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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

#291

Post by jonknee »

rayiner wrote: post #27
funkyy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a guess, but tech companies are occasionally release % of their workers to clean its workforce, boost productivity and make space for new, young and experienced engineers. Stagnation and idea depletion is dangerous for tech companies, fresh employees bring fresh ideas and boost competitiveness between workers.

Perhaps some people believe that is what happens. But if I were a talented employee, I'd see an 11% staff reduction as a sign to stop ignoring those recruiter emails.

Which means the best employees are the ones most likely to leave. The ones who weren't fired, but who can't easily get another gig are what you are left with. It's a tough cycle to beat.

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

#292

Post by qaq »

superkuh wrote: post #277
qaq wrote: post #199

Maybe it's time to innovate a bit? I have 0 reasons to upgrade my 6 year old MAC Pro, I would need to spend 5K to get a mild performance boost.

I agree but that's a bad example. Macs are notoriously expensive for the performance they deliver.

That's a stereotype from a time long gone. The difference in price between Mac Pro and identically configured dell workstation is minimal. On the low end yes there is price difference. On mid tier iMac 27" 5k costs about the same as dell 5K monitor without the computer (they use identical LCD).

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

#293

Post by sounds »

golergka wrote: post #101
robertelder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it's actually difficult to find any sort of high performance laptop (for cheep). I went to a computer store recently, and told them that I was interested in dropping about 2k on a laptop, and I brought a list of specs (at least 16gb ram, lots of cores, etc.). He suggested I should get a gaming laptop and never gave any suggestions from his store. It will be interesting to see what the future holds, because they…

128 cores?

Your laptop already has a GPU, which has more cores than that.

Let's take the segment of the market with an NVidia GPU. They have CUDA, one of the most polished development environments for GPGPU today.

When was the last time you wrote something in CUDA? What was it for?

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

#294

Post by CamperBob2 »

shostack wrote: post #159
wolf_cook wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From CNBC: "The technology company also said the chief financial officer Stacy Smith would leave that role to lead sales."

Hmmm...CFO heading up sales is not something you see every day... Anyone have any further context around this?

Lateral moves, even downward ones, are part of the corporate culture at Intel. At most large companies this type of job switching at the C-level would come as a surprise, but if you read some of the stuff Andy Grove and others have written about Intel's "matrix" practices, it's not too shocking.

Basically, they believe that experience across multiple areas of the business is a good thing, and that no one should become too attached to a particular position or title.

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

#295

Post by scholia »

noir_lord wrote: post #216
fokov wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote, I was an avid gamer that would upgrade whenever the price/performance was good enough for my budget. However, I bought almost top tier stuff back in 2008 and haven't upgraded the core of my system since. I don't game like I used to, but it still does everything I need it to do. I used to do yearly-ish new builds as well.

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.

> Me as well, I built an i5-2500K system backend 2010(ish), it's still my main home desktop

Good pick: it's still one of the faster chips around. However, it's TDP is 95W, which is fine for a desktop. Since then, Intel has been concentrating on delivering the same (or, often, much less) speed with lower TDP ratings.

These address the market need for thin, high-priced laptops -- preferably without fans -- that you can use in Starbucks.

You could "upgrade" to a new Intel Core i7-6600U that's actually slower than your i5-2500K but has a TDP of only 15W.

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

#296

Post by jonknee »

bduerst wrote: post #289
jonknee wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both GS and MS (as well as other FIs) are off there highs because of all the volatility in the markets the past 6 months and worries about losses from bad energy loans. No, they are off because they are making way less money (down 55% from a year ago!). In general volatility can be good for investment banks because it means higher trading volume. Revenue has been way down thanks to fewer deals (remember when tech c…

It would be interesting if they could release metrics on trading or investing activity, the way some software companies release stats about active users. Then you could calculate revenue per trade (or something more useful along those lines) to use as a signal in these cases.

They break out a lot of numbers, but I'm not sure how useful metrics on trading activity would be. Not all trades are equal, so something like revenue per trade is pretty meaningless.

http://www.goldmansachs.com/media-relations/press-releases/c...

The numbers are pretty brutal, especially in institutional client services.

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

#297

Post by digi_owl »

noir_lord wrote: post #258
tostitos1979 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 he…

Not quite about that last part. Clock rates have been more or less stationary over the last decade or so. What Intel has been focusing on for some time is cache, and how to practically always have the right data in the cache at the right time. but yes, having more transistors to work with do allow them to pack more cache onto the die.

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

#298

Post by bduerst »

tim333 wrote: post #288
bduerst wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I don't think anyone above said "bubble". Overvalued is a different thing markets are usually either over or undervalued and probably overvalued today. Bubbles proper are kind of rare, the last major clear one being the 2006 housing bubble. You could argue there's a bond bubble presently.

You're right - Claiming the markets are overvalued like the unicorn bubble isn't literally saying there is a bubble, it's just implying there is.

There is most likely a corporate bond bubble, as we know from representative market signals. With the S&P 500 though, four companies are not representative signals.

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

#299

Post by sounds »

mmagin wrote: post #207
aluminussoma wrote: post #190

A good friend was laid off from Intel during their last round of layoffs. Without going to into details that would identify my friend, he was laid off after losing a game of internal politics. His division's vice president even apologized to him for his layoff. My friend's story gave me the impression of Intel being a highly dysfunctional company. My friend was sad to leave Intel, but I think it was good for him in t…

Are there companies with >100,000 employees who are not highly dysfunctional?

Number of employees as a metric for dysfunction? Why not number of court injunctions? Number of union strikes?

I mean, if we're getting serious, we could write a dysfunction function, D = dysfunctional points:

  D = (points for threat posed by dysfunctional government)
    + 4*(points for direct environmental harm done by company)
    + 2*(points for environmental harm caused by subcontractors)
    + (points for each lobbying dollar spent)
    + 2*(points for frivolous or non-FRAND patent lawsuits)
    + 10*(points for fighting against a free and open internet)
    + (points for trying to track users / violate privacy)
    + 10*(points for getting hacked, releasing user's private data)
etc.
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