INTEL suffers from in-breeding
I took a look at INTEL top brass' bios, there are no tech guys at the Executive VP level and up. At the Senior VP level, there are two guys with chip design experience, but they only worked on old stuff such as 386, 486 and Pentium II. At the VP level, I only saw one chip design guy from Israel who worked on Pentium-M (a modification of Pentium-III).
Compared to AMD, who has a DEC Alpha architect as President & COO and a fresh IBM guy as CTO, INTEL leadership is technically very weak, no fresh blood, all in-breeding.
posted by Sharikou, Ph. D. @ 1/30/2006 05:20:00 PM
3 Comments:
It's obvious that Intel has been taken over by the marketing managers. It happens to all great corporations when they get too greedy. Their most unscrupulous managers come up to the head of the pack. That doesn't necessarily have to be marketing managers, but marketing managers are the best at unscrupulous. Remember Craig Barrett was an engineer, but he was unscrupulous too.
It is very dangerous for a corporation to have only marketroids at its top, because they are the worst kind of ignorants: those who think they know. In particular, it happens that after a while the marketroids start to believe that the products sell not because they are good, but because the marketroids are terrific salesmen, so they shift the priorities toward marketing and the game is over.
But people, investors and costumers alike, love marketroids. A guy such as Hector Ruiz is unappealing.
I mentioned this as an explanation for the suicidal insistence in the Itanic in my blog (chicagrafo)
This explains why so many bad decisions were made at Intel the past few years. It has been glaringly obvious in academic and technical circles that we can't be cranking up the clock speed for performance gains anymore and that going multi-core is the way.
I'm very sure there're a lot of very smart engineers at Intel and I find it very hard to believe that they would make the decision to go with a chip design (i.e. the Pentium 4) that had only one design goal in mind, which was to crank up the clock speed. Apparently, they were still stuck with the "Mhz Sells" mentality when this decision was made.
So there, the marketing folks were calling the shots, everything now makes sense then.
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