Jeremy Laird
It was Februar y 2021 that Pat Gelsinger returned triumphantly to the helm of Intel. It was a winning narrative. Intel had lost its way after years of marketing-biased leadership. At last, an engineer was returning to the top job—and not just any engineer, but a former Intel devotee who’d joined the company aged just 18 in 1979 and worked his way up through the firm to become CTO, only to be forced out by those evil marketing suits in 2009. Look what happened to Intel since.
I was pretty down with Gelsinger’s return, too. His keynotes were a definite highlight back in the good old days of pure print journalism and trips to San Francisco for the Intel Developer Forum. Well, Gelsinger has now been in the top job for three years, and we are rapidly approaching judgement day. Of course, the whole ‘five nodes in four years’ thing was a bit specious to begin with. Those five new nodes included Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 3, Intel 20A, and Intel 18A. At best, that list only contains three truly new nodes, arguably only covering two.