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Morgan Stanley chip analyst Joseph Moore, who covers Intel (INTC), and has an Underweight rating on the shares, today writes that he met with the company’s head of its client computing and IoT efforts, Murthy Renduchintala, recently, and came away with the impression he is a face for “pragmatism” at the chip giant.

Moore’s overall takeaway is “one of the important long term questions is Intel building a pervasive presence in markets such as Internet of Things and wireless.” In that regard, "we think that broadening out the management team as we have seen here is a positive."

Intel is stuck with the problem of being a bit too rigid, given its traditional focus on making better transistors, writes Moore:

Our belief is that Intel's execution is very strong in core microprocessor markets, even amid recent challenging growth conditions, but that the machine-like reliable precision and planning driven by the tick/tock methodology, and the challenges that the company's microprocessor designers take on to ensure the world's most powerful microprocessor transistor, could be a barrier to the nimble and flexible process required to drive innovation in newer markets with a more reactive planning cycle. Even within microprocessors, the company's long term planning process leaves them prone to disruption when there are surprises, whether that is AMD's unexpected success with Opteron last decade, the encroachment of the tablet market a few years ago, or this year's surge in interest in graphics for machine learning. To be clear, Murthy did not say those things, that is simply our observation.

Among the positive influences of Renduchintala is how he’s helping drive greater power efficiency in Intel’s “14-nanometer” process technology:

While Intel still hasn't released many details yet on 10 nm, Murthy did say that 10 nm would substantially enhance performance along multiple axes. There will be better power efficiency for thin and light notebooks, which we think was the primary benefit of a 14 nm process defined during a period where the company was under siege from other form factors. But there will be a significant focus also on higher performance microprocessors for desktops and servers, both from higher instructions per clock but also in other key metrics. Our faith in 10 nm raising the bar for enthusiast PCs is why we see the threat presented by AMD's Zen as being fairly manageable, with only short term disruption in 2017.

In addition, he notes Renduchintala, who was at Qualcomm for 11 years before coming to Intel, is aware that it’s hard to change a market where an instruction set dominates, such as Internet of Things, where ARM Holdings’s intstruction set is the norm:

Clearly, the company has already moved in a more instruction set agnostic direction, offering ARM cores as part of its foundry offerings, and continuing Altera's usage of ARM cores. But longer term, if the company has superior microprocessor manufacturing technology, why not use it to build other architectures, where prudent? It might have been unthinkable for the company to design 5G smartphones with an ARM applications processor, but the way the company is talking about those opportunities now.

Intel shares today are up 15 cents, or half a percent, at $34.31.