Father of Intel 486, Pentium Pro and Net Neutrality Joins VMWare as the New CEO

We just received information that Patrick P. Gelsinger, an industry veteran credited with dozens of information is one step ahead of reaching his goal of becoming a CEO of a technology company.

This chip engineer joined Intel in 1979 and quickly progressed to the role of Director and later become the first CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Intel. Pat Gelsinger is considered as the key contributor in development of the i286 (16-bit) and i386 (32-bit) microprocessor architectures. He was group leader on developing the Pentium Pro and a person which brought Internet and Wireless-related technologies into Intels product stack. The development of Pentium Pro, as well as Intels pushed focus on Internet technologies represents the founding stone of VMware, a company which Pat will start leading following the official announcement.

Like him or not, he was pushing the technologies inside Intel which would often maddened the competitors, who had no other choice but to follow. However, Pats coming of age inside Intel, and being groomed to become a CEO took a dent downwards with the damaging contract Intel signed with Rambus on bringing RDRAM to market. Mr. Gelsinger pushed RDRAM to Pentium III and upcoming Pentium 4 platform, leading to so-called Caminogate, product recall and a loss of billion dollars. The fall of Intels stock in 2000 is something we believe it should be taught in schools, when a company valued almost half a trillion dollars (peak was $436.69 Billion) tumbled down by $174.88 billion in just two days. To this date, Intels market cap did not pass the value the company lost in just those two days in August and October.

Still, even with the Rambus story not developing in is groups favor, the star darkened when AMDs K7 architecture flat out leveled Pentium III and subsequently less-efficient Pentium 4 "NetBurst" architectures. Pat had a good chance of becoming the CEO of Intel with the success of wireless push and the wireless radio strategy, but insistence of Big Iron Pentium 4, cancellation of Tejas and the rise of Israeli-developed Core (Yonah, Conroe) architecture sent Mr. Gelsinger to push for development of Intels first Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), codenamed Larrabee. Mr. Gelsinger then begun a war against NVIDIA at the time when Larrabee extensively used NVIDIA and AMD intellectual property. With the bill reaching billions of dollars (our sources estimate that including the settlement with NVIDIA, but excluding settlement with AMD, Intel lost around 4-4.5 billion dollars on Larrabee, i.e. LRB). That was also coup de grace for Pat, who was pushed out from Intel and ended up being the Chief Operating Officer e.g. COO at EMC, a company located on the same street as Intel in Santa Clara, California (Intel is 2200 Mission Blvd, EMC is headquartered at 2831 Mission Blvd, just below the college campus).

However, he is credited with the development of a framework with the FCC which later became "Net Neutrality".

With Pat being the CEO of VMware, the company is gaining a person not afraid to take a bet on technology and insists on developing that technology until it wins the market. Will it be enough to take VMware from 11,200 employees and $3.77 Billion going into the future… well see.