“I think he understands the business well,” said Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “There are very few people Intel could have brought in with the right background, and he was one of them.”
Nguyen also gave Tan high marks for his time at Cadence. “He was able to keep them relevant of in terms of keeping the platform to design on. But it’s a different part of the semiconductor industry. Success there doesn’t mean success at Intel, so I’m looking forward to seeing how he addresses things,” said Nguyen.
Tan is coming into a chaotic situation. Intel has gone through four (one set of co-CEOs) CEOs in the last seven years, it has seen significant erosion of market share, and its stock has dropped 60% in value in the past year, to the point that Intel was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average and replaced with Nvidia.
There have been rumors for some time that Intel is up for sale, with everyone from Broadcom to Elon Musk rumored to be the buyer. There has also been talk of splitting the company, with the fabs going to one customer – most notably Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – and the semiconductor business going to another. Tan’s appointment should put those rumors to rest, experts say.
“Intel has a powerful and differentiated computing platform, a vast customer installed base and a robust manufacturing footprint that is getting stronger by the day as we rebuild our process technology roadmap,” Tan said in a statement issued by Intel. “I am eager to join the company and build upon the work the entire Intel team has been doing to position our business for the future.”
Tan holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a Master of Science in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MBA from the University of San Francisco. In 2022, he received the Robert N. Noyce Award, the Semiconductor Industry Association’s highest honor, according to Intel.
