The Chips Have Fallen at Intel - DTNS 4906  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: The Chips Have Fallen at Intel - DTNS 4906 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b3c062fa-16f5-476c-80ab-6f1cd5c6f06a ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Gelsinger's Abrupt Exit** - Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, retired abruptly, and CFO David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus are interim co-CEOs. - The board reportedly gave Gelsinger the choice to retire or be fired. Transcript: Tom Merritt Intel announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger retired on Sunday, December 1st, and also stepped down from the company's board of directors. Intel CFO David Zinsner and the general manager of client computing, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, are now interim co-CEOs while the board searches for a permanent replacement. Holthaus was also named to a newly created position of CEO of Intel Products that will oversee the non-foundry business. So the PC chips, the data center chips, all of that stuff. The management of the foundry business will remain unchanged. They didn't touch that part, interestingly. Independent Chair Frank Urie becomes interim executive chairman of the board. And Bloomberg sources say that the board gave Gelsinger two options, quit or get fired, basically. Allison Sheridan So retired was in quotes, right? Yeah. Tom Merritt You can retire or we can remove you, your choice. And I guess Pat said, well, I'll leave now because there were no rumors of this happening. There was a meeting and Gelsinger left right away. Roger is going to join us to talk about this because I know he follows the chip space really closely. Intel's chip revenue has been down. The shareholders have been wanting the foundry to be spun out. And it wasn't till this fall that Gelsinger decided to do that. But really, it does seem to be that the board is going to continue to follow Gelsinger's plan of having a foundry business and a product business. They're just in all of their announcements saying they're going to put more resources back into product and they're going to work on efficiency. And what did they how did they put it? Uh, driving returns on foundry investments. So Roger, it sounds to me like they just didn't think the money was being spent in the right priority. Speaker 4 I think it was, I think it was that. I also think maybe, uh, the impression that, to step back a bit, when Gelsinger took over, Intel was already kind of in a not good place. And they brought them on board because they needed to do some significant changes to the business. And when Gelsinger took over, I mean, he refocused their efforts on chip, but also the foundry business, which was something that they kind of let kind of become laggard compared to TSMC and global foundries. I think that's partly the money. They weren't seeing the returns that they were hoping to. AMD has definitely not just caught up, but I think they're on the verge of becoming on par with Intel in the x86 business, especially with the new Zen 5 architecture coming out this year. I think next year, 2025. And I think a lot of it is just people were impatient. They wanted things to kind of speed up a little bit. There was a lot to do, and I don't think it's entirely fair for Gelsinger to get all the blame because he is just one person. But he was the CEO, and he does ultimately shoulder that responsibility of not meeting the expectations, especially with 18A, which was the new manufacturing process that they were Developing to catch up to TSMC, the 7 and 3 nanometer process. ([Time 0:11:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8a0de688-2888-4f04-bcb7-a9bd969cafaa)) - **Intel's Future Strategy** - Intel's board likely wants to prioritize the product business and improve returns on foundry investments. - They may eventually spin off the foundry business, similar to AMD's strategy with Global Foundries. Transcript: Tom Merritt Intel announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger retired on Sunday, December 1st, and also stepped down from the company's board of directors. Intel CFO David Zinsner and the general manager of client computing, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, are now interim co-CEOs while the board searches for a permanent replacement. Holthaus was also named to a newly created position of CEO of Intel Products that will oversee the non-foundry business. So the PC chips, the data center chips, all of that stuff. The management of the foundry business will remain unchanged. They didn't touch that part, interestingly. Independent Chair Frank Urie becomes interim executive chairman of the board. And Bloomberg sources say that the board gave Gelsinger two options, quit or get fired, basically. Allison Sheridan So retired was in quotes, right? Yeah. Tom Merritt You can retire or we can remove you, your choice. And I guess Pat said, well, I'll leave now because there were no rumors of this happening. There was a meeting and Gelsinger left right away. Roger is going to join us to talk about this because I know he follows the chip space really closely. Intel's chip revenue has been down. The shareholders have been wanting the foundry to be spun out. And it wasn't till this fall that Gelsinger decided to do that. But really, it does seem to be that the board is going to continue to follow Gelsinger's plan of having a foundry business and a product business. They're just in all of their announcements saying they're going to put more resources back into product and they're going to work on efficiency. And what did they how did they put it? Uh, driving returns on foundry investments. So Roger, it sounds to me like they just didn't think the money was being spent in the right priority. Speaker 4 I think it was, I think it was that. I also think maybe, uh, the impression that, to step back a bit, when Gelsinger took over, Intel was already kind of in a not good place. And they brought them on board because they needed to do some significant changes to the business. And when Gelsinger took over, I mean, he refocused their efforts on chip, but also the foundry business, which was something that they kind of let kind of become laggard compared to TSMC and global foundries. I think that's partly the money. They weren't seeing the returns that they were hoping to. AMD has definitely not just caught up, but I think they're on the verge of becoming on par with Intel in the x86 business, especially with the new Zen 5 architecture coming out this year. I think next year, 2025. And I think a lot of it is just people were impatient. They wanted things to kind of speed up a little bit. There was a lot to do, and I don't think it's entirely fair for Gelsinger to get all the blame because he is just one person. But he was the CEO, and he does ultimately shoulder that responsibility of not meeting the expectations, especially with 18A, which was the new manufacturing process that they were Developing to catch up to TSMC, the 7 and 3 nanometer process. Tom Merritt Yeah, I mean, NVIDIA sells all the chips to the data centers. Intel was not able to scale and sell chips to the data centers anywhere close. And meanwhile, there were other of their various lunches being eaten that you just mentioned, right? Speaker 4 And, you know, to use a metaphor, I mean, you know, he took control of a container ship, and they don't move like a jet ski, right? You can't just automatically do a 180 and go back the other direction. I mean, it takes a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of investment. I mean, this is the thing. The Chipsack was sort of a boon for Intel because it did help get some of the manufacturing plants up at a much lower cost than if they had to do it straight out of pocket. Allison Sheridan Have they already actually spent Chipsack money? I mean, that stuff's just really... Speaker 4 No, it's just been earmarked. That just helps the planning. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing, though. Everything is playing, right? Chips, foundry business takes... When you build a new plan, you got to factor in, what, three years? Allison Sheridan Yeah, I thought you were saying that they already spent that money to actually build those plans, and they can't have yet. No, no. Speaker 4 But if I said to you, you're going to build a new home, I have earmarked $1.5 million for you to spend when you come past the design phase and it's all past zoning and stuff. That changes how you plan versus you're going to have to spend everything out of pocket. You're going to build a more modest house or not even build a house at all, maybe a duplex or something. Gotcha, gotcha. Tom Merritt And in this metaphor, Gelsinger is an architect, but he's not a mortgage financer. Allison Sheridan So three years is not a long time in this size of a container ship? No. Tom Merritt For three—I mean, this should have been— engineering side, I think Gelsinger has done an impressive job turning Intel towards where it needs to go. I just feel like the board was like, yeah, we need a business person because you're moving too slow. Speaker 4 Yeah. And there's definitely a feeling of, at least I get a feeling of impatience. Tom Merritt I don't think they made the wrong choice in having Gelsinger turn this around. I think they got, like you say, they got impatient. Allison Sheridan So you said that they set up the new CEO of the Foundry, right? No, the CEO of Product. Tom Merritt And that tells me, first of all, they didn't think Gelsinger was spending enough on product, and they wanted Foundry to be more autonomous. And there's two reasons for that. They think you need to spend on product because that's what Intel is good at, and that's where you can remain competitive. And Foundry is not a core business, so you want to develop it and probably spin it off and sell it. And creating a CEO of product starts to look like maybe like yeah well that's the real intel yeah we'll have a ceo of product and a ceo of foundry oh it makes it easier to split it into two Speaker 4 Companies at some point right which is probably what they're gonna do eventually i mean they're gonna do what amd with global foundries yeah and spin that up which would take intel back Tom Merritt To being fabulous which it well, well, I guess it was never totally fabulous. Yeah, but it would take Intel back to not making chips for other people, I guess is where my head is. Speaker 4 Which is something they just started doing, by the way. It's not something that they've been doing for a while. Tom Merritt But yeah, you're right. It would make Intel fabulous, not fabulous. Well, it could also make them fabulous, but not ([Time 0:11:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/67a13337-ef23-427d-8108-318fe7fb0f09)) - **Aluminum vs. Titanium** - Aluminum is lighter and cheaper than titanium, but titanium is stronger and more scratch-resistant. - This matters to users who prioritize weight and cost versus durability and scratch resistance. Transcript: Tom Merritt Right, let's talk Apple phone cases. There's been a lot of buzz around this, and I'm confused, and Allison's going to help me understand this. The rumor has been that Apple will change all of their iPhone cases to aluminum next year. And you don't mean the cases you buy to stick on your phone. No, that's right. The actual case of the phone that Apple makes that the innards are inside. For years, Apple made its pro models with a steel chassis and then last year changed that to titanium while the regular models have aluminum. Except that word chassis is confusing. Last week, the information reported its sources said Apple was going to switch from steel and titanium to aluminum frames. And frames is the right word to use. On Monday, Instant Digital said that Apple won't do that. It didn't provide backing for this. It just has a decent track record on leaks follows Apple and says, in my opinion, it would be silly. They won't do that. 9to5Mac points out that Apple refers to the band as being titanium. That's the part around the outside, right? Not the part with your hands. Yeah, you've got two glass frames. You've got a glass front and a glass back, and then you've got a titanium band, or you have an aluminum band, or you have a steel band, depending on your model, right? What 9to5Mac points out is that Apple refers to that as a band, but uses the word frame for the part inside your phone, behind the glass that you never see. And that has been aluminum in all of its models for a while. So it might be that they're not changing to aluminum. It might be that just some suppliers used confusing language in the information. I don't blame the information, got this report and said, oh, it looks like they're changing. And maybe they're not. Maybe they're not changing the band and they're not changing the frame. And it's just all a confusing thing. But even if they were to change the band from titanium back to aluminum, why would we care, Alison? Allison Sheridan Well, I'm going to make sure we highlight every confusion. The band right now on the iPhone 16 Pro is titanium. The band on the iPhone 16 is aluminum. The non-pro is aluminum. The non-pro, the vanilla iPhone 16 is aluminum. So neither of those are steel right now. And so we're just talking about that band around the outside. The first thing to know in thinking about whether you care about this or not is that aluminum is lower density, so lighter per unit volume than titanium, but titanium is a lot stronger. And it's also harder. So strong and hard are two different things. So titanium has a 150 to 250 Rockwell hardness versus 15 to 100 for aluminum. And the reason you care about that number is that titanium is more resistant to scratching and deformation. I remember Barb Bouchat on my show talking about how he doesn't use a case on his titanium phone. And he's dropped it a bunch of times and he swears that it heals itself. It doesn't get those little dings and scratches. I don't know about the healing part, but that's what it feels like to him but it doesn't really seem to to scratch up as much and that's because of that rockwell hardness number the problem Is that titanium is way more expensive because it's a rare metal to start with so extraction from the earth is is more difficult it costs more but it's also more difficult to machine than Aluminum and on top of all of that the price is more volatile than the price of aluminum. Aluminum pricing has been pretty stable for a long time, but all kinds of things affect the titanium price, including geopolitical things, you know, it definitely causes all kinds Of problems. So if you want your phone to be lighter and less expensive, and you're willing to sacrifice those scratches and dings and dents, then you do want aluminum. So is that that's the real question? What do you think, Tom? Tom Merritt Yeah. OK, so that that clears it up a lot for me. Thank you for explaining that. I get why if Apple announces that it's aluminum instead of titanium, I might see an advantage. I still don't understand why people in December of 2024 are spending so much time talking about, ooh, they might switch to aluminum. Is it just that there's no other rumors that are more interesting? Because this feels mildly interesting to me when they announce it, but not something I'd be like, oh, I'm so excited they're going to change it to aluminum, you know? Allison Sheridan I just think it's a fun game that people like to play, that the instant one model comes out, or possibly weeks before a model comes out, especially with the iPhone, is that they immediately Start talking about, yeah, but what about the next one? Yeah. Because that's fun for some people? I don't know. Tom Merritt Is this the most exciting possible change to the next iPhone? That tells me it's not going to be very different. Allison Sheridan Yeah. You know, we passed down Apple watches to our son-in and our daughter, and they asked us, they said, what's the difference between the one you gave me last year and the one you're giving Me this year? And I was like, well, always on. Yeah, that's it. It's always on. That's what you got on that one, because I think Nolan jumped two versions or something. Tom Merritt That is a more significant difference, I suppose. Because I don't have to wait for it to turn on. But yeah. Allison Sheridan But I mean, unless they add another button. And I already have to count. If I reach into my spy belt to try to figure out how to turn the volume up, I got to go, okay, there's three buttons on this side too. I hate that third button. Tom Merritt I have it on Shazam right now. I think I might change it to flashlight, but I don't know what to do. Allison Sheridan I set it to one. Um, what'd I set it to? I set it to something good. I had it to translate, but I set it to open my garage door, but then I accidentally pressed it when I wasn't in town. I was in Africa. So I had to take that one off. ([Time 0:19:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/928ac764-f51e-424c-96ce-ca233ffe31d7)) - **Apple Password Manager Reconsidered** - Allison Sheridan initially considered Apple's password management tool dangerous due to reliance on a phone's passcode. - She changed her mind after seeing its ease of use and effectiveness for non-technical users. Transcript: Tom Merritt Removing carbon for good. On a recent blog post, Allison wrote how she was warming up to Apple's password management tool. Now, Allison, originally you were skeptical. In fact, you thought it was kind of dangerous to use Apple's password management tool. Why did you think it was dangerous and what changed your mind? Allison Sheridan The biggest thing I thought about was people are jumping on the idea of using Apple passwords and it's replaced, for anybody who's not an Apple fan girl, it's replaced their old Keychain Access, which was an iCloud keychain that was really kind of confusing and arcane. And now it's a kind of a fledgling password manager, I would call it. And it is very convenient. It'll store your passwords, generate passwords. It'll do one-time passcodes. It'll do passkeys. So it has a lot of capabilities. The reason I've been nervous about it is because people don't realize that they now have their password manager locked just behind the passcode on their phone. It is possible to still have a four-digit passcode, even though certain actions will require you to change it to six. A friend of mine had it set to four and then had Apple passwords running on it, and that makes me really nervous. You know, my password for my password manager, one password, is like 68 characters long. It's got upper lowercase numbers and a goat in the middle of it. You know, I mean, it's complicated. Does it have a goat? It does. It does. Oh, I don't want to tell you what position it's in. I don't give up my code. Yeah, interesting. So I was anxious about that. And if you have a password to log into your Mac, that's the other way it's been secured. So if you're going to use the Apple Password Manager, you better start at least with six digits. But again, that's just six digits. Can somebody see you doing it? Does someone already know your birthday? You know, don't make it your birthday. And so I was really kind of nervous about people using it. But I go to a friend of mine's house every year to help her make her Christmas card labels. And every single year, I try to convince her to use a password manager. And every single year, she says, Okay, okay, I'll do it. I'll really do it. I'll get one password, I'll set it up. And I've told her, I said, Look, it's a real pain to get started. But I've got my friend Pat Dangler. She's a certified Apple consultant. She'll come help you do it. You got to pay her a little bit, but it's not worth my time to help you because it's a pain. I don't want to do it. So she'll come over. She'll help you. She's got her phone numbers. Every year, she hasn't done it. Every year, she hasn't done it. This year, when she immediately said, yeah, no, I didn't do it again this year. I said, you know what? Let's upgrade you to iOS 18 and let's take a look at the password app. And it was extraordinary, Tom. She took to it like a fish to water. I mean, it showed me that she had her passwords in plain text in her contacts. So it would say Verizon or Bank of America, and there would be the password in there. Tom Merritt I mean, that's her password manager then. So that was certainly as insecure as password manager, definitely less secure as password. Allison Sheridan Right, right. Because it didn't, obviously not encrypted in any way, shape, or form. Well, encrypted on the drive, I guess. Yeah, but plain text. So I showed her how she could use the Apple password manager. We opened it up and it had been pre-populated because she'd been saying yes in Safari to saving her passwords, not ever knowing she was doing that. And when she saw how easy it was to log in, she said, hey, I should erase this over in my contacts, shouldn't I? Tom Merritt Yes, I could never have been more proud. That's good that she thought that way. That's great. Yeah. Allison Sheridan Yeah. Yeah. And she enjoyed doing it. We did three of them where we went and we tested it, made sure it worked. She did, you know, got in there from her, from the password manager and she was able to go in and log in much more quickly than looking it up on her phone. And she said, this is so fun. I'm going to do the rest of them tonight. That's great. I love that. I just, I was so proud. I was so happy. I haven't checked to see that she actually did. I'll find out next year. But just the fact that it felt easy and obvious and was a good way to go. And I made her change her password, her passcode, her phone, because it was four digits. And she immediately said, I know my birthday. No. Okay. My husband's birthday. No. We went through four or five of these until she came up with one she eventually came up with one that was something i would never have guessed on her and i couldn't repeat if yelled a gun To my head so she uh good good i i think i've come around well ([Time 0:26:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75d0017d-db2e-4778-bcb0-72c45c7ced64)) - **Balancing Security and Usability** - Security measures should prioritize what users will actually adopt, even if not perfectly secure. - Widespread passkey adoption will improve security, but current implementations can be cumbersome. Transcript: Tom Merritt This is this for for people who don't know and the security heads out in the audience are already you know smirking to themselves, but security measures are whatever makes it so that The user is doing the most secure thing they will do, which will do, which sounds weird. It's like, well, then they should just do, they should just do the most secure thing, but humans won't. And so individual humans, this is why we still have SMS as a second factor, because it is still more secure than not having a second factor, even though there are security issues with It. So if there is nothing else for me to do as a second factor, I will do SMS, because that's more secure than not having it. But if they allow me to do a passkey, or even just something like Google Authenticator or Authy, then I'll do that. I will choose the most secure thing. When you're talking about the general populace, you want to do the thing that is going to be the easiest for them to do because they're not all like us. Allison Sheridan As Kendrick Lamar says, they're not like us. Well, and even with password managers, I found a report done by security.org where they compared 2022 and 2023 in their password manager annual report. Oh, yeah. I heard you talking about this. Yeah. Yeah. They said that – so the 41% of respondents – and now these are kind of self-selecting respondents – but 41% said they memorized their passwords. But the next highest was using a password manager, and it was 34% of respondents said they use a password manager. That was extraordinary to me. It was up from 22% to 34%. So a third of Americans that responded to this survey said they use a password manager. However, 28% of those said that they reuse their one password, if you will, or their last password, that password they use to get in the password manager, they reuse that on other sites. Tom Merritt So this is why I'm a big believer in Passkey. And I know folks who are tech savvy, like Ron Richards are like, it's too hard. It's not explained well. It is too hard. And I see that. I do look at this password manager from Apple and think, that's kind of a pathway to Passkey. Because when properly implemented widely, Passkey will not be too hard. It will be just like this, except you won't have to have the password manager pick a password for you. And your password won't be stored in a database that can be hacked. Your Passkey will stay on your device. But training people to the idea of like, all your passwords are on your device. So you want to have a more, you know, secure way into your device just in case is good, because that's also going to be true of passkeys. Allison Sheridan Yeah, that's a good point. It puts you on the slippery slope we want you on. Tom Merritt Yeah, the goods. Some slippery slopes are good. I'd never thought about it that way. Yeah. Sometimes you slide down into a barrel of fun. Exactly. Allison Sheridan I can prove that Paskies are too hard. I had four email exchanges with the folks at 1Password to help me get Paskies to work to get into my Google account. I could not solve it on my own. Tom Merritt You were storing them in a password manager, which actually makes it more complicated. Yeah. Also, Google's implementation of passkey has tripped me up before as well. Yeah. Whereas the other day, I can't remember which service it was, but it said, and I was on Chrome OS. I was on my Chromebook. It said, do you want to log in with your passkey? And I'm like, sure. I'm pretty sure there's no passkey for this on Chrome OS. And it said, ah, there's no passkey for this on this device. Scan this with your phone. So I scan the QR code with my phone. It unlocked on my phone with used my required face ID to unlock. And then it unlocked me on my Chrome OS. And I'm like, that's, that's how it should work. Allison Sheridan No, I get that all the time where that now takes me so much longer. I get it on my Mac where it's asking me to use my phone to scan a QR code. I would rather hit command backslash and have one password enter my password. You've now made passkey harder. In that case, it saved you. I get that. Tom Merritt But it was more secure and it was easy. It was easy to follow. No one else is going to do backslash, you know. Allison Sheridan Well, I'm just saying I can, you know, open my password manager. It was, to me, if I've got a passkey stored on my Mac for that service, I shouldn't have to scan with my phone to get it. Sure. Tom Merritt And I often do. You should be able to have a passkey and when it's widely spread out, then you won't run into these situations. But as a bridge, in the meantime, the advantage to this will someday be, and this is all the problem with PASC is we're in Bluetooth 1999 world, will someday be worth it because there won't Be a password stored in a database. Allison Sheridan We're not to that. I'm a fan and I plan to keep trying to use it, but today it is hard. I wouldn't recommend it to most people. Tom Merritt I don't know that it's hard. It's just not... Inconsistent. It's not as easy as the password manager on the phone, right? That slippery slope is not slippery yet. ([Time 0:30:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1998323d-e4ba-4e0d-b96f-b314e8edd398))