Who should be Intel's next CEO? These are the top candidates people are buzzing about

• Intel's former CEO Brian Krzanich was out of the job so suddenly, the company had to appoint an interim CEO while it embarks on a search.
• That means it's time to play: who will be the next CEO?
• Intel has always hired from within, but says it will be looking for candidates inside and outside the office.
• Here's a list of the candidates people are buzzing about based on our conversations with people, online water cooler chat and a few of our own thoughts.

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With Brian Krzanich's sudden and surprise departure from Intel's corner office, it's time to play the who-will-take-his place game.

Intel has a long tradition of grooming its CEOs from within its internal ranks.

That makes a lot of sense given how huge the company is across so many different electronics markets, from PC processors to memory to networking and so on.

Most importantly, the CEO of Intel needs to balance two very distinct jobs:

1. Keeping a global network of multi-billion dollar chip manufacturing facilities running smoothly and without any hiccups.

2. Having the vision to focus on the right products and to steer the company into new markets (without missing the next big thing, as Intel famously did in mobile).

Finding someone who can do both of those jobs is no easy feat, which is why the company has always ended up going with someone internal.

But times are changing. The company is still recovering from missing the boat on the mobile platform shift. And some chip industry insiders are buzzing that now may finally be the time for Intel to break with tradition.

Intel itself said, quite deliberately, that it will be looking at CEO candidates externally, as well as internally - and for good reason. Most of the top internal candidates are relatively new hires. So if you're going to go with someone who hasn't been there very long, it opens to door to going with fresh blood altogether.

The most likely candidates internally are:

Bob Swan, who is currently interim CEO. He joined Intel in 2016 as CFO, and he may looking at this as an extended job interview. He may succeed and nab the top role permanently for himself.

The main downside to Swan is that he's a straight up financial guy, not an engineer. He was the CFO of eBay for nine years, and also worked at investing firm General Atlantic. To succeed, he'd have to build a brain-trust of execs that could run the technical side of the business, and fix Intel's 10nm (and beyond) chip fabrication issues.

Navin Shenoy joined Intel in 1995 and currently runs Intel's all important data center group. He's the classic choice as he grew up inside Intel and cut his teeth as the technical assistant to former Intel CEO Paul Otellini. He's known internally for having the product vision that Intel needs right now.

Venkata Renduchintala, known at Intel as Murthy. Renduchintala was hired away from Qualcomm in 2016 and currently runs Intel's hefty client device products and its hot up-and-coming Internet of Things (IoT) products.

He's got the technical chops, though his management style has raised eyebrows in the past. In a 2016 Business Insider profile one person described Renduchintala as being "loud" and "not afraid to say" his opinion, while another called his leadership style "command and control" where he often "dressed down" underperforming executives at Qualcomm.

Raja Koduri was hired away from AMD in 2017. He runs a new group that was formed when he was hired -Intel's Core and Visual Computing Group, which deals with graphics and other visual technologies.

Jim Keller is the newest hire, joining in April from his short-lived stint running Tesla's self-driving autopilot group (a job at Tesla that has seen a lot of turnover). Prior to that, Keller spent most of his career in semiconductors for AMD and others. He's a long-shot but if Intel wanted to bring in fresh blood for its CEO while still maintaining its tradition of hiring from within, Keller could be the guy. He currently leads chip engineering.

Top outsiders

If Intel is serious about looking outside the company, one place it might want to prowl is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the giant chip manufacturer that makes processors for everyone from Apple to Qualcomm.

Rick Cassidy is CEO of TMSC's North America unit. TSMC's semiconductor manufacturing process is kicking Intel's butt. As Intel has struggled to get its 10nm chips into production while dreaming of its 7nm offerings, TSMC not only already has 10nm chips available, earlier this year it started mass producing 7nm, and is working on 5nm, the chip that is supposed to be the "end of Moore's Law." Hiring someone from TSMC might be the boost Intel needs.

Sanjay Jha is the recently departed CEO of Intel's fab rival Global Foundries, who left that role March after four years as CEO. He's also the former COO of Qualcomm. It's not clear why Jha left, whether he was falling short of expectations or if he quit on his own. Global Foundries has a reputation of being a hard place for CEOs, and has gone through four CEOs now in less than a decade, EE Times' Rick Merritt reports.

The dream CEO for Intel employees is AMD's Lisa Su. It seems far fetched that she would jump ship though. Su has been crushing it at AMD and she'd be leaving for AMD's all-time arch rival.

People are also talking about Renee James, the one time heir apparent to Krzanich. But she is unlikely to go back to Intel. James spent 28 years at Intel and left in 2015 and earlier this year came out of stealth as CEO of her own chip company, Ampere. She's deliriously happy doing her own startup, she previously told Business Insider.

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