A new team of actual gamers
All of this feels like a world away from the Intel of the 2010s, which kept reselling the same Skylake quad-cores and told us to be happy with it. This about-face may well have come from an overhaul of Intel’s teams and structure. In 2025, the company brought in a new CEO in Lip-Bu Tan, but he’s not the only new face at Intel in recent years.
“There’s a new product management team. There’s a new business team. There’s a new marketing team. There’s a new engineering team for these gaming CPUs,” Hallock told Club386.
I asked him about that changing of the guard in our interview, and though he wouldn’t be drawn into discussing the executive arm of the company, from his side of the equation at least, things are looking rosy.
“I’m personally very excited about where we are right now and what the future holds for our desktop business,” he said. “We’ve got a super talented team in place, with a great balance of Intel veterans and folks newer to the company that ensures we’re making the right product decisions with a diversity of inputs in the decision-making process.”
Pexels: Ron Lach
That mix of new and old may have the right focus for this kind of enthusiast chip division. “I, my team—we are ourselves, first and foremost, PC builders and enthusiasts. Every single one of us has built their own PC, games on that PC. That was not always the case at Intel,” he told Club386. It might be what’s making a real difference.
“The overlap between gamers, creators, and professionals gets bigger by the day, and it’s important our products address the unique compute needs of all the relevant workloads included in that Venn diagram,” Hallock told PCWorld. “Building products that reflect this reality is important to my team, and our singular focus is on delivering a roadmap that’s legitimately exciting to enthusiasts.”
Again, it’s good to exercise caution here. Intel is in bed with both Nvidia and a US government that’s doing little to halt the rampant inflation of enthusiast hardware. In many ways, they’re accelerating it. But there are real people working at Intel—and it sounds like Intel has built a much more enthusiast-friendly group of workers in key positions.