Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, told employees in his July 2025 memo "Steps in the Right Direction" that he has "instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me before tape-out."
To Wall Street, this might sound tough and reassuring.
To anyone who has ever worked in chip design, it sounds like parody — the business equivalent of approving the screenplay after the movie is already filmed. I'm sure that even the most junior person at Intel was scratching their head.
The Point of No Return
Tape-out is when a chip design is sent to the factory - from that moment, you're locked in.
Tape-out isn't where you debate whether a design is good. It's the point of no return. By the time you get there, you've already sunk years of engineering and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Every critical decision has been made months or years earlier: the target architecture, the performance goals, the power envelope, the manufacturing process node. At tape-out, engineers are fixing final bugs and praying the silicon works. You can patch small issues if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you discover a fundamental flaw and realize you've just burned through Intel's quarterly R&D budget.
Tan claims his tape-out reviews will "reduce development costs" - which proves he doesn't understand that by tape-out, virtually all development costs have already been spent. The expensive work - architecture definition, design, verification, physical implementation - happens in the years before tape-out.
Where the CEO Actually Matters
There is exactly one place where a business-focused CEO should insert himself: at the product definition stage, before any engineering begins. That's when the questions are business questions:
What market are we targeting and why?
Who are the customers and what do they actually need?
What's our cost structure compared to competitors?
Which architectural bets give us sustainable advantage?
The semiconductor industry is littered with technically excellent chips that solved the wrong problems for the wrong customers.
Being able to navigate these waters for something like the processors Intel is making takes decades of experience in processor production — experience Tan simply doesn't have.
The Bottom Line
Putting someone in charge of Intel who does not seem to understand where tape-out lives in the chip production process is hard to fathom.
Tape-out is such a fundamental event in any company that makes processors - it's like not knowing what time of year Christmas is.