Brendan Gregg Departs Intel

Brendan Gregg has resigned from Intel and taken a new role elsewhere. The performance expert and author spent three and a half years at the company, a period he notes was marked by both its most difficult stretch in history and an initial hiring freeze for his first 15 months.

His work at Intel was heavily focused on observability and analysis tooling. Among the achievements he lists as public:

Gregg sees AI flame graphs as still in their early days. While CPU flame graphs are a common sight in performance analyses online, GPU equivalents have a longer road to widespread adoption, particularly as the open source version is Intel-only. He expects demand to grow as GPU software gains more layers and complexity.

Beyond tooling, Gregg was active in Intel's cloud efforts. He participated in 110 customer meetings and, with collaborators across six organizations, authored a company-wide plan with 33 recommendations for winning back cloud business. He describes this strategy—which included a visual map of interactions between all 19 relevant teams, a first for the company according to long-time employees—as some of his best work. The deck itself remains internal.

In his departure message, Gregg leaves the execution of those recommendations to remaining employees. He acknowledges that many of them are difficult, requiring executive approval and quarters of investment, but notes the strategy and supporting materials are in a shared folder with his presentations, code, and status reports.

Among his fond memories are meeting Linus Torvalds at an Intel event, encountering Pat Gelsinger, and a surfing offsite with Intel Australia and HP. He also met Intel hardware fellows and senior fellows who helped him understand processor internals.