Pat was arrogant. He didn't know how to get 3rd party fab customers. Nvidia, AMD, Apple did not trust him. He comes from the old Intel regime when it was all roses and Intel was at the top of the world. He didn't realize that Intel was at the bottom and it needed to do whatever it took to win customers.

Here's Morris Chang's opinion of Pat Gelsinger:

  Chang said he found Pat Gelsinger’s attitude to TSMC “hostile”, adding he had been friends with Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore and been close to many Intel CEOs but not to Gelsinger.

  Previously Chang has described Gelsinger as “discourteous” and “a bit cocky”.

  Tan said the company needs to listen to prospective outside customers for its factories and let them specify the design and manufacture of their products, rather than Intel dictating the way it will be done. Tan said many large customers want custom parts — and his company will do it for them.

Lastly, Pat hired a ton of people. Intel increased employee count under his watch while revenue decreased by 50%. Tan wanted to cut way more. Pat didn't.

So while the strategy is similar, Pat's execution was severely lacking.

I think Pat enforced his dismissive optimism on the entire company which made a tough job even tougher. A number of Intel executives, new and old, have taken indirect shots at Pat when he got pushed out even before Tan came on board.

I still see a lot of people worship Gelsinger just because he was supposedly the engineer CEO messiah that Intel needed. But he had a flawed strategy made worse by naive, arrogant execution.

Thanks! That’s a really interesting perspective. From the outside, it’s hard to get a full view of how Pat was perceived by potential foundry customers or what was happening inside the boardroom. I actually watched Lip-Bu reading from the teleprompter at that recent Intel conference, and yeah, maybe I see what you’re saying. The tone felt more grounded compared to Pat.

The only sad part is… it feels like Lip-Bu might now need another 4–5 years to fix things.. . basically restarting the clock.