I think history will see him as having governed the American crown jewel that is Intel good enough but with limited Vision.
The massive recent capex increase was a bad decision, IMO. Intel hardly generated any cash the past two years, certainly not in the position they should be - flush with cash to make acquisitions which i strongly believe they will need to (starting with Micron - I'm a shareholder :wub
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And they didn't take mobile seriously enough - they had StrongArm from their DEC asset acquisition and sold it off. Then they had Atom and didn't give it the resources needed because they primarily saw it as low cost PC (netbook).
The continuous push on improving integrated graphics and putting it on die, essentially dumbing down the PC and self-induced narrowing the gap with ARM, was also questionable - the original idea, to fab integrated graphics on old fabs was brilliant, the follow on not so much.
I hope it has nothing to do with health, though.
Anecdotally, I asked him at a public event about 64bit after AMD had launched while Intel was still in denial mode. His answer was brilliant and drew a lot of laughter - "the AMD sales guy wants to know".
Intel is at an inflection point at the moment and what they need is a visionary, a CEO who can set the right course. Like Andy Grove though that's probably asking too much.
Though I think getting someone from outside would be a mistake. The highest level executive I've known would never get hired too big of a job and got passed up for VP WW Sales anyhow but Tom Lacey ex was a great guy and a very good listener too. Probably Intel has many more people like that internally, with more experience so I'm confident they can find the right person.
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