Lip-Bu Tan Lays Out Intel Recovery Plans || Tech Field Day News Rundown: April 2, 2025

Techstrong. It launches Checkmate for checkpoint. Broadcom maxes out their minimums.

Google Beefs up certificates. Core Weave is cooling. Broadcom enhances AI networking.

And we look at Lip Boot Tan's plan for Intel fans in this episode of the Tech Field Day rundown. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Tech Field Day Rundown for Wednesday, April the second. My name is Tom Hollingsworth and I go together with my co-host Steven Foskett, just like Peanut butter and jelly, because it is of course peanut butter and Jelly Day.

But if that's not your favorite thing, just do it yourself. 'cause yeah, it's DIY day. Steven, how are you doing today?

I, you know, honestly, it's a beautiful day. I thought maybe I'd go for a walk here on National Walking Day, and maybe I'll run into a ferret on National Ferret. Uh, I, you know, these, these, these days, you know, we stretch them a little bit.

Um, it's National Ferret Day. Have a ferret. Well, if you don't want to have a ferret or go for a walk, you can totally check out all of this great news that we have lined up.

And I guarantee you all of this is true. We don't play that game with those other people that happened yesterday, the, the Fools, as it were. But we actually wanted to kick off the coverage this week with another big exciting announcement because we're launching a brand new enterprise IT focused site.

Now, longtime fans of the Rundown, no doubt know all about Gestalt it and all of the great content that we published over the years. But now that we're a part of the Future Room group, along with our friends over at Techstrong, we thought it was time for a new look. Uh, make sure you go out there and you update your bookmarks to Textron it.

Steven, you were kind of behind this, so I was wondering if you could tell everybody real quickly, what is the goal for a new enterprise IT focused site? Well, we, uh, have long run Gestalt it, in fact, gestalt, it actually predates Tech Field Day and this exciting rundown news show, it predates the Tech Field Day podcast, which is, by the way, a very old podcast that started a long, long time ago. Um, I started gestalt it way back in the, when the numbers of the years began with 2 0 0 instead of 2 0 1 or 2 0 2.

And the idea was, um, I, so, so I came from enterprise storage and I realized that you can't really understand it just looking at it through the lens of storage. We needed to cross the streams as it were, and invite people in from other fields at that time. You know, it was virtualization, it was networking, it was security, it was compute.

And that philosophy is really what infused Tech Field Day from the very beginning, uh, Tom, you know, I mean, you, you were part of that for so many years, and it's a magical thing when you have people who know a lot about a little get together, because together we know a lot about a lot. And so the idea for, with Gestalt, it was that we're gonna have a big picture view of it. Now, the problem is that it's very difficult to run a, uh, tech news site as a, um, kind of not-for-profit side gig for a long time.

Um, we did it, um, 15 years was a pretty good run. And, um, 50,000 articles. Uh, can you imagine, Tom, 50,000 articles.

Um, it's, it's been great. However, it was really not the focus for you or for me or Corey or any of the other people involved. Alt it has always been, you know, a a fun thing that we did on the side.

But it is exactly what Textron does. Textron is a company that publishes media sites. com, they run Security Boulevard, just incredible sites like that.

And so when we joined the Futurum Group, and when Textron joined, the first thing I did was talk to Alan Shimel over at, uh, Textron and say, well, the first thing I did was say, Hey, how can I get me on that Textron gang thingy? And that's been a lot of fun. I'm on every Tuesday.

Um, but I also said, you know, gestalt, it sounds more like a Textron gig than a Tech Field Day gig. Do you guys want this site? And, and his response was, boy, do we, um, we've been needing a site like that because they have a lot of great content.

What they didn't have was a site for basically the nuts and bolts of it. Everything from chips to, so storage servers, networking, that sort of thing. Uh, so what we've done is we have moved, uh, te Gestalt it and our beloved editor and writer, Sona Saha over to the Techstrong side.

And so Sona is the editor of the New Text Strong. It, it's Live Now. And, um, if you go to Textron it, you will see not just the content that we've created over these last couple of decades, but also great new content with real IT pros.

I never thought that I could get somebody like John Schwartz, uh, writing for, for Gestalt It. Well now he's writing something almost every single day for Textron it. Um, and so it is a great launch.

I I, I will tell you, don't tell anyone, but the views, uh, traffic to the site has already doubled, um, which is just phenomenal. Um, and that was even before the launch of Textron. It.

Now that it's part of the Textron community, um, it's getting a lot more great content up there. I I think the views are probably gonna rapidly double a few more times, which is just amazing. And it's in good hands editorially.

Now, what does this mean for you, dear reader? First off, this is no longer the gestalt it rundown. This is now the Tech Field Day rundown, because I'm Tech Field Day guy Tom, he's Tech Field Day guy, Alistair's, tech Field Day guy.

We're all Tech Field Day guys. Um, and so we're running this as a way to provide a rundown of the news of the week that was from a Tech Field day perspective. Um, we also have relaunched the podcast, uh, actually over just about a year ago.

We relaunched the, uh, on-premise it podcast as the Tech Field Day podcast, because it really was the Tech Field Day podcast already. Um, we recently, uh, rebranded the Tech Field Day, or the Gestalt it YouTube channel as the tech field day plus YouTube channel, because it really was already basically everything up there was, um, non-event presentation content from Tech Field Day, and the same with the mailing list. So there was a Tech Field Day mailing list that went out basically to announce tech field day events.

So it was sort of a, an announcement list. And then there was another one that went out weekly, um, that we called the Gestalt IT mailing list, but it was the Tech Field Day mailing list already. And so that one is now the Tech Field Day, um, weekly mailing list as well.

So if you're watching this, if you subscribe, um, nothing's gonna change. The URLs didn't change. The RSS feeds didn't change, you know, probably nothing's gonna break.

If you subscribe to the mailing list, you'll still get the mailing it, it's just now it just has a different logo at the top to reflect kind of what it really is and what it really has been. And, um, if you want to subscribe over on the Textron It side, if you wanna start, um, seeing some of the, the new content that's appearing there, I, I urge you to because it is just phenomenal stuff and I couldn't be happier with, uh, with this result. Add checkpoint to the list of companies that got breached in 2025.

The attackers said that they grabbed internal network details and diagrams, hashed user passwords and source code for software. Screenshots of admin access to the system were shared as proof Checkpoint provided comment that this was old known and very pinpointed breach, which only affected three customers back in December, 2024. Way back then, checkpoint said that the portal was, um, accessed through compromised credentials and had other, uh, internal mitigations in place to prevent further exploitation.

Tom, um, how serious is this breach? I'm gonna be honest, I actually think checkpoint's more in the right here. When you look at the fact that they already have a knowledge base article out about this, and they're like, it was three customers.

Yeah, there was a lot of records in there, but quite honestly, there wasn't as much data as you think. Something like the, the, the data that was being shared had like tens of thousands of records and just scanning through them. It only looked like about 18,000 of them were actually valid and, and current.

Um, and, and the fact that Checkpoint was immediately like on top of this and said, it's old, like it happened in December, it was just affecting a few customers. It was compromised credentials. Uh, the one thing I will kind of take them to task for a little bit is this idea that their portal had some other mitigations that prevented this from becoming like a, a big lateral movement deal.

You're gonna have to give us a little bit more than that. Like, like how is this, what, what did you build into the system that other people don't get to see? Or did you have some kind of special customized version of your CRM that other people don't get?

Because that's the other thing that you have to understand. They didn't hack checkpoints software. They hacked checkpoints, customer software.

The thing that they bought from another company, and we see this a lot if, I don't know if you remember or not last year, but we talked about the whole thing that happened with Snowflake, where someone figured out how to get into the Snowflake database and suddenly a whole bunch of companies were getting hacked. The companies weren't getting hacked, snowflake was getting hacked, and, and that ended up being, you know, Hey, why don't you turn on multifactor authentication? That might be a good idea.

I think what we're gonna see here is that this was actually a, uh, a problem in their software that got corrected, uh, by a patch getting pushed down. And then it turns out that, you know, compromised credentials and all that other stuff. But this speaks to a bigger problem in that you can make a lot of noise about a hack really quickly by putting all of this data out there and saying, oh, look what I got.

And it looks really messy until you start sifting through all of it. And especially because most of the time the way that this works is that whoever's doing the attacking will put the data up for sale on a forum. And mostly it's kind of useless data.

Like, oh, great, I have an internal IP map of a company that I'm not gonna hack, or I have customer records that are 10 years outta date. Like, like, nobody's gonna go pay for that unless you're willing to pay for it to sift through it to find out. It's all junk anyway.

So you, you kinda have to play this cat and mouse game. So I applaud checkpoint's response. You just gotta make sure you're giving us a little bit more to go on so that we feel a little bit more secure.

There was an email last week from a tech distributor in France that made the rounds and highlighted a coming change to Broadcom's minimum licensing requirements for VMware customers. The email stated that on April 10th, the minimum number of licensed cores for VMware license will increase from 16 to 72. This means that any servers that are below the minimum core count will have that new minimum in force.

So for example, if you have an eight core CPU, you'll be paying for 72 licensed cores for that server. There will also be increased costs for customers that do not renew their subscription licenses by their anniversary date. Now, there's been some speculation from affected users that this is a way to kind of force smaller VMware customers onto more lucrative options such as VMware Cloud Foundation as opposed to the entry-level vSphere Foundation offering.

Steven, I saw a little bit about this, but then it kind of felt like some people weren't really picking up on it. Is this a massive change to the way that people are gonna start licensing their virtualization software? Well, it sounds like it is, doesn't it?

Um, I mean, wouldn't you be mad if you had only eight cores and you had to pay for 72 instead of eight? Um, that sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? The truth is that this isn't as much of a change for most VMware customers, as it sounds, frankly, this is egg on the face of VMware more than it is a something that's really gonna affect that many customers.

The problem is the customers that it affects, it's gonna very deeply affect. So, so let's dig into this. First off, VMware has not, as far as I know, confirmed this change.

So this could be a misunderstanding. Um, it could be something regional that we're not aware of, but it wouldn't surprise me if VMware did enact a minimum core count requirement, simply because multi-core CPUs are so popular, most customers already have more than 72 cores if they're using anything at all. In fact, I can't imagine a scenario where a VCF customer would have fewer than 72 cores.

So this just doesn't really affect VCF people. But, um, but the smallest companies, I think it would affect, assuming that it's true, because it's quite possible that there are many, many tiny shops out there, probably shops that are poorly equipped to migrate to something else or to handle this kind of change. And, and shocks that will, uh, shops that will be very shocked at the cost of licensing when they need to buy many, many more cores than they're actually using.

Those shops are gonna be really, really disproportionately affected by a change such as this one. Effectively, if you are using, uh, if you've got an old license, you've only got a few cores licensed, uh, you're kind of hoping for the best. Well, this is the end of the line.

I think Broadcom, uh, is really trying to push those shops out of the VMware ecosystem, which is really sad because to be honest, um, those were the, you know, tho those early adopters sometimes grow up and, and become major users in the future. And, um, frankly, if, if, if you raise the barrier to entry high enough, people just aren't gonna enter. It's no surprise that, uh, VMware competitors are making hay with this.

Um, I, I will admit, I was among the people who said, Hey, this isn't April 1st. How come they're announcing this? You know, because it sounds like such a ludicrous change, doesn't it?

That you would force everybody to have a minimum of 72 course. The other thing that they allegedly are forcing is a penalty if you haven't yet renewed your license, which again, I, I can see, but is really gonna affect the little guys and not gonna affect the big guys who probably already renewed anyway. Um, this is a big change.

It's a change that could affect a lot of people, and frankly, it's another great opportunity for companies. Uh, you know, I've seen, uh, my friends over at scale computing, uh, gleefully rubbing their hands saying, we would love to have you as a customer over here and we won't charge you a minimum of 72 cores. Um, certainly there are a lot of other companies and competitors out there that are saying the same thing.

Um, unfortunately the customers that this is gonna affect, they may not be in a position to go out there and make that change anytime soon. And that's gonna be a big problem. So we'll see how this, um, how this sorts out.

Um, again, for most VMware customers, anyone using VCF, it's really not gonna be a big deal. But for the little guys, I'm sorry to hear about this, and honestly, there's some great alternatives out there, so maybe give those a look. Google announced that proposed changes to TLS certificates have been ratified by the certification authority browser forum.

The first change is the inclusion of multi perspective issuance, corroboration or MPIC, which is their terminology for forcing the issuing certificate authority to verify that the requesting party has control of the domain. This is designed to prevent hijacking of all kinds, including BGP, which has been a huge problem. The other proposal was for something called linting, which is the process of analyzing X 5 0 9 certificates for errors and correcting them.

One of the biggest uses of linting is to find obsolete cryptographic methods and make their certificate owner update them to be current. It's hoped that this will standardize certificates and increase interoperability. Tom, what do you think the result of this is gonna be?

I think it's long overdue, to be honest with you, and I'm kind of shocked that we didn't already have this. Uh, the big change with the the MPIC stuff is that you've done this before, right? When you want to verify that you own control of a domain, you put A-A-D-N-S record in there, and then they look up that DNS record because only they are the ones who who gave it to you.

And then if it's there, then obviously you own the domain. Uh, this is making sure that that process can't be hijacked somehow. Because if you're gonna move forward with a process to, I don't know, use certificates to authenticate BGP sessions, you wanna make sure that that is the owner of that domain and there's no other way to, oh, I don't know, put something out there and get ahold of a certificate that you're not supposed to have and reroute a whole bunch of traffic through another country even for a few minutes.

Um, we've seen that a lot. And, and this is, to me, it, it just says we're doing our due diligence, right? Do this to prove that you own the domain before we'll ever issue any certificates to prevent any hijacking.

Kind of a long overdue thing. The linting part was kind of interesting to me because it's focused on X 5 0 9, and a lot of people out there are like, man, that's kind of old school technology. Well, yeah, it is, but there's still a lot of it out there.

And the problem with old technology is, is that it still runs the way that it always has. And if it is running, a lot of people don't go check on it, right? And so these certificates could probably be using really old, um, you know, encryption, cryptography methods like Triple Des, uh, and, and anybody out there who's ever had to work with that, especially in modern times, just kind of shiver goes up your spine because Triple Des is crackable in a matter of minutes.

So by going out there and effectively kind of creating this situation where they're gonna go seek out these certificates, they're gonna notify people and say, Hey, you know, you've got this thing that's kind of hanging out here. You need to upgrade it, you need to refresh it. You need to change the cryptographic methods that you're using.

It's gonna provide better interoperability. 'cause that's the other thing that most people don't realize. A lot of the problems that you have with modern systems is not in the way that they operate with each other.

It's when they have to operate with old systems. And, you know, just think about every crazy Windows device that you've ever bought, and the fact that there has to be a driver for it to work with Windows and that something like 70% of all Windows crashes are caused by crazy drivers. Now amplify that from a security perspective to, oh, I've gotta get all of these, you know, x 5 0 9 certificates that still haven't expired to interoperate with modern, you know, infrastructure.

And that's a problem. So I applaud this. I just, I kind of wish that maybe someone else had kind of jumped on board with Google to say, Hey, we need this.

As opposed to the way that the, the blog post kind of makes it sound is like, Google's the one who's bringing this to their attention and they're like, yeah, you know, we'll, we'll go ahead and do that. 'cause you know, it's probably a good idea because as we've seen over the last few months, uh, there are organizations out there that are still not a hundred percent certain that Google owning what I consider to be the dominant browser engine for, you know, everything chromium, being able to dictate the standards of the web. Like we already fought this battle in the nineties with Microsoft and Internet Explorer, and that's why we got to where we are so that Google could become the dominant player.

I feel like maybe the DOJ is right that maybe Chromium needs to be completely spun off from Google into its own kind of separate entity. And then Chromium could propose these standards and everybody else would feel at least a little bit more comfortable knowing that it's backed by a third party independent organization and not Google. But what do I know, if you've been watching the tech news, you know that there was a big IPO from Core Weave on Friday.

And just like some IPOs, things seem to be up and down quite a bit. Uh, the company, which of course is a huge partner with Nvidia announced at the very last minute that they were gonna change their price target. Originally, analysts had projected it to be almost up to $55 a share, but Core weve came out and said, we're gonna release it $40 a share.

5 billion. Now on Monday, the shares were trading a little bit lower than the IPO price, but on Tuesday they shot back up well above the IPO price. And so I, you know, this is stock market stuff, and I'm not exactly sure how all of this is gonna play out, but a lot of people were really anticipating this IPO because of the fact that the AI market is so hot and Core Weave offering GPUs as a service was kind of primed to take advantage of everybody wanting to build these things.

But I guess the question now, Steven, is, is the market unsure of how they want to proceed with Core Weave? And could this have an impact on other big AI IPOs? Well, you know, I guess there's sort of different ways of looking at this.

Now, as you mentioned, I am not a, um, a, a core weave, or I'm not a market analyst. Um, I'm not even a Core Weave expert, uh, but I play one on tv, so I'll see what I can say now, um, let's look at this a little bit differently. So first off, uh, I'm not gonna really worry too much about IPO prices and, uh, dollar closes and so on.

As you mentioned Core, weve went public, I guess at 40, then they closed at 37, and then today they're back up at 42. Um, you know, stock or 48, I guess, uh, stocks bounce. Um, that's for sure.

Uh, you know, I think we can say for certain that the IPO was a bit disappointing because as you said, they were hoping to get a lot more money out of it. The other thing, um, that I find interesting, uh, from IPOs and public companies is that these companies are forced to, um, release, uh, their financials, uh, for public consumption. And that's been a lot more interesting.

And I think that if we look at this core weave, IPO not as, you know, gosh, how is Core Weave doing? But if we look at it as sort of a referendum on the AI market, then it becomes a lot more interesting. Uh, certainly there's a lot of, uh, hype around AI right now.

A lot of people are very excited about the profits to be made, but there haven't been any profits made so far. In fact, uh, the analysis that we see from analysts and market analysts that know this stuff pretty well is that basically every company in the industry is losing money. They're basically, uh, selling, um, you know, dimes for a nickel and trying to make it up on volume.

And that's not really gonna work unless they can figure out a way of cutting the cost of goods sold, the cost of delivering these things. The other challenge is that so far, uh, the nature of AI makes it very different from previous software revolutions, you know, the internet revolution, et cetera, because many of these, in many of those cases, basically for the last 30 or 40 years in tech, um, there's been very little, um, uh, net new cost as you get another customer. Essentially you put your money into developing software and then you sell one copy of it and it's a tremendous loss.

You sell a thousand copies of it, well then maybe it's not a loss, you sell a million copies of it, then you suddenly have margins of like 95%, right? It's even more so in the internet space where essentially you can build a service that uses very little infrastructure and has very little expense behind it that really takes off like a bullet and suddenly you're making money hand over fist, even if you're not selling it for very much. The problem with AI is that every net new user of AI uses the same amount of, of infrastructure resources to deliver that.

So, you know, if, if, if I'm using x of um, compute capacity for my chat GPT queries, then you decide, hey, I want to, I wanna do some of that too. Well, then you're using X and the next guy's using X and the next guy's using it scales in a different way than we've seen previously. And that's a real trouble for the AI industry.

Now, who that's not a trouble for are the companies that are actually providing that infrastructure as long as they're selling it at a profit. So a company like Core Weave should be very well positioned to make money on this AI boom, simply because for them it's more of a commodity business and that they're able to, um, roll out more and more and more of the stuff that run this all runs on, and then the companies above them have to pay for that stuff. The problem is, and again, I'm relying on financial analysts that I trust, the problem is that Core Weave also is selling dimes for a nickel.

And in fact, they may be selling dimes for less than a nickel. Um, and that's not a great way to be, especially when it, those dimes are so expensive. So if you look at the core Weave filings, you'll see that they had to take on a tremendous amount of debt in order to, um, to build this system that they're able to then rent out to companies like OpenAI and stuff.

And, um, and, and assuming that they do that, then they have to continue to build up more and more and more. In fact, the CEO of Core Weave said on Friday, I believe that the company is built on debt, and that's a little bit alarming when it costs so much to borrow money. Again, if you look at the numbers, core Weave could be borrowing at over 10% interest on some pretty challenging terms.

I think that's really what Wall Street is reacting to, and I think that's what the tech industry is reacting to too. The tech industry is looking at this and saying, where's the profit? You know, when do we make profit?

Who makes profit? Um, core Weave should be well positioned 'cause they've got an investment from Nvidia, they've got probably discount parts from Nvidia. They certainly have, um, a very nice, uh, pipeline from Nvidia to get those parts and deploy them are, if they're not able to make money on that.

Wow. I wonder what's going on with this industry. And for me, that's the real takeaway here.

How does the AI boom, how does this AI phenomenon become an industry that actually makes money? Because, you know, you look at companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon, um, who know really well how to make money, and many of them are also kind of pulling back a little bit on their expectations from AI as a tool in terms of a moneymaking tool. And starting to look at it a little bit differently, we'll see where it goes.

Broadcom has announced new networking chips that are aimed at the hot AI market. The CO2 m and CO three are digital signal processors or DSPs that are designed to work with the 200 gigabit lanes. 6 terabyte ethernet.

One of the biggest advancements in these DSPs is the reduced power consumption for fiber optics. This reduction in consumption along with advanced technologies like forward air correction, should encourage people to upgrade to their latest chip sets according to experts. Tom, you're an expert.

Uh, why is reduced power such a big draw in networking? Have you been in a data center recently? Um, they get a little warm when you look at the fact that more and more of these devices that we're putting in there, especially when you talk about AI consuming more and more and more power.

5 kilowatts of power for the server when it was fully loaded with GPUs. And you think what, four of those in rack? So you're already bumping up against, you know, 50 kilowatts just for the servers, but you have to do something with them in order for the, to get them to talk to other stuff, right?

Well, here's the deal. 6 terabit ethernet need a lot of power in order to work properly. And that means that you're already gonna be creating a lot of, you know, power draw per rack.

But the waste product of power is heat. And this is something that we heard at Tech Field Day, years and years ago from Andy Bechtel Shine. He said that the biggest blocker for getting past 800 gigabit ethernet wasn't gonna be laser quality or fiber quality or sunspots or cosmic rays or any of that craziness.

It was the fact that they couldn't make a device that could dissipate the heat fast enough in order to make that, you know, workable. 6 terabyte optic. So I think that, you know, these new chips are digital signal processors, so they're working on enhancing the signal quality that you're already getting.

And by reducing the power draw that these lasers produce and enhancing the signal quality, you're effectively saying you can reduce the amount of power that you need to run to the rack in order to make the networking equipment work better. And they've been tested over the short haul multi mode fiber as well as the long haul single mode fiber. Very important there because server, like, I don't know if you guys know this or not, but the days of plugging an ethernet cable into a server to do this stuff, they're long gone, maybe in your management network, but like if you are talking about, you know, the, the cards in the servers connecting to a top of rack switch that goes to the end of row, all of that is done through fiber, and the shorter the fiber runs, the, the more optimal that that run, uh, data collection stuff can be.

So you've got to make sure that that fiber works at optimal, um, capacity at all times. And that's why you're starting to see this focus on not just building bigger beefier better, but creating these DSPs in this case to condition that signal to make it better. I think that when you're looking at the fact that we're still a ways away from creating more additional power, uh, delivery to giant data centers, I think this is actually gonna spur kind of a round of innovation where people are gonna say, well, if I can't get more power into my data center, I need to keep the things that I'm already using from consuming all of it.

So let's do a swap out to these, you know, tuner gig lanes. There's, it's a less complex switch that uses less power. That means there's more power budget available for the server, so I can maybe stick an extra GPU in it or something like that.

Um, but you know, that's, I I, that's my speculation on the, the analyst side of things. Uh, I don't vote with this on my, with my wallet, so there's no telling what people are gonna say. We had a story we wanted to take a closer look at and it involves Intel, and you all know that Intel has a new CEO lip Bhutan, uh, we covered it here on the rundown a couple of weeks ago, and this week was Intel Vision 2025, which was a big event that they put together to talk to, uh, the community and, and some other analysts and folks like that.

Well, lip Bhutan got up and told the attendees there about his vision for the return of Intel, and of course he said that Intel needs to attract engineering talent. They, of course need to fix their balance sheet issues and they need to look at the way that they do manufacturing processes. One of the biggest ways to take care of those last two was a rumor proposal that Intel could be spinning off non-core business units.

He also asked his customers to be, and I quote here, brutally honest with the company going forward and reiterated that he was going to be focusing on engineering talent. He's either gonna go out and hire brand new engineers, or he's gonna go find those X Intel employees that have left the company and maybe entice them to come back. Now, Steven, we've covered Intel's fortunes for quite a while here on the rundown, and we've talked through a lot of different ways that maybe Intel can return to prominence, but I guess my question is, do you think lip Bane's plan is what we need to turn Intel around?

Well, I think one thing that Lip Butan is doing right, is admitting that the company has lost its way and admitting that the company has made mistakes and asking customers for feedback and suggestions and ideas about what they want intel to do next. Um, that kind of humility is, uh, refreshing. Uh, frankly, it's something that we saw from the previous CEO as well.

And, um, something that we don't always see from tech companies, it shows that lip Bhutan understands the challenge that he's facing and the challenge that Intel is facing in order to kind of pull itself out of this dive. What we didn't really get was a lot of concrete answers about what exactly they're gonna do. Now, this is a new CEO, um, you could forgive him for maybe not having a plan about what he's gonna do for Intel, but on the other hand, this is a guy who was on the board of Intel for years, um, somebody who really knows the chip industry, somebody who presumably has an incredible BA bench of, uh, thought leaders to help guide him on his way.

And yet in this presentation, he really didn't give us much information about what the company is gonna do. For example, uh, one of the biggest questions we have is what is Intel gonna do about the, uh, data center in, uh, Ohio, the, the chip fab in Ohio that it's been building? Um, will that go forward or not?

The answer, well, there wasn't any answer. Uh, the next question we got, uh, you know, what is Intel gonna do about its next generation products? Well, uh, lip Bhutan and the rest of the team at Intel did give us a pretty good walk through the next generation products coming out of Intel, but basically all that stuff is already set in stone.

So it, I mean, honestly, the only thing they could have said would be, we're not doing this because it's not like they can go invent a new next generation Xon today that's gonna be launched later this year. I mean, that's just not how the chip industry works. Intel has been working on this stuff literally for years, and now it's coming to light.

Um, so I guess maybe people are expecting too much. It's kind of like when the president comes in and they expect like a new presidential administration to like, I don't know, lower the cost of eggs on day two. Well, that's not just how the, how that this whole thing works, right?

You, you, the president comes in and they set a new tone and then you give it two or three years and then you see how things are going. Uh, wall Street may not like that, but that's the truth. That's what happens when you have a new president.

That's what happens when you have a new CEO. And for that perspective, I'm actually excited about lip Bhutan because basically the things that he said, and more importantly the way that he said it made me feel like this guy is the kind of leader that Intel needs. Let's see where he goes with this.

Tom, I echo your statements there because you come into a company who quite honestly has been having trouble innovating, right? Like, we've seen that over the years with some of their issues with releasing chips with some of the, the security issues that they've had, the fact that they kinda lost the GPU race. Um, and then you bring in a guy who maybe doesn't do a complete 180, but says, I'm gonna focus on engineering talent.

Like, like, I'm gonna do what I can to bring the smart people back here. I have to applaud that messaging because you're effectively saying we need to get to the next level in order to beat our competitors here. And, and yes, they are fighting against, uh, a MD, they're fighting against Nvidia.

The question is, and you kind of alluded to it in your statement, is not, can the smart people save us? It's, can the smart people save us before the people with the purse strings decide this isn't good enough? Um, we always talk about runway when we talk about startups, right?

Um, you know, do I have enough money in the bank to keep going until I can figure out how to make this work? Well, Intel obviously has enough money in the bank, but do they, because we've seen, you know, they originally were trying to put all these pieces together to create, um, applications for their chips, right? And I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about hardware, you know, things like, um, you know, mobile, I, uh, autonomous vehicles and, you know, their, their servers and, and all these other things.

And then they slowly started piecing it out. They started getting rid of it 'cause they needed the cash more than they needed the, the pipeline effectively. And now we're kind of at a point, you know, we were talking about this right before the, the thing started.

Oh, some people are saying, oh, well he's gonna get rid of in Intel's non-core businesses, what's left? Like, like Intel is kind of down to, it's, it's our chip stuff, it's our foundries. Are are, are you gonna get rid of the foundries?

Are you going to kind of roll them into their own separate concern and then, you know, control enough of it that you can continue to keep the CHIPS ACT funding if it's still there that, that you need to make this happen? Or are you just gonna kind of concede that maybe you can't make this happen. But one of the other weird rumors that's been going around all this week is the fact that there's a possibility that Nvidia could be coming to Intel to start doing chip productions.

Because one of the things that we've seen on a bigger global, uh, political scale is that there's pressure being put on Taiwan and TSMC in the form of tariffs. And so if the goal of those tariffs is to onshore manufacturing, obviously Intel would be a big pr you know, they'd be the target of that. But is that gonna meet the requirements that, uh, NVIDIA's gonna have?

'cause obviously NVIDIA's not gonna pull chip manufacturing from a place they know they're getting good gear to bring it to the US to pay slightly less in tariffs, but end up paying more because they either can't get enough units to ship, which is a problem they already have, or the units that they have are, are low enough quality that they're not gonna get what they really want out of it. I mean, I don't know if you follow like the gaming market, you know, the other thing that GPUs do other than run AI code, but there was a big deal when they launched their latest series of GPUs about some of the fact that that, that some of their, uh, raster operations processors were disabled. And you know, I look, it's like a, a 4% performance hit if you think about it in the, in the grand scheme of things.

But man, for some people, 4% really matters. So do you think Nvidia would be happy with Intel? They're like, oh, well we can get you like 95% of what TSMC can do.

Yeah, but that 5% can matter to some of our most loyal customers. I, I don't have a good answer. But then if Intel ends up being a manufacturer for Nvidia and that's the way that they're gonna get enough money to kind of go back to prominence, what happens when they want to jump back into that GPU market or what happens when NVIDIA decides, well, what if we wanna take over the CPU market with ARM CPUs?

Yeah, there, there's a lot to unpack here and a lot of it is reading the tea leaves of the market. Tom, you know, you look at, um, the AI market, for example, um, lip Bhutan said a lot of of things not specific, but enough that we know that Intel is looking at, um, fighting in the AI space against Nvidia. Um, as we talked about previously on the show, um, there's some question about exactly what that product should look like.

Uh, you know, uh, wouldn't it be embarrassing if, uh, Gaudi ended up being the right direction, uh, instead of going against these, you know, a hundred plus kilowatt racks that Nvidia is rolling out there. But it would also be embarrassing if it's completely the wrong direction and Intel should have invested in its own 600 kilowatt rack or something like that. So, um, I guess, uh, you know, hopefully, uh, the Intel team is up to snuff and can predict what the market wants and hopefully, uh, lip Bhutan can turn this thing around.

But, you know, it means so far he's saying the right things. I guess we gotta give the guy some time And time is what we have here on the rundown, because of course we're gonna be here every week bringing you the greatest real news that's coming out of the IT space and all the enterprise things that you need to be concerned about. But we don't just report the news sometimes.

We make the news and what we're gonna be making next week is something special with you. Steven, why don't you tell us about what you've got going on? Yeah, I'm pretty excited.

Uh, I'm heading back to Houston where I used to live. Uh, going to visit the HPE campus where I've been before. And, uh, diving into HPE ProLiant.

Now I'm kind of a server nerd. I know I'm a storage nerd, I'm a server nerd too. Uh, I also am a customer.

Um, I have a couple of ProLiant servers that I've used. Um, I actually just deployed one and, um, there is some incredible engineering in these systems. We are diving deep into HP's next Gen ProLiant technology.

We're gonna look at ILO seven. We're gonna look at the, the really cool Edge servers that they've got. We're gonna look at some of their specialized, uh, AI servers.

And not only that, but we're gonna get to spend some time with their gurus of liquid cooling. So nerd out with me on Tuesday, April 8th as we live stream, uh, sessions from HP's, uh, Houston, uh, offices, and we dive into some of the coolest server tech out there. I'm also really excited about AI Infrastructure Field Day.

That's April 20, uh, second through 25th. That's right, four days. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

We're gonna be having companies presenting all aspects of infrastructure, um, with a focus on ai. We've got a full day with Google, we've got, uh, a whole bunch of other companies that are gonna be joining us there. It's gonna be incredible.

The probably the biggest Field day event of the year. So again, that's uh, the third week in April. Please join us And in the immortal words of the sage of our time, Justin Timberlake, it's gonna be May next.

And that is my time to shine because I've got two big events headed your way. First part of the, uh, month, we're gonna be having Mobility Field Day, that's gonna be May 7th, eighth and ninth. Uh, we have a big lineup of people that are gonna be talking about all of the new advancements in the wireless and mobility space.

Uh, enterprise users that are focused on things like wifi seven or Private 5G or you know, really any technology, whether it's networking, networking as a service, you name it. Make sure you set your calendars for that. It's gonna be jam packed.

And then at the end of the month, we are gonna be having Security Field Day, and that's gonna be May 29th and 30th. It's gonna be in Silicon Valley again. And we have some big names there.

We're gonna be talking to folks from Beam. We're also gonna be talking to our friends at Microsoft. And if you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, we just published a Tech Field Day showcase all about some of the cool things that Microsoft is gonna be talking about at their secure conference coming up next week.

But I'm sure we're gonna get more about that at Security Field Day coming up at the end of May. And we're gonna be bringing you the news the whole time. Myself, Steven Alistair, we're gonna be here with all the exciting things that have happened because we appreciate you watching the Tech Field Day rundown.

Each week we publish our episodes on Wednesday on YouTube or in your favorite podcast application of choice. If you wanna listen to what we have to say, don't forget that the rundown is Stream Live on Textron tv and you can catch us on all of the other great Textron properties, including Textron it, as well as the Futurum Group websites. Uh, we're gonna be back next Wednesday, myself and Alistair, to talk all about the IT News of the week.

That was until then for myself, Tom Hollingsworth and for Steven FoST. Thank you very much for tuning in. Have yourselves an amazing day, and we'll see you next week.