SEPTEMBER 2020 PCWorld 17

What’s wrong with Intel, and how

to fix it: Former principal engineer,

Francois Piednoël, unloads

Principal engineer who worked on CPUs from the Pentium III to Core i7 says Intel has lost focus,

and is “lucky” AMD can’t make enough CPUs to do more damage. BY GORDON MAH UNG

I

n a blunt video posted in early August,

outspoken former Intel principal

engineer Francois Piednoël offered his

advice on how to “fix” Intel CPUs,

criticized current leadership for not being

engineers, said AVX512 was a misadventure,

and declared that it’s only luck AMD hasn’t

grabbed more market share.

“First, Intel is really out of focus,” Piednoël

said in the nearly hour-long video

presentation (go.pcworld.com/hlng). “The

leaders of Intel today are not engineers, they

are not people who understand what to

design to the market.”

Piednoël said Intel’s technical decisions

have largely been “nonsense” since 2016.

IMAGE: MARTYN WILLIAMS