had they not failed in the above plan? Let us know in the comments section below.