Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan To Partners: ‘Please Be Brutally Honest With Us’
In his first public appearance as Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan urges partners and customers to ‘be brutally honest with us’ as he works to ‘build a new Intel’ that will be ‘equally focused’ on strengthening the chipmaker’s products and building a ‘great foundry.’
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan urged the beleaguered semiconductor giant’s partners and customers to “be brutally honest with us” as he takes on the “very challenging task” of building a “new Intel” in his first public appearance as the company’s new leader.
Tan delivered the remarks, often candid and humble but also full of resolve in his vow to stage a full comeback for the Silicon Valley chipmaker, in his live-streamed keynote at the Intel Vision 2025 event on Monday, nearly two weeks after he started as the company’s new CEO.
“It had been a tough period for quite a long time for Intel. We fell behind on innovation. As a result, we have been too slow to adapt and to meet your needs. You deserve better, and we need to improve, and we will,” he said. “Please be brutally honest with us. This is what I expect [of] you this week, and I believe harsh feedback is most valuable.”
Intel’s board named Tan, a longtime tech investor and former CEO of chip design software vendor Cadence Design Systems, as the ninth CEO in the company’s 56-year history on March 12. This was a little more than three months after the board reportedly forced former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to leave out of frustration over the slow progress in his comeback plan.
During his roughly 37-minute keynote Monday, Tan, who was on Intel’s board until last August, vowed to stay on as the company’s CEO for “as long as the company needs” and said he will be “equally focused” on strengthening Intel’s products and building a “great foundry” with its contract chip manufacturing business, Intel Foundry.
“We are here to serve you and earn your trust. I won’t be happy and satisfied until we [are] consistently delivering our promise, on time, on quality, to exceed your expectation, and we have to earn it,” he said to customers and partners attending the event.
How Tan Plans To Improve Intel Products
For Intel’s products, Tan said it’s critical for the company to “deliver the great performance that is essential to enable your workload of the future.”
It’s also important for the chipmaker to “deliver great efficiency [that is] essential to enable AI in the [increasingly] power-constrained world,” the CEO added.
“And we must deliver great quality, on-time delivery without exception,” Tan said.
In the Client Computing Group, Tan acknowledged that Intel’s traditional PC chip business is facing increased competition and, as a result, “cannot stand still.”
Intel will “continue to strengthen” its products and road map within the Client Computing Group, which includes the Panther Lake processor the company plans to launch later this year using Intel Foundry’s Intel 18A manufacturing process, according to Tan.
“We also remain focused on building the industry’s broadest ecosystem of ISVs and AI applications. We will leverage our capabilities in client to help enable the AI edge,” he said.
As for Intel’s data center products, namely its CPUs, Tan said the company needs to “strengthen” its offerings and admitted that it “lost quite a bit of talent” in this area.
“That’s my top priority: to recruit some of the best talent in the industry to come back and then to rejoin or join Intel,” he said.
While Tan said Intel’s latest Xeon processors represent a “step forward to enhance our competitiveness,” customers and partners told him that the company needs to improve their performance and efficiency in addition to pushing for a lower total cost of ownership.
Another important focus is to continue improving CPUs for AI inference because of their “increasing important role” as a low-power option for the workload, according to Tan.
As for Intel’s AI accelerator chip strategy, Tan said he’s not “happy with our current position” and acknowledged that the company’s partners and customers “aren’t happy either.” Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel Products CEO, said in previous months that the company’s Gaudi chips weren’t competitive enough and announced that Intel had canceled its next-generation Falcon Shores chip to focus on a “rack-scale solution.”
Moving forward, Intel will learn from “past mistakes and work towards a competitive system that we can provide you,” according to Tan, who offered no details.
“It won’t happen overnight, but I know we can get there,” he said.
