Arm " is worth almost $150 billion," writes the Verge, "which is now considerably more than Intel."

"With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger 'retired' and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what [Arm CEO Rene] Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that [Haas] approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted...."
Haas: As someone who has been in the industry my whole career, it is a little sad to see what's happening... Intel is an innovation powerhouse. At the same time, you have to innovate in our industry. There are lots of tombstones of great tech companies that don't reinvent themselves.

I think Intel's biggest dilemma is how to disassociate being either a vertical company [where a company owns its supply chain] or a fabless company, to oversimplify it. That is the fork in the road that they've faced for the last decade. Pat [Gelsinger] had a strategy that was very clear that vertical was the way to win. In my opinion, when he took that strategy on in 2021, that was not a three-year strategy. That was a five-to-10-year strategy. He's gone and there's a new CEO to be brought in and the decision has to be made.
My personal bias says that vertical integration is a pretty powerful thing. If they could get that right, I think they would be in an amazing position. But the cost associated with it is so high that it may be too big of a hill to climb. I'm not going to comment on the rumors that we wanted to buy them. But I think, again, if you're a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition.
When Pat was the CEO, I did tell him more than once, "You ought to license Arm because if you've got your own fabs, fabs are all about volume and we can provide volume." I wasn't successful in convincing him to do that...

Haas also obliquely commented on rumors that Arm will build its own AI chips, saying that companies making hardware are closer to the "interlock" of between hardware and software and "have a much better perspective in terms of the design tradeoffs to make. So, if we were to do something, that would be one of the reasons."

The full interview will be coming to the Verge's Decoder podcast soon...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/12/07/0333209/what-arms-ceo-makes-of-the-intel-debacle?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.