Former Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger revealed that his company used to scoff at NVIDIA's GPU when Intel was dominating the industry and CPUs were the mainstay of computing. Gelsinger discussed Intel before his return, his time at the company when it was working with Apple and the impact that hostilities in Taiwan can have on the global economy. The former CEO, who currently has a close relationship with quantum computing company PsiQuantum, also believes that quantum computing can reshape a host of industries before the end of this decade.
Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger Discusses How Apple Founder Steve Jobs Was Farsighted
The conversation started out with the former Intel CEO and the All-In podcast's host discussing the state of Intel before Gelsinger took over, and when the firm was working with Apple. Gelsinger criticized Intel's strategy of paying a hundred billion dollars as dividends and remarked that the move was driven by managers with a business background instead of a technical background.
"In the five six years before I came back, Intel gave a hundred billion dollars to shareholders," he said. "What I wouldn't have done for another hundred billion dollars on the balance sheet," he added. "It [Intel] hadn't built a new factory in a decade when I got there. It's like you know, how can you not be building? How can you not be buying EUV machines?" said Gelsinger. According to him, only a technologist would have understood the need to buy the new machines and build the factories since the economics behind them were unfavorable.
He also recalled working with Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs, whom he called "incredible" and "ruthless." Apple shifted to Intel's processors for its computers in 2005, and Gelsinger used the change to highlight Jobs' foresight. He revealed that Jobs had already been working on methods to port the Mac's operating system to Intel's chips from the PowerPC family:
"I remember when we had the first conversation with Steve about porting the operating system to the Intel chip from the Power chip that they were running on before they moved to Intel. And we were quite proud of the silicon software competencies that we had in compilers and operating systems. You know, so Steve, we'll help you port the operating system to the x86. And I remember that Steve said, I've been working on that for the last four releases. He had been preparing the core technologies inside of Apple for something that might happen in the future."
NVIDIA's Jensen Huang Reminds Gelsinger Of Steve Jobs
Back then, Intel was the market leader in chip fabrication and its products were also the mainstay of global computing. Discussing how great business leaders slowly build great technologies, Gelsinger recalled Intel's attitude towards NVIDIA and its GPUs.
"You know Jensen he was just building high-performance computer, you know throughput machines," he said. Gelsinger added:
"You know, when we were at the height of our strength on CPUs at Intel, we sort of scoffed at his machines. Right, that's a graphic machines, there's some gamers that want to use that kind of stuff."
He shared how this approach of gradual improvement made Jensen Huang a bit like Jobs:
"But when they started to build a real software stack with it, right, you know sort of okay, this CUDA thing, and SIMT as a technology, multi threading and so on. And it, just sort of getting a little bit better, and a little bit better. And it was a little bit Jobs like in that way."
The boom in GPU uses, from being just gaming products to high-performance computing, came when the "crazy Japanese HPC guys said hey we could take those graphics cards and maybe start using them in HPC," according to Gelsinger.
Quantum Computing Advances Are Just Around The Corner, Believes The Former Executive
The big debate surrounding Intel is its ability to compete with Taiwan's TSMC. TSMC is the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, and Gelsinger remarked that when he took over as CEO, it was making as many as five times the wafers as Intel was. This time, he discussed how a blockade of Taiwan by China could disrupt the global economy in as little as three weeks:
"The island of Taiwan has less than three weeks, a big article in The Wall Street Journal, two weeks ago on this, less than three weeks of energy reserves. That should just put a chill in everybody's spine. Because the blockade after three weeks, the island browns out. When you turn off a fab it doesn't come back on for 90 days. Right. The economic impact of a brownout of Taiwan is greater than the Great Depression in the world. Never do you need to do anything, a shot to be fired. You just need to say, great, no energy for three weeks. . .no LNG, that's how the island runs. That is scary, you know to me, we need more resilient supply chains, associated with it."
Whether the blockade could materialize, the former Intel executive believes that since China has blockaded the Taiwan straits seven times over the last four years another blockade isn't a theory.
Finally, Gelsinger, who currently has a close relationship with PsiQuantum, believes that advances in quantum computing are just around the corner.
"You know, you're going to be able to start doing things that cannot be computed today. Chemistry, you know biology, there will be things that can't be computed today. You know some of the easy things will be some of the logistics, where I will compute the best answer to get this thing to you," he said.
"But this decade we will see quantum supremacy results across multiple industries. You know we know how to build qubits, we know how to error correct qubits, we now have algorithmics right, against quantum. You know now it's just about engineering scale," Gelsinger added.
"My prediction is meaningful results before 2030," he said
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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