Intel has hired Pat Gelsinger as its next CEO, replacing interim CEO Bob Swan. Mr. Gelsinger had been the CEO of VMWare since 2012.

“Pat is a proven technology leader with a distinguished track record of innovation, talent development, and a deep knowledge of Intel,” Intel chairman Omar Ishrak says. “He will continue a values-based cultural leadership approach with a hyper-focus on operational execution. The board is confident that Pat, together with the rest of the leadership team, will ensure strong execution of Intel’s strategy to build on its product leadership and take advantage of the significant opportunities ahead as it continues to transform from a CPU to a multi-architecture XPU company.”

For those wondering about the term XPU—I certainly was—it refers to a shift at Intel away from just CPUs, or central processing units, to “a mix of architectures across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators.”

Anyway, Intel also cites its “strong progress on its 7 nm process technology” and plans a public update on that progress at the time of its next quarterly earnings report, which should be within the next 30 days. Note that all of the four processor families that Intel announced this week for 2021 releases are 10 and 14 nm technologies.

As for Gelsinger, I think it’s fair to describe his tenure at VMWare as positive, and that he could be just the shot in the arm, pardon the pun, that Intel needs right now. It’s also worth noting that he was previously Intel’s first CTO, so he certainly has experience with the company as well.

Tagged with Intel