Intel’s new leaders are good news for PC enthusiasts

Paul Otellini, Intel’s just-retired CEO, has been employed by Intel in various roles for over 39 years. He joined the company straight after completing his Business Management degree from the University of California in 1974 and rose up the ranks to become CEO in 2005. Like Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs and a host of other well-known companies in Silicon Valley, he’s a business man, not a scientist or a geek.

Paul Otellini

Otellini guided Intel out of the rough patch that was the Pentium and Netburst era and straightened things out a bit on arrival. From 2005 to the present day, Intel has been transformed into a company that dominates the server and desktop market and can lay claim fairly easily to the notebook and Ultrabook sectors. Today, it’s earning more money than ever.

Otellini’s Intel is a company more concerned about making money and keeping things going on schedule. But the two people replacing him might change the status quo for gamers and enthusiasts around the world.

The new Intel guard

The new CEO is Brian Krzanich. He’s an engineer and has been in charge of various fabrication plants owned by Intel since he joined the company in 1982. Given how the business side of Intel is fairly stable at this point, putting an engineer at the helm is an exciting prospect for gamers. Intel’s new processor family, Haswell GT3 or “Iris” is the company’s first real attempt at creating gaming-grade integrated graphics.

Related article: Intel’s Haswell GT3 graphics now called Iris

Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO

Intel is worried about how AMD’s APU processors are taking away market share for the budget gaming segment and Iris might just be the first in a long line of new GPUs that can challenge AMD and Nvidia.

Krzanich knows how much space Intel can afford to put aside for a GPU in the future and we could see some real progress on the GPU front within the next two years. Moore’s Law states that every 18-24 months the amount of transistors in a given space doubles, roughly increasing processing power by the same amount.

By this time in 2015, Intel’s Iris GPUs could be as powerful as a Geforce GTX650 Ti Boost. That’s a scary prospect for their main competitor, AMD.

Related Article: AMD says Moore’s law is at its end

Wreak some Havok

The exiting Otellini was also President of Intel and this capacity is to be filled by Renée James.

James has been in high-ranking roles commanding several Intel-owned companies like McAfee and Wind River – but its her role as director at Havok that’s most interesting for us gamers

Renee James

Havok is a software developer looking to make CPU-accelerated physics a reality for gamers. Havok’s physics software runs on several platforms, and works on consoles, computers and mobile phones and tablets.

Havok’s implementation also does native hardware acceleration and displayed strong performance on Intel’s processors. Havok was working on GPU-accelerated physics with ATi and Nvidia, but those projects were abandoned soon after when Intel bought the company.

Havok currently also works on Windows 8 tablets, for both the x86 and ARM environments. It additionally also works on Google’s Android.

We could see Intel making more moves into the Android market with strong associations with game developers and even more focus on Intel Iris once the product is launched and in the hands of reviewers and gamers.

This will be an exciting time for gamers because the company won’t just be focused on making money like it’s been doing in the past decade – it’ll be looking at how it can dominate the graphics market. More competition and more options are always a good thing for us.