CEO Brian Krzanich of Intel resigned four days ago after the commencement of an investigation into a previous relationship with an employee that was a violation of the company’s non-fraternization policy.
It was five years ago when Krzanich was appointed CEO, and all he has done since then was to drive the company forward in conventional markets. But, as a result of the cloud and the invention of smartphones, the company’s business has been disturbed. What came as a surprise to the Intel was the development of AI and self-driving cars. As by and by, the company has been declining and Krzanich has been working since the moment he was made CEO to fight this decline.
Intel has for a long time dominated the market when it came PCs and servers, but of recent, competitors like AMD are catching up to them and threatening to move them out the market. Even CEO Krzanich has acknowledged that Intel’s server share will be lost to AMD this year.
During the tenure of Krzanich, Intel went through a huge restructuring and this is what made the company to bail from the smartphone market. It’s Atom processors which were supposed to be a competition for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line was cancelled and the company also signed a deal to design ARM-based chips in Intel factories. Right now the company is focusing on GPU and AI. It hired Apple and AMD veteran Raja Koduri to build graphics chips which it plans to launch in 2020. On the other hand, AMD and NVIDIA are way ahead of Intel in the sense that GPUs have thousands of cores that they can handle whilst frequently calculating unlike traditional processors and this makes them ideal for training AI. This is one thing the company has to work on.
Following the resignation of Brian Krzanich, the company has to focus on hiring a CEO that can bring it up to speed in the competition race for AI and at the same time make sure that it does not permit its competitors to take all its share of datacenter dominance.
