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

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

#251

Post by coldtea »

cheald wrote: post #243
david927 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why job losses are a bad thing. As long as we move quickly to "you don't need a job to live" because otherwise these job losses are destroying people's lives.

Unless these folks had degrees in Working At Intel, losing a job is not the same as becoming permanently unemployable. Job loss sucks. But it's pretty hyperbolic to say it's destroying peoples' lives. Particularly for skilled workers, finding a new job isn't all that far out.

>Unless these folks had degrees in Working At Intel, losing a job is not the same as becoming permanently unemployable.

A 50 year old Intel employee might find it quite difficult to get a new job any time soon. Not to mention that where they live they'll have some other thousands ex-colleagues recently fired looking for similar type of jobs.

We're talking about thousands of people -- few of them will be highly sought after chip gurus. In fact obviously it's the less sought after ones that will be let go.

Add a recent mortgage, medical issue or kid at college and here goes their pension savings (or worse). Have the same layoff happen to their spouses near the same time (which it's not that rare), and they're pretty much screwed.

Really, it's as if people have no real world experience with these things...

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

#252

Post by melling »

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.

Can you explain why the Goldman and MS stocks didn't drop? Overvalued means the stock prices should drop.

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

#253

Post by CydeWeys »

osweiller wrote: post #119
ranci wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't sell computers in the digital age where software has taken over everything, you can think whatever you want but that does reflect poorly on the economy. Yes, many factors are at play. It is still a terrible sign.

More computers are being sold than ever before. The market is absolutely saturated with computing devices. And aside from the intense competition Intel is facing, they're suffering the same issue that the GPU makers face -- I once upgraded yearly because the gains made it worthwhile. Now I upgrade pretty much only when something fails. It is absolutely picking a narrative.

Intel screwed up and didn't become a major player in the mobile market. They could have, because they are still the world's best chip maker, but they didn't. The mobile market is experiencing the most growth and also the shortest product lifetimes. I still get a new phone every 1-2 years because the upgrades are worth it, but my laptop needs upgrades less often, and my desktop less often than that. Mobile phone processors today are where desktop processors were a decade and a half ago in terms of growth potential.

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

#254

Post by [deleted] »

swalsh wrote: post #124
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?

I recently started working on a little eCommerce project. I found a way to indirectly estimate the sales of some of my competitors products. So I downloaded about 13gb of this data, processed it down into about 80 million rows and than ran a bunch of stats on it. Now 80 million rows is not "big data" scale, but it's not super small either. With my 16gb of memory (that I paid I think $400 for), my humble quad core i7…

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by maaku »

jhulla wrote: post #164
pjlegato wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efficient market hypothesis (the idea that the market is by definition perfectly valued at every moment) is highly controversial, and actively rejected by many finance and economics experts of all political views.

My point is simply a tautology: the price is the price. Now the price may change, someone may have their thumb on the scale, there may be shill bidders driving sentiment, etc. But at the moment you get a bid/ask spread, that is what you get. Practically speaking, I personally don't believe the efficient market hypothesis due to the very obvious meddling by political actors, central banks, national treasuries, etc. Be…

That may have been your point, but it's not what you said. "Perfectly valued" means that the price is what it should be (for some definition of "should").

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

#257

Post by bduerst »

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.

>Bubble

Four companies don't represent the market. Come on. I swear some users here will wish will wish bubbles out of the air to gripe about.

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

#258

Post by noir_lord »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #247
noir_lord wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me as well, I built an i5-2500K system backend 2010(ish), it's still my main home desktop, 32GB RAM and an SSD and it's as fast as the machine at work that is two generations newer (or more correct it's imperceptibly slower). Things have really levelled out for average loads even developer loads (mostly do web dev, run vagrant machines that kind of thing). I can't see me upgrading til this thing dies tbh.

What you folks are saying is mostly true. VR and 4K are the drivers for a whole new compute cycle in the home. I think the current core counts for Xeon are good enough for cloud (by this I mean that I think CPU isn't the bottleneck for the average EC2, Google Compute, Azure instance). Any one care to comment?

In the sense of VR/4K the CPU is way less important than the GPU and we still have some headroom on those even with existing process, what will be interesting is when everyone else's process catches up with where Intel is now, they've generally stayed out in front of everyone else for a long time (except AMD for a spell).

I'm really looking forwards to VR if it catches on though, having an insanely high resolution headset so I can dump multiple monitors for programming is a big win, combine that with something that has the portability/form factor of a MS Book/Macbook Pro and you'd be able to program as capably from a hotel room as at your desk at home/work.

That would be the biggest shift in my work habits since I went from Windows to Linux in the late 90's.

Also I think once everyone can get down to the same size as intel we might start seeing more exotic architectures, Intel has often won with the "with enough thrust a brick will fly" approach to engineering, it doesn't matter if your chip is clock for clock more efficient if Intel is operating at a level where they can put 5 times as many transistors down in the same unit area and ramp the clock speed way up.

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

#259

Post by dbcurtis »

r00fus wrote: post #73
robertelder wrote: post #38

I'm not sure how much of an effect this would have, but from a consumer's point of view, there isn't as much of a reason to buy a new PC every few years anymore. The laptop I'm using right now was purchased in 2011, and the prices in stores now are very comparable to what I paid back then. I've made up my mind to buy a new one a few times, but then when I go to the store, it just isn't worth it.

So Intel has had decades to become more than a PC parts manufacturer (albeit largest one ever). The issue is creating compelling reasons for buying a new PC. Intel/Microsoft have not been very successful at promoting those sales-drivers.

Yes, and Intel has been trying. Remember, there once was a time when Intel did not make CPUs at all. Intel has remade itself several times, and pretty much each time it required retrenchment and refocus. Intel has been trying for a long time to get wins in the mobile space, without much luck. High gross margin per wafer and high volume is a rare combination, and a difficult act to repeat.

An interesting aspect of Intel culture is how it reacts to body blows, urgently seeking a path out of the darkness along many different paths simultaneously. Remember the legend of "operation crush" -- the sales force was tasked with getting 1000 design wins for the 8088, from whatever place they could find them. Some guy in Florida found a renegade group in Boca Raton working on a skunkworks project called the "PC". Meh, it didn't sound like much, but hey, only 999 more design wins left to go, eh? Bag the order and get on the road again... whoever that guy was, I sure hope he made his quota that quarter.

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

#260

Post by megablast »

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.

You should start a new index, called the 3 index, that just looks at 3 companies. That should be enough to gauge the market, right?
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