My interpretation is that Intel didn't understand the customers of the fabless business and Tan does, so he's there to make Intel fabs attractive to them.
EDA companies have limited exposure to the inner workings of the fabless semi giants (Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD). They have even less exposure to running a fab service for fabless companies.
EDA tool vendors have to work extremely closely with both fabless firms and fabs forever to tune their products to deal the ever increasing complexity of nanometer scale manufacturing processes. Backside power delivery? You bet your ass that the tools folks were involved in making that work well for designers. Gate-All-Around? Probably needed the tool vendors to make tweaks based on feedback from the fabs.
The important thing is that Lip-Bu is from the industry, and has contacts on the tools side of things as well as the customers for those tools which happen to be potential future customers for any Intel fab services. This is a step in the right direction for INTC which has a board where industry experience is severely lacking.
