Very doubtful it was a voluntary retirement. Note how short Intel's parting "thanks" is. With a person of Pat's history and pedigree at Intel, they would have usually written a very flowery love letter instead of a short single mostly factual paragraph (original Intel statement
here).
There must be more to it. The only known fuckup of Pat was him missing out on a 40% discount at TSMC because of some not so thoughtful remarks he made about Taiwan/TSMC.
Other than that, he is hardly to blame for most of Intel's misery. He's not been with the company long enough for that. That said, his 5N4Y plan hasn't exactly worked out as planned as the 20A node had to be outright cancelled.
The other nodes were of mediocre quality at best and they produced mostly degenerating garbage on the "Intel 7" (10nm) node for over two years before realizing it (Intel 13th and 14th gen mega fuckup). Two gens for the trash bin. Gratz @ Intel.
18A was supposed to become the savior and Pat "
bet the company" on it by his own admission.
Qualcomm was apparently less than impressed with 18A when they sampled chips earlier this year and it's not like customers are exactly queuing up for 18A manufacturing at IFS.
So, my guess is that 18A is a bust like its predecessors. Skipping the line without the invaluable learning process is probably not the way to go or more companies might try leading edge chip manufacturing. Intel tried the impossible. You can't just effectively skip from 10nm ("Intel 7") to something like 18A (that is supposed to rival TSMC's 2nm) within such a short amount of time. You are lacking the experience, the learning process(es), the understanding of the tools and you can't keep up developing PDKs for the potential foundry customers. Mission impossible.
It will be interesting to see Intel's follow-up announcements in the coming weeks and months. They are probably in some really, really deep shit with 18A a bust and still no end of the troubles in sight after almost a decade of fumbling around at IFS...
-=Threadcrappeur Extraordinaire=-