Confronted with “the most critical junc-
ture in its long and storied history,” Intel
is bringing back its “boy wonder,” said
Therese Poletti in MarketWatch.com. Still,
its incoming CEO, Pat Gelsinger, “faces
quite a task in returning the chip giant to
the glory days.” An engineering whiz who
spent most of his career at Intel, Gelsinger
may be one of the few people who can
“guide Intel out of the mess in which it cur-
rently resides.” The company that invented
the microprocessor was long a driving force
in the tech industry. But under CEO Bob Swan, who will leave
in mid-February, Intel went from “having a two-year tech lead to
being three years behind” in manufacturing technology. Progress
is likely to be slow, but there is optimism around Santa Clara,
Calif. One analyst called Gelsinger’s hiring “the biggest return of
a prodigal son since Steve Jobs went back to Apple.”A new chief executive will help stem Intel’s pressing “loss of
talent,” said Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal, but
the company needs more than a morale boost. It’s now “two
generations behind a fast-moving rival,” Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Co., in its chip-making process. While TSMC is
already making cutting-edge 5-nanometer chips, Intel’s “latest
process for manufacturing chips at 7 nanometers ran into new
problems” this summer. That has created pressure from Wall
Street for Intel to outsource its production. Gelsinger last weeksaid he would outsource some work, but
that Intel still plans to keep making most
of its chips in the future—setting himself
the “daunting” mission of recovering
Intel’s manufacturing edge.Intel’s challenges were on display at
last week’s virtual Consumer Electron-
ics Showcase, said Chuong Nguyen in
DigitalTrends.com. Chip competitor
AMD showcased its new Ryzen 5000 mo-
bile processors, which it said could beat
the performance of Intel’s 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors “by
as much as 44 percent” while still offering “up to 17.5 hours
of battery life.” While AMD was showing off its powerful new
architecture for laptops, Intel’s much-promised new gaming
chips “were a no-show.” Gelsinger is coming back to a competi-
tive landscape very different from his earlier days at Intel, said
Clare Duffy in CNN.com. The company “has in recent years
lost its position as the industry’s undisputed leader”; competitors
have bested it both in technology and in financial performance.
Gelsinger not only has to solve the major delays in producing
Intel’s next-generation chips, but also faces “unprecedented
competition from former steadfast partners.” Apple’s success in
building its own chips “will likely encourage other PC makers
to explore” alternatives to Intel, too. Intel has to be “a different
company going forward,” and we have yet to find out what its
key innovations will be.Intel inside: A pathbreaker in need of a turnaround
GettyGoogle resists fees for news links
Google threatened to shut down its search
engine in Australia if the government passes
a bill forcing tech companies to pay for news
links, said Damien Cave in The New York
Times. Facebook, which “appeared with
Google at an Australian Senate hearing” last
week, “reaffirmed a threat of its own, vow-
ing to block users in Australia from posting
or sharing links to news if the bill is passed.”
While Google has already “agreed to pay
news publications in France under an agree-
ment likely to lead to more deals across
Europe,” Australia’s plan holds greater risks
for the search giant. France gives Google
broad leeway to negotiate prices with publish-
ers, but under Australia’s proposed legislation,
most negotiations between tech platforms and
media companies are likely to end up at an
“independent arbitration body.”Trump pardon for trade secrets theft
Former President Trump granted a last-minute
pardon to controversial onetime Google en-
gineer Anthony Levandowski before leaving
office last week, said Kirsten Korosec in Tech
Crunch.com. “A star engineer” renowned for
being “an early pioneer of autonomous ve-
hicles,” Levandowski was sentenced in Augustto 18 months in prison for stealing trade
secrets from Google, which he used to start
Otto, the self-driving car company acquired
by Uber. The actions triggered a “multi-year
legal saga” beyond the criminal charges;
Levandowski filed for bankruptcy protection
last year after Google was awarded $179 mil-
lion in an arbitration case against him. But
“Levandowski’s pardon was supported by
technology founders and investors, including
Founders Fund’s co-founder Peter Thiel,” a
longtime backer of Trump’s.Taking control of your browser tabs
If you keep way too many tabs open in your
browser hoping to get back to them later, you
are far from alone, said John Kehayias in Vice
.com. I’ve long “hoarded” tabs, opening more
and more as computers got more powerful,
“always going to the limit of what my com-
puters were capable of.” I was afraid of miss-
ing something, but it was also a form of pro-
crastination. Eventually, my computer would
crash, and I’d add more RAM or an updated
CPU to support my habit. But this New Year’s
Day, I decided it was enough. I closed all
1,314 of my browser tabs and “let go.” Well,
not totally. “Before I closed the tabs, I book-
marked them in a bunch of folders.”Bytes: What’s new in tech
Augmented-reality glasses are
helping surgeons make sure their
operations come off without mis-
takes, said John McCormick in The
Wall Street Journal. Orthopedic sur-
geon Jonathan Vigdorchik at New
York’s Hospital for Special Surgery
recently donned spectacles made
by Vuzix Corp. to perform the first
augmented reality–assisted knee
replacement. The glasses showed
Vigdorchik a “3D model of the leg
with a diagram of planned cuts.”
When a surgeon “makes cuts
exactly as planned, a green line
appears as instruments are moving.
If cuts are off, the line turns red.”
Sensors clamped to the patient’s
knee also transmit signals to the
glasses, sending “a precise mea-
surement of their spatial position in
3D” to help surgeons keep the liga-
ments in the knee in balance.Innovation of the week
20 NEWS Technology
Gelsinger is tasked with fixing Intel.