Intel today announced that its board of directors has appointed 40-year technology industry leader Pat Gelsinger as its new chief executive officer, effective Feb. 15, 2021. Gelsinger will also join the Intel board of directors upon assuming the role. He will succeed Bob Swan, who will remain CEO until Feb. 15.

Today’s announcement is unrelated to Intel’s 2020 financial performance. Intel expects its fourth-quarter 2020 revenue and EPS to exceed its prior guidance provided on Oct. 22, 2020. In addition, the company has made strong progress on its 7nm process technology and plans on providing an update when it reports its full fourth-quarter and full-year 2020 results as previously scheduled on Jan. 21, 2021.

“The board and I deeply appreciate Bob Swan for his leadership and significant contributions through this period of transformation for Intel,” continued Ishrak. “Under his leadership, Intel has made significant progress on its strategy to transform into a multi-architecture XPU company to capitalize on market shifts and extend Intel’s reach into fast-growing markets. Bob has also been instrumental in reenergizing the company’s culture to drive better execution of our product and innovation roadmap. He leaves Intel in a strong strategic and financial position, and we thank him for his ongoing guidance as he works with Pat to ensure the leadership transition is seamless.”

“My goal over the past two years has been to position Intel for a new era of distributed intelligence, improving execution to strengthen our core CPU franchise and extending our reach to accelerate growth,” said Swan. “With significant progress made across those priorities, we’re now at the right juncture to make this transition to the next leader of Intel. I am fully supportive of the board’s selection of Pat and have great confidence that, under his leadership and the rest of the management team, Intel will continue to lead the market as one of the world’s most influential technology companies.”

Most recently, Gelsinger served as the CEO of VMware since 2012, where he significantly transformed the company into a recognized global leader in cloud infrastructure, enterprise mobility and cyber security, almost tripling the company’s annual revenues. Prior to joining VMware, Gelsinger was president and chief operating officer of EMC Information Infrastructure Products at EMC, overseeing engineering and operations for information storage, data computing, backup and recovery, RSA security and enterprise solutions. Before joining EMC, he spent 30 years at Intel, becoming the company’s first chief technology officer and driving the creation of key industry technologies such as USB and Wi-Fi. He was the architect of the original 80486 processor, led 14 different microprocessor programs and played key roles in the Core and Xeon families.

Today rumor is that 7nm output now is totally horrible and 10nm is still bad economically and in performance areas it can't match even 14nm.

Intel already asked TSMC about volume to make some of notebook processors using 5nm tech and wants to join Apple with using TSMC 3nm. Despite TSMC having severe problems with making 3nm work.