The official transition has taken place and Pat Gelsinger is now Intel's CEO. The appointment came as a bit of a bolt from the blue back in mid-January and the transition from Bob Swan seems to have been rather speedy, being completed little more than a month later. If Intel was in hot water, its most recent financials didn't show it - but there was an underlying feeling that the firm had been knocked from its pedestal over recent years / months with AMD's ascendancy (a significantly smaller company) and the launch of Apple Silicon which must have hurt its pride. Certainly there was activist investor pressure for a serious change of tack – will Gelsinger deliver it?
Even as he was the CEO-in waiting one gets the feeling that Gelsinger was already been making waves at the company where he established his technology career (he spent 30 years at Intel before leaving to become VMware CEO in 2012). During the recent financial results conference call Gelsinger was made available to talk to investors about the next part of Intel's journey. Among the several interesting quotes from Gelsinger during the conference call, the incoming CEO stated that he had already been busy reviewing the firm's manufacturing operations and 7nm progress.
The Intel News Blog contains the video reproduced above, with the new CEO enthusing that Intel's best days are ahead. In a personal Twitter note Gelsinger added that "When I look @intel, I see limitless potential. This company continues to evolve, but one thing remains constant: we're just getting started." You can see the accompanying photo with Gelsinger standing considering the Intel HQ in Santa Clara, below.
You can read through Gelsinger's full biography here, and Intel has shared an interesting infographic of Gelsinger's progress here (PDF).
