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Former Intel CEO on Nvidia: You have to be 10x better to dethrone the king

Daniel Nenni

Admin
Staff member
Now that Pat Gelsinger is no longer occupying the corner office at embattled chipmaker Intel, he can acknowledge one thing about the semiconductor industry.

Nvidia has a wide, wide lead over its rivals on the tech front.

"You see, they are executing well ... At the end of the day, [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang] is on it, driving his teams to stay in front end," the former Intel CEO told me on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid podcast.

"They have built meaningful moats around their franchise," he added.

Gelsinger led aggressive efforts to turn around Intel for more than three years. He slashed thousands of jobs, improved costs, secured CHIPS Act funding, built chip foundries, and promised fast AI chips that could compete with Nvidia and AMD.

He was fired in early December amid missed financial targets, lack of progress on the AI chip front, and a cash drain on the foundry business.

Intel's fourth quarter sales fell 7% year over year to $14.3 billion, and net earnings plunged 76%. The company forecasts it will only break even on the profit line this year.

Analysts think Nvidia may post upward of $5 per share in earnings in 2025. Nvidia's stock is up 1,220% over the past five years, while Intel's has dropped 69%.

Intel announced Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO in March.

Tan was the CEO of Cadence Design Systems from 2009 to 2021. After serving on Intel's board for two years, he left in August 2024 following clashes with Gelsinger over how to position the business.

Tan frequently pushed for a better artificial intelligence strategy to take on Nvidia and faster decision making at the notoriously bureaucratic Intel.

It will be hard for someone to dethrone Nvidia, said Gelsinger.

"I've always viewed that there's sort of this 10x rule, where if you're not 10x better than the king, you're not going to displace that. Here you have to be at least sustainably 10x better, and then people will say, okay, yeah, I'm going to go invest in that," Gelsinger added.

Tan will get to outline his strategy publicly — and detail how he will navigate Trump tariffs — when the company announces first quarter results on April 24 after the market close.

 
Back in the day the formula was 2x the performance at the same price or the same performance at half of the price. This was for CPUs and we rated them in MIPS (millions of instructions per second). I have no idea what Pat means by 10X better? Seems like unmeasurable executive level speak to me.
 
Now that Pat Gelsinger is no longer occupying the corner office at embattled chipmaker Intel, he can acknowledge one thing about the semiconductor industry.

Nvidia has a wide, wide lead over its rivals on the tech front.

"You see, they are executing well ... At the end of the day, [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang] is on it, driving his teams to stay in front end," the former Intel CEO told me on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid podcast.

"They have built meaningful moats around their franchise," he added.

Gelsinger led aggressive efforts to turn around Intel for more than three years. He slashed thousands of jobs, improved costs, secured CHIPS Act funding, built chip foundries, and promised fast AI chips that could compete with Nvidia and AMD.

He was fired in early December amid missed financial targets, lack of progress on the AI chip front, and a cash drain on the foundry business.

Intel's fourth quarter sales fell 7% year over year to $14.3 billion, and net earnings plunged 76%. The company forecasts it will only break even on the profit line this year.

Analysts think Nvidia may post upward of $5 per share in earnings in 2025. Nvidia's stock is up 1,220% over the past five years, while Intel's has dropped 69%.

Intel announced Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO in March.

Tan was the CEO of Cadence Design Systems from 2009 to 2021. After serving on Intel's board for two years, he left in August 2024 following clashes with Gelsinger over how to position the business.

Tan frequently pushed for a better artificial intelligence strategy to take on Nvidia and faster decision making at the notoriously bureaucratic Intel.

It will be hard for someone to dethrone Nvidia, said Gelsinger.

"I've always viewed that there's sort of this 10x rule, where if you're not 10x better than the king, you're not going to displace that. Here you have to be at least sustainably 10x better, and then people will say, okay, yeah, I'm going to go invest in that," Gelsinger added.

Tan will get to outline his strategy publicly — and detail how he will navigate Trump tariffs — when the company announces first quarter results on April 24 after the market close.



Does this "10x better rule" mentioned by Pat Gelsinger also apply to Intel Foundry vs TSMC?
 
Does this "10x better rule" mentioned by Pat Gelsinger also apply to Intel Foundry vs TSMC?
If it did, they have no chance.

But this is just such self-evident nonsense.

When - for example - was Intel ever even 2x better than AMD (or vice versa) ? I'd be surprised if the gap (on production cost or peformance) was ever much over 50% for more than a few months. 10x might be possible in exceptional circumstances in software. But in hardware ?

And Gelsinger's implication seems to be that you provide a 10x better product for much the same price as the existing one - i.e. giving most of the value away for nothing.

I hesitate to mention it, but the idea just crossed my mind that Gelsinger's public utterances seem to divide into a set that make quite a lot of sense and another that don't seem to at all ... and that this all reminds me a little of Trump ...
 
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