Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#171

Post by dragontamer » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #37

anilshanbhag wrote: post #20

One must understand that this is re-structuring. Intel is probably letting go of some divisions it no longer intends to pursue. In the not-so-distant past, Microsoft did an internal re-structuring when Satya Nadella became the CEO. It isn't as bad as it is portrayed to be as most people end up getting re-hired in other groups or take the severance and join a new company.

News like this out of the blue is strange. I was pretty sure that the post-PC era was a sham. It still is, right?

There are plenty of PCs.

Here's the problem. Running a five-year-old PC used to be an issue.

Today, running a five-year-old PC is a Intel Sandy Bridge i7-2600K ( Passmark Score: 8,518 ). While a modern i7-6700K has a Passmark Score of: 10,987.

FIVE YEARS, and FOUR generations of processors have created a gain of net 28% in multithreaded situations. Far less for single-threaded applications (maybe 15%). And absolutely negligible for gamers (which are 100% GPU throttled).

If you're running a 5-year-old i7-2600K, there is absolutely no reason to upgrade to Intel Skylake. None at all. Maybe you want a new GPU to play those VR games... but Intel isn't making gains anymore in processor speed.

Intel has been trying to get people to buy their power-efficient designs (Skylake is a hell-of-a-lot more power efficient...) so Intel continues to sell laptops at a decent rate. But no one I know has major issues with their desktop speeds.

The only people I know who have upgraded their computers are those who have had hardware failures. There's still no need to upgrade a computer from Sandy Bridge.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#172

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

msellout wrote: post #91

logfromblammo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closer to nonation, technically, but decimation is the word everyone already knows.

"decimation" is also the word with meaning. "nonation" is just turning "nineth" into a verb and then somewhat of a gerund, like "ninething". Without the historical context, it has little meaning.

Yet that is exactly the pattern used by decimation.

  decimus (tenth) + -ate (convert to verb) = decimate
  decimus (tenth) + -ation (resulting state of -ate form) = decimation

It could be used with any Latin-rooted ordinal number. Primate, secundate, tertiate, quartate, quintate, sextate, septimate, octavate, nonate, decimate, undecimate, dodecimate.

Primate, secundate, tertiate, and octavate have meanings other than either "reduce by 1/Nth" or "reduce to 1/Nth". Tertiate is actually roughly equivalent to "threepeat". Those words have about as much inherent meaning as "tenthing", but some had meanings extrapolated from "decimate" as early as 200 years ago. The "reduce to 1/Nth" meanings would be more accurately encapsulated with the "an-" (to) prefix, as in "annihilate": literally "to nothing (verb)". That would give you antertiate, anquartate, anquintate, et cetera for the reciprocal-valued words.

As I said, "decimate" is the most well-known of the bunch. "Annihilate" is also well known. But every last one of them is a perfectly acceptable English combination of Latin roots, and should be understood easily enough.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#173

Post by Nihilartikel » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #37

anilshanbhag wrote: post #20

One must understand that this is re-structuring. Intel is probably letting go of some divisions it no longer intends to pursue. In the not-so-distant past, Microsoft did an internal re-structuring when Satya Nadella became the CEO. It isn't as bad as it is portrayed to be as most people end up getting re-hired in other groups or take the severance and join a new company.

News like this out of the blue is strange. I was pretty sure that the post-PC era was a sham. It still is, right?

The particulars of Intel's situation aside, there are some (notably not all) watching the markets that believe we may be well into the prelude to a market recession.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#174

Post by dismal2 » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #150

mathattack wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goldman's stock price is approximately 25% off it's 12 month high. [0] Morgan Stanley is approximately 35% off. [1] Seems like the market is properly taking in their bad news. Some parts of the market do fine, others get hit. And yes, some might be over-valued. When interest rates are low, the future cash flows of companies are discounted back at a lower rate. So if all things are equal (which they never really are,…

The GAAP P/E of the S&P is now at 24.28, that's near, if not, a record high. That's bad. It's very overvalued historically. Banking stocks are doing badly because interest rates are so low across the curve that they can't make money from the spread. But even at that, they are overvalued along with various momentum stocks like Tesla, Netflix (which we saw implode yesterday.)

no worries the FED will do SOMETHING and save us, SOMEHOW. no moral hazard to see here.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#175

Post by Alex3917 » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:53 PM UTC

tma-1 wrote: post #39

So Intel is cutting 11% of its workforce, Goldman Sachs just reported a 56% drop in profits, Morgan Stanley had a 50% drop in profits, Netflix missed subscriber growth estimates etc... yet, the Dow just hit a 9-Month high, and the S&P500 is now above 2100. The whole market is overvalued, not just the tech unicorns.

> The whole market is overvalued, not just the tech unicorns.

To the extent that Intel and the tech unicorns are complements, Intel's profits declining may actually signal that tech unicorns are undervalued.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#176

Post by bluedino » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:53 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #171

theandrewbailey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News like this out of the blue is strange. I was pretty sure that the post-PC era was a sham. It still is, right?

There are plenty of PCs. Here's the problem. Running a five-year-old PC used to be an issue. Today, running a five-year-old PC is a Intel Sandy Bridge i7-2600K ( Passmark Score: 8,518 ). While a modern i7-6700K has a Passmark Score of: 10,987. FIVE YEARS, and FOUR generations of processors have created a gain of net 28% in multithreaded situations. Far less for single-threaded applications (maybe 15%). And absolutely…

>> i7 2600k

Sure, that's the top of the line $300 chip in the days of a whole PC being able to be bought for $300. What if you're on a five year old Pentium G620?

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#177

Post by cordite » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

hkmurakami wrote: post #118

tma-1 wrote: post #39

So Intel is cutting 11% of its workforce, Goldman Sachs just reported a 56% drop in profits, Morgan Stanley had a 50% drop in profits, Netflix missed subscriber growth estimates etc... yet, the Dow just hit a 9-Month high, and the S&P500 is now above 2100. The whole market is overvalued, not just the tech unicorns.

Healthcare as a sector is doing pretty well. Consolidation down to 3 major players will likely increase their margins further.

Which aspects are you referring to?

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#178

Post by mattbillenstein » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

Large enterprise companies like this can lay off 10% anytime they want with little effect on output -- there are oodles of people slacking in big corporations basically not doing much of anything except collecting a paycheck.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#179

Post by akuma73 » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

robertelder wrote: post #149

mark-r wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's law may become irrelevant long before it becomes invalid. Without rapid increases in usable computing power, the reasons for upgrading have largely disappeared. In particular the chips at the top of the profit margin curve, where Intel loves to play, are much less compelling. Intel might eventually find itself in the same shoes Kodak did - when your primary business dries up, there's unlikely to be a follow-o…

Yes, this thought really makes me wonder about where the future hardware computing advances will come from. How long is it going to take for a new company to 'disrupt' the processor industry in a way that the behemoths of today wouldn't have expected or weren't able to do. I would guess at least 10 years from now.

The end of Moore's Law has broad industry-wide implications. Imagine if Moore's Law had ended in the year 2000 - no smartphones...

A lot of future technologies that rely on exponential increases in silicon capability will not be possible. It's almost impossible to replicate an exponential.

The rate of progress will slow and look more like more mature industries such as aerospace.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#180

Post by makomk » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 9:59 PM UTC

intelthrow wrote: post #76

wrong_variable wrote: post #14

Does anyone working within Intel know the reasoning ? It seems skylake is doing really well. Is it mostly electrical engineers working on the processors or sales and marketing people ?

I hope it's the hardware side of the company waking up that the software and "solutions" side of the company is a gangrenous fifth limb. Things like trying to start an app store when they didn't have content (e.g. Steam) or a platform (Google, Apple, Microsoft), trying to pivot that abomination into a media store after Netflix already won and the studios are all trying to start their own, trying for way too long to d…

I'd still like to know whose idea it was to try and compete in the Internet of Things market by pitting a buggy warmed-over 486 (the Quark) against ARM's best, most modern chip designs. Sure, Intel got a bunch of headlines in the tech press about their new IoT solution, but the technical details just didn't add up. The performance and power figures were dire, it couldn't run existing x86 code, it looked like a bear to integrate into anything, it just made no sense.