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A hot potato: Craig Barrett is firing shots at Intel’s board over its proposal to break the company up into multiple smaller pieces and sell parts of the business to TSMC. The former Intel CEO called it the “dumbest idea around” that would squander the “accomplishments” made under Pat Gelsinger’s leadership.
Barrett, who ran Intel from 1998 to 2005, didn’t mince words in his opinion piece published on Fortune, where he expressed a starkly different take. He says the only viable path forward for the company is to stay unified and double down on its latest 18A process node and imaging technologies like high NA EUV lithography.
Perhaps even more radically, Barrett contends that Gelsinger should be brought back. That’s because under the ousted CEO, Intel finally regained technical parity with TSMC at the 2nm node after years of stagnation, according to Barrett.
“Pat Gelsinger did a great job at resuscitating the technology development team,” Barrett wrote, highlighting Intel’s lead in novel areas like backside power delivery in addition to the 18A process itself. He added that a better move over simply breaking the company down might be to fire the board and rehire Gelsinger to “finish the job he has aptly handled over the past few years.”
The critique pulls no punches against the “well-meaning but off target” current Intel board members. He compared them in a seemingly sarcastic way to “two academics and two former government bureaucrats – just the type of folks you want dictating strategy in the ruggedly competitive semiconductor industry.”
Barrett went so far as to place the blame for Intel’s poor performance squarely on the shoulders of the board members, saying “they bear ultimate responsibility for what has happened to Intel over the last decade.”
Where Intel faltered in the past, per Barrett, was its outdated fabrication technologies. But now, with 18A bringing Intel’s foundry ops up to speed, a split would only “introduce complications” rather than solve anything. Instead, he advises Intel to focus on “good customer service, fair pricing, guaranteed capacity, and a clear separation of chip designers from their foundry customers.”
While he opposes breaking Intel up entirely, Barrett does support splitting the company into a design firm and a separate foundry, as long as the foundry is not sold.
Barrett signs off by noting that his criticism of Intel being split up stems from understanding “the intricacies of the semiconductor industry.” He derides the plan as a “simplistic solution” that ignores just how difficult and time-consuming it is to develop and ramp leading-edge manufacturing tech.
“It takes years to develop a new semiconductor manufacturing technology and ramp it into volume production. Intel is about to regain its leadership in this area, and the dumbest idea around is to stall that from happening by slicing the company into pieces,” he declared.
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