A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/my-commitment-to-you-and-our-company

by rntn • 12 months ago

175 239 12 months ago

newsroom.intel.com

rwmj• 12 months ago

Does he write this ridiculous verbiage himself or does he have a team of people who "hone" it to this point? This could have been a four sentence email.

rco87868• 12 months ago

He’s the CEO of a multi billion dollar company of course he has a comms team.

cosmicgadget3• 12 months ago

Seems like one of those times to send an authentic message.

Alupis• 12 months ago

Some context is available here: https://apnews.com/article/intel-trump-cotton-yeary-tan-2061...

FTA:

“In March 2025, Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO,” Cotton wrote in the letter. “Mr. Tan reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”

everfrustrated2• 12 months ago

If true, questions should also be raised about the Board who must have signed off on any conflicts of interest.

tiahura• 12 months ago

This is entirely on the board. They didn’t know / They didn’t clear first with govt. Either way it’s grossly negligent.

threatripper6• 12 months ago

Nobody really knows if 18a is a failure or if it was turned into one by deliberate mismanagement. It feels like when Microsoft took over Nokia.

tlogan2• 12 months ago

If true …

I don’t know about his investments, but one fact is clear: he was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which has just pleaded guilty to federal charges for exporting technology to China. That alone should make him ineligible to lead a company with major government contracts.

If he resigns (and he will), the board should go with him.

skywhopper• 12 months ago

I mean, given that Tom Cotton wrote it, I would be surprised if it were true in any meaningful sense.

woooooo• 12 months ago

"Controls dozens of companies" is a pretty strong allegation without naming a single one.

"Has a stake in hundreds" is true of anyone who owns a global index fund.

moomoo11• 12 months ago

True capitalism is embracing the free market, or trying to be close to one.

In Soviet Russia you follow their rules and do everything/anything to win.

In US you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.

In China/India/country you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.

Through law, politics, advertising.

The ultimate goal is to win globally right?

A true capitalist leader can operate with complete lack of attachment for the sake of the corporation.

scrubs4• 12 months ago

Huh? What'd we supposed to learn? If we're doing billion foot maxims i prefer iacocca: you need people, product, profit. Without people you can't get the other two.

croemer• 12 months ago

What does FTA mean here? "From The Article"?

jjcm• 12 months ago

It's honestly wild that a sitting US president is calling out specific company CEOs. The fact that it was done in a tweet-esque post is even more concerning. I'd expect that something like this would have been accompanied by a proper investigation and writeup stating the administration's perspective on why, but instead it's just "he's highly CONFLICTED".

I don't debate his history at Cadence Design is concerning from a national security point of view, but the approach the administration took really shows how we're in a different era of politics.

tptacek12• 12 months ago

Eh. Without getting anywhere near the merits of this particular fracas, the federal government has gotten deeply involved in critiquing the management of companies like Lockheed and Boeing, both for national security reasons and because of the importance of those companies to the economy. Easy to see Intel fitting into that mold in 2025.

rco87868• 12 months ago

I don’t recall a sitting President publicly calling for the CEO of either of those companies to resign.

Please let’s not sanewash what is happening right now.

scrubs4• 12 months ago

It's not done by competent presidents. Trump is incompetent. Feds mind their own business except for doj, fbi, sec, fina who have evidence of wrong doing.

gibbitz• 12 months ago

Meh, Trump wants someone as loyal and willing to spy on us as he thinks this guy was for China. I love how the right detests regulation but is okay with arbitrarily monkeying directly in the management of a company like this with no rules around it. No company is safe under this guy.

dkenyser• 12 months ago

Correction: The right detests regulation on the things they like at that given moment.

If it doesn't affect them directly, or they can't perceive how it will affect them directly, they simply do not care.

togetheragainor• 12 months ago

It can be very difficult for some people to separate their personal feelings about Trump from whether he’s on the right side of an issue.

cnst• 12 months ago

Like this?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033113

2OEH8eoCRo0• 12 months ago

Stupid flamebait.

Not a sitting president and the NSA doesn't need a warrant for foreign targets.

unethical_ban• 12 months ago

Like what?

fundad• 12 months ago

They may have dropped the name China Initiative but all this tough talk on China (and immigration) primes the public to believe the worst.

https://apnews.com/article/business-china-asia-beijing-race-...

tgma2• 12 months ago

This administration (and the previous one) have been paying billions of dollars to chip companies to make fabs in the United States.

Trump in particular is essentially trying to make sure Intel lives despite market forces. It is effectively a quasi-nationalized entity akin to major military-industrial complex entities.

Given that, we are not talking about a random private entity. A US President making such statement about Intel is entirely justified.

burnt-resistor2• 12 months ago

"Strategic" companies like Boeing and Intel get socialism for corporations and rich people, but then decry "socialism" and "communism" for everything and everyone who isn't rich.

smsm423• 12 months ago

It's honestly wild that a sitting US president is calling out specific company CEOs

This truly never happened before. Oh wait:

https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...

standardUser3• 12 months ago

Not an apt comparison. GM needed $50 billion in government funds just to stay alive.

kzs0• 12 months ago

Wasn’t that in conjunction with the us govt essentially taking over gm though?

munificent• 12 months ago

Must have been great to be buddies with Trump and get the heads up so you could short Intel right before his tweet.

burnt-resistor2• 12 months ago

The king, I mean unitary executive, has opinions and power to do all things without regard to law, without critical thinking or consideration if they are beneficial or harmful to humanity, and without boundaries.

This is why Tim Apple presented Dear Leader with a 24K gold award and so was rewarded by a tariff exclusion.

parker-3461• 12 months ago

Additional context in https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-demands-highly-con...

DiabloD3• 12 months ago

This guy might be the last CEO of Intel.

soganess2• 12 months ago

I don't really understand this.

Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.

Intel’s mobile CPUs remain extremely competitive. Their integrated GPUs are the fastest in the x86 space. And their SoC+platform features: video decode/encode, NPUs, power management, wifi, and so on are the best in class for x86 CPUs; they are usually a solid second place or better regardless of architecture.

Subjectively, the most interesting “mainstream” laptops on the market are still, and historically have been, Intel-based. I understand that in an era where the M4 Max, Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Strix Halo each serve as best-in-class in different segments, “mainstream appeal” no longer equates to market dominance. And that is bad news for an Intel that historically just make a few CPUs (the rest being market segmented down versions of those chips), but still, to suggest they will disappear overnight seems... odd.

threatripper6• 12 months ago

In the past AMD needed to survive for antitrust reasons. Now x86 is losing in relevance now as alternatives are established. Nobody needs to keep intel alive.

chrsw• 12 months ago

"last CEO" is hyperbole. But despite the competitiveness of some of their latest offerings, their trajectory is beyond concerning.

tgma2• 12 months ago

Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.

The current “bad chips that are only 10% behind” are fabbed by TSMC, not Intel.

os2warpman• 12 months ago

Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity)

Gaming is irrelevant.

For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes.

Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off.

Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me.

Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all.

Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those.

Even in the consumer space, for running bullshit workloads like Copilot on a laptop the difference is negligible. Intel is ahead, by about 10%-- at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY WATTS (if the OEM even allows it) while you trade that 10% for 75W on AMD.

No human being on earth cares that the scan to identify if there's a cute dog in the photo they just saved to disk takes .255 or .277 seconds. They do care about battery life.

And gaming isn't just irrelevant due to revenue, once you look at margins you start realizing that AMD could never again spend a single cent on marketing X3D chips to gamers and instead redirect that money to target other sectors and they would probably be better off for it.

Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Gaming went to less than 9% of revenue from like, 80%. They don't care about people buying an RTX card and having to deal with OEMs and distributors and retailers and marketing and RMAs and driver patches at whatever piss-poor margin it is due to everyone taking their cut when enterprise clients are putting in POs directly to them for tens of thousands of Data Center cards at a time at high margins-- and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.

The very last thing, after figuring out absolutely everything else, that Intel should care about is what their chips are benchmarking at in the latest video game.

michaelt2• 12 months ago

I kinda see what you mean.

Steam [1] tells me gamers use Intel by 59:41

Price-performance scatter plots [2] say although Intel isn't battling AMD for the >$1000 threadripper territory, they have some competitive products in the sub-$500 price band.

And while Intel missed out on the smartphone market, I've heard people comparing their N100 CPUs favourable to the latest Raspberry Pi hardware.

Sure, Intel has had major troubles with their next process node. And one of the best performing laptops is ARM-based. But Intel are nowhere near defeated.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_sca...

poemxo• 12 months ago

"in the x86 space", otherwise you would have to acknowledge that M4 far outpaces any intel iGPU.

dismalaf4• 12 months ago

Intel has 75% of the desktop/server chip market. They'll survive.

theevilsharpie2• 12 months ago

Intel has only about half of the server market at this point, and that's with their products priced so low they're nearly selling them at cost.

The margins on their desktop products are also way down, their current desktop product isn't popular due to performance regressions in a number of areas relative to the previous generation (and not being competitive with AMD in general), and their previous generation products continue to suffer reliability problems.

And all this, while they're lighting billions of dollars on fire investing in building a foundry that has yet to attract a single significant customer.

Intel's not in a good spot right now.

getnormality• 12 months ago

Lots of en dashes.

xdennis• 12 months ago

They looked too short to be em dashes and too long to be en dashes. Sure enough, they're neither.

They're minus signs. The AI is evolving.

hinkley2• 12 months ago

Sigh. Guess I’m going back to using way too many commas and living in fear of misusing semicolons.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

threatripper6• 12 months ago

Must be a force of habit.

sgerenser• 12 months ago

Nope they’re en dashes. Minus signs aren’t longer than en dashes anyway.

arduanika• 12 months ago

Yup.

I'd bet 98% odds that Intel CEO and/or his comms team drafted this using an LLM trained on a competitor's chips.

Bearish. As if we even needed to know, at this point.

edit: Downvoters -- would you honestly take the other side of that bet?

gloosx• 12 months ago

Accusing every article of being made with AI is a new type of psychosis. Overall it's just a speculation without any sensible way to back it, thus it's gets logically downvoted.

rpcope1• 12 months ago

What are the odds this ends with Intel getting nationalized? I think it's really looking kind of non-zero now.

hn_throwaway_99• 12 months ago

It doesn't need to get officially nationalized. Trump is already using tariffs to essentially direct large businesses. It's already been reported that Trump is requiring TSMC to take a 49% stake in Intel for tariff relief.

Dr4kn• 12 months ago

Why would TSMC do this? Companies want the best chips and they can only get them from TSMC. If there isn't an alternative and building the necessary infrastructure in the US takes too long the Tarif is useless.

emchammer• 12 months ago

Thank god Apple has been putting their eggs in their home-woven ARM basket. Now I just wish that they had a CEO who was above golden-trophy ass-kissing.

tengwar22• 12 months ago

Partly home-made. Arm Holdings is British-based, but owned by Softbank Group (Japanese).

hinkley2• 12 months ago

Amd64 has other vendors.

scarface_742• 12 months ago

I hate everything that Cook is doing to kiss up to Trump and he did something similar during the first administration by letting Trump brag about final assembly of low selling Mac Pros was happening in the US.

But this is the country that the US wants (said as a born and bred US citizen) these are the results of it. Every CEO is kissing Trumps ass because that’s the only way you get ahead in the US now.

The media, the other two branches, colleges, tech companies etc have all bent a knee and bribed the President in one way or the other.

dylan6043• 12 months ago

Does it being "designed in California" but "made in Taiwan" really make a difference? If Taiwan was to be invaded and TSMC follows through with their threat of destroying all of the fabs, Apple's home-woven basket wouldn't be worth much at all

gjvc• 12 months ago

who buys intel instead of AMD at this point?

bornfreddy• 12 months ago

Swing traders. Also those who think China-Taiwan conflict is imminent.

nodesocket• 12 months ago

I own both, though admittedly Intel has not panned out so far.

extraduder_ire2• 12 months ago

It can't be AMD, two separate companies need to exist for dual-sourcing reasons. Market cap is $86.5B ATM, so there's quite a few who could afford them.

ac29• 12 months ago

A lot of people?

Intel, even in its current weakened state, did nearly double the revenue of AMD last quarter.

KronisLV• 12 months ago

My current GPU is an Intel Arc B580 and before then it was the A580. They aren't perfect but now that they're coming down to MSRP, they're pretty good budget friendly options.

I would have also unironically gotten a Core Ultra CPU if the pricing was actually... well, not insane for the value (or lack thereof) that they have. A 245K would still be an improvement over my current 5800X, though I have no idea what they were thinking of with that pricing - if their CPU prices were as competitive as their GPU prices (vendors ignoring MSRP be damned), that sidegrade release might have not been as horrible. They're still modern CPUs that work pretty well.

Though when I buy Intel, it's mostly so I don't give even more money to Nvidia and support competition in the market (otherwise my build would be all AMD).

jaian• 12 months ago

I do. AMD has done me dirty many times in the past so I will continue buying Intel for the foreseeable future. The only thing that matters to me is single core performance and when you compare Intel and AMD in that regard they are similarly priced anyway.

dluan2• 12 months ago

happy b580 user here

aryonoco• 12 months ago

I just did because of Quick Sync. Plenty of software has support for Quick Sync, the two I use are Plex and Immich. The AMD equivalent, VCN, has never had anywhere near the same level of software support.

cosmicgadget3• 12 months ago

x86 starts with someone's favorite letter.

dyauspitr4• 12 months ago

I still try and buy American

leosanchez• 12 months ago

Is AMD not American ?

dlyco2• 12 months ago

First, you need to know the emotional bond between Chinese Malaysians and the Chinese Communist Party, before you can say his actions are not suspicious.

_ncyj• 12 months ago

That is just factually incorrect. Most Chinese Malaysians are either Cantonese or Hokkien, with closer ties to Taiwan and Hong Kong than the mainland. A lot of the older folk don't even speak Mandarin. Keep in mind the CCP wasn't even in power when most migrated here.

dluan2• 12 months ago

literally it doesnt matter you'll always be Chinese to them.

yen223• 12 months ago

As a Malaysian Chinese my ties to the CCP is that I have heard of them

dlyco2• 12 months ago

emotional bond with the CCP is a bit too specific; what I should say is that the older generation Chinese Malaysians always have an emotional bond towards China, especially the PRC.

tlogan2• 12 months ago

The key question is this: how did the board of directors hire him knowing he had been subpoenaed to testify regarding Cadence Design Systems, and that the company has now agreed to plead guilty.

wewewedxfgdf2• 12 months ago

The biggest problem with Lip Bu Tan is he has given up on competing with Nvidia.

What's the point of being Intel CEO if you give up?

He should resign.

newAccount2025• 12 months ago

Can they win?

nont• 12 months ago

That is not as important as if they want to win.

greenhat76• 12 months ago

Some of their cards were beginning to become competitive for the price in the consumer market, they were getting there imo, just afraid to sync the insane amount of money needed for R&D to get them to the next level to actually compete with Nvidia in the enterprise space.

Intel is just bending over for shareholders instead of doing actual engineering. A big reason the previous CEO got yeeted.

cosmicgadget3• 12 months ago

Seems more prudent to compete with AMD and ARM?

wewewedxfgdf2• 12 months ago

That's Intel's strategy - to just give up?

Andy Grove would turn in his grave.

sugarpimpdorsey• 12 months ago

Well that was a whole lot of words that conveyed basically no information.

A sort of corporate communications-whitewashed version of the My Cousin Vinny "Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you."

braum• 12 months ago

up for My Cousin Vinny reference!

dimator• 12 months ago

I think the unsaid words were most important: no, I'm not gonna resign because some out of touch conman thinks I should.

sashank_1509• 12 months ago

So now being a bad CEO who is not of European ethnicity, will have the sitting president insinuate you not so subtly for treason. Wild. A cursory Wikipedia search confirms Tan was born in Malaysia, has lived in US for 40+ years in California, and is a practicing Christian.

travem• 12 months ago

The context in the related AP article shows that they were CEO of Cadence during the time when that company violated export control rules by selling certain technology to Chinese organizations linked to the Chinese military.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Cadence, in July, agreed to plead guilty to resolve charges that it violated export controls rules to sell hardware and software to China’s National University of Defense Technology, which is linked to the Chinese military. Tan was the CEO of Cadence when the company violated the rules between 2015 and 2021.

https://apnews.com/article/intel-trump-cotton-yeary-tan-2061...

dyauspitr4• 12 months ago

Why are you using they? It’s a man.

smsm423• 12 months ago

It's sad that people read the headlines and immediately start screaming "racism!". I don't know if Lip-Bu Tan has done anything wrong or not, but at least there's enough evidence to suggest a massive conflict of interest and particularly the Cadence affair stinks really bad. Maybe it turns out somehow Lip-Bu Tan is completely unconnected to any of this, but claiming this all just because he's "not of European ethnicity" is complete bullshit. It's not his ethnicity, it's his actions and connections.

selimthegrim2• 12 months ago

What does being Christian have to do with anything?

horns4lyfe• 12 months ago

Just read the article a little bit, jfc

catigula4• 12 months ago

ChatGPT vibes in the statement lmao

catigula4• 12 months ago

[flagged]

dismalaf4• 12 months ago

Jews aren't ethnically European and plenty of white Americans have sold state secrets.

catigula4• 12 months ago

Ashkenazi Jews are ethnically European and plenty of people driving motorcycles have lived but there is a statistical connection between driving motorcycles and dying.

tomhow• 12 months ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44842498 and marked it off topic.

kazinator• 12 months ago

No mention of AI; yay!

shrubble• 12 months ago

I view Intel as a company that has a huge number of missed opportunities:

1. They have excellent engineering resources - why didn't they just take their ARC cards and add more RAM to them? People are dropping $2K+ on the 5090 with 32GB and would surely pay $1200+ for an ARC with 32GB or even much more for one with 64GB or higher. Absolute performance wouldn't be the benchmark; being able to load larger models would make for excellent price/performance, for many lower-end uses.

2. We've been stuck at typical network speeds of 1GBit Ethernet for literally 20 years at this point. A first generation Opteron server like the Sun V20z (made by Newisys or Celestica, really) had dual-Gigabit interfaces; Intel should be pushing for 10Gb or higher as the bare minimum - and they make the 10Gb chips! More bandwidth capacity, even on the low end, will grow the computing market. And Intel has a big chunk of the market.

3. Intel did the same with their only offering dual-memory channel and thus much lower bandwidth of CPU <-> RAM ; unless you are buying an expensive server, you only get 2 channels to RAM; Apple increased their RAM bandwidth significantly and as it turns out, customers liked that, and bought more Apple CPUs.

Intel has to become "hungry" once more and stop their sedate, sclerotic ways. Maybe caring about their customers would help, too.

hakfoo2• 12 months ago

I have the feeling nobody knows what to do in terms of selling Ethernet for home use right now.

The moonshot efforts are around better Wi-Fi, which is, of course, at best a "good enough" solution that keeps people from running proper wires. But even as someone eager for hard-line networks, I wouldn't have good advice for a typical consumer.

If you run copper in your walls, you're really only good up to 10Gb and perhaps not even that. But if you want an optical-centric solution, that's an entirely new ecosystem that's a lot more complex. It's not just "buy a box of cable at the Home Depot and a crimp tool" anymore-- your devices might need 10GbE cards and SFP modules, you'll probably need some switches that still expose copper ports.

I wonder if there's a market for optical versions of the early "LAN in a box" kits that came with a couple of cheap ISA bus cards and a spool of cable-- just selling to people something that's all-inclusive and eliminates high-frustration mismatched parts.

unixhero• 12 months ago

10gigabit ethernet is where its at

to11mtm4• 12 months ago

They have excellent engineering resources - why didn't they just take their ARC cards and add more RAM to them? People are dropping $2K+ on the 5090 with 32GB and would surely pay $1200+ for an ARC with 32GB or even much more for one with 64GB or higher. Absolute performance wouldn't be the benchmark; being able to load larger models would make for excellent price/performance, for many lower-end uses.

This one also drives me bonkers, but my guess is that it doesn't capture that margin they want.

Intel seems to be kinda bad at starting from an 'underdog' standpoint in a market.

Intel did the same with their only offering dual-memory channel and thus much lower bandwidth of CPU <-> RAM ; unless you are buying an expensive server, you only get 2 channels to RAM; Apple increased their RAM bandwidth significantly and as it turns out, customers liked that, and bought more Apple CPUs.

Apple has much tighter integration; i.e. they don't have sockets for the CPU or memory. What you buy is what you get unless you're brave enough to solder.

AMD provides a sort of in-between with Threadripper and it's pro variant, however it seems that they have a bit of a limitation on bandwidth based on CCDs for the low core count Pro models [0].

Intel has to become "hungry" once more and stop their sedate, sclerotic ways. Maybe caring about their customers would help, too.

TBH I think whatever body (JEDEC I'd guess) needs to either make DDR6 128bit, or at the very least (and if even possible) work with memory controller folks to figure out a way to have a 'one stick, two channels' standard that simplifies board routing and keeps OEM usage simple.

It's really curious to me that over the last decade I've only dealt with one machine that only supported single channel, and the ones that 'were' single channel absolutely could have been dual channel but the OE could save a few bucks by going single channel due to the cost of two DIMMS vs one.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mcrx23/psa_the...

Eisenstein2• 12 months ago

TBH I think whatever body (JEDEC I'd guess) needs to either make DDR6 128bit

That would require twice the number of pins and traces on each DIMM with corresponding extra pins on the CPU package as well and associated interconnects which would add heat as well. You end up with similar problems when you increase the number of channels per DIMM. CPU packages are strained as it is; I don't think the tradeoffs are worth it to increase system memory bandwidth on consumer systems.

niles• 12 months ago

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-arc-pro-b50-and-b60-for-l...

24GB and 48GB cards are supposed to be coming.

raincom• 12 months ago

tl dr without all bullshit: "False claims are circulating about my past roles. I’ve always acted to the highest legal and ethical standards, and I lead Intel the same way. The Board supports our work. This year, we’ll launch high-volume manufacturing on the most advanced U.S. semiconductor process—thanks to you. Stay focused. Our mission is clear, our impact critical."

A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

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