Fister is well aware of the challenges that chip makers, both large and small, face as they try to innovate with new technologies, and that is why Cadence Design Systems, one of the big players in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software area, has tapped Fister to become its new chief executive officer (CEO) and president.
As a senior vice president and general manager at Intel, Fister had a fair amount of control over the server, workstation, chipsets, and related technologies that drive a fair portion of Intel’s $30bn in annual sales and arguably a very large portion of its billions in profits. Fister, who is 50, spent 17 years at Intel, and was responsible for bringing the later generations of Intel’s 80486 processors – the ones without the bugs – to market as well as the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Pentium II Xeon and Pentium III Xeon chips to market.
He has also been one of the champions of the 10-year, 64-bit Itanium line of chips co-designed by Intel and server maker Hewlett-Packard Co and, of late, has been the person who has explained why Itanium is better than Opteron and then reversed position to launch the Xeon with 64-bit extensions in February.
As a self-proclaimed gear head, the Intel job was a lot of fun, but Itanium has been something of a bummer until recently when performance finally got on par with RISC/Unix processors. Because of his close association with the Xeon and Itanium roadmaps, which have been radically changed a number of times in the past year, there will be plenty of talk about whether Fister left or was asked to leave. Officially, Intel says that Fister is resigning.
The jump to Cadence is an unexpected but logical one. The company has 4,800 employees and is a $1.1bn provider of software and services to many of the largest and smallest chip makers in the world and one of the big players in a $4bn industry. With Paul Otellini tapped to be president and chief operating officer at Intel last year and presumably the next CEO at the company when Craig Barrett retires next spring, Fister’s upward mobility was probably limited.
By moving to Cadence, he becomes CEO and president in charge of one of the companies that Intel will tap to try to give it the tools to create all of the new sophisticated processors it needs to make to stay in the market. Fister, as one of the guys most frustrated by the limitations of current EDA tools to speed up design, ferret out flaws and bugs, and improve yields, is the best person to sell Cadence tools into Intel.
This is an obvious reason why Cadence wants to hire one of the top guns at what could turn out to be its largest customers. But, according to Ray Bingham, the current CEO at Cadence who is ascending to the chairman role, the company wanted Fister as their top executive because he was the one who forged all of the partnerships with workstation and server markers that drove Intel’s share of those markets ridiculously high in the past decade.
The CEO job is not necessarily going to be easy at Cadence, however. The big chip makers play the EDA software makers off each other to drive down the cost of the software, and a key metric for the semiconductor business – ASIC design starts – is decreasing. However, Cadence has some advantages and plans to attack new markets and new geographies to build its business.
The company touted its open framework and database software, which makes it easier for companies to deploy, use, and integrate with other tools. Fister, who is on his first day on the job, called the shot just as he would have at Intel.
You just have to be confident that you can set a standard and then go ahead and execute, he said in a call with Wall Street analysts and reporters yesterday. People will pay – and pay differentially – if they can offset some of the human cost and potential waste as they drive efficiencies because this affects their profitability.
Bingham and Fister explained that Cadence planned to identify adjacencies to their core EDA software that directly affect yields and then try to gain new business; they also suggested that the company might work from the chip out to higher and higher abstraction levels to encompass complete systems. Finally, as chip making moves ever into new markets where environmental laws are arguably less stringent than in the States and Europe and labor is cheaper, Cadence will pursue business with chip upstarts. Many of these companies will inevitably compete with Intel as well as with other Cadence partners such as IBM Corp, Fujitsu Ltd, Hewlett-Packard, and Agilent.
Over at Intel, Abhijit Talwalkar, who was vice president of the company’s Enterprise Platforms Group and general manager of its Platform Products Group, which means he reported to Fister and was responsible for the development of chips, chipsets, and other features of workstations and servers, takes over from Fister. Talwalkar joined Intel in 1993 and has worked at the former Sequent Computer Systems, which is now part of IBM, and Lattice Semiconductor.
Intel also announced that it has broken its Software Solutions Group away from the Enterprise Platforms Group and that co-managers Richard Wirt and Will Swope now report directly to Otellini.
