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Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…
Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…
hotdesking?
Basically the concept was instead of engineers having an assigned office or desk, the office would have a large field of unassigned desks and generic equipment. Every day you would come in, reserve a desk, take any belongings from a locker, and set up shop. At the end of the day, you would tear down, lock up, and leave.
It is beautifully efficient from a top-down perspective, but it turns out employees like the consistency of a known work location each day. Its also nice to be able to put up a picture of family, from what I gather. I suspect the cost of personnel replacement dwarfs the saving of n% reduction in desk need.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hotdesking?
Several of the engineers I worked with a few years ago left Intel (for the company I work at) after they switched to hotdesking to save money on facilities. Basically the concept was instead of engineers having an assigned office or desk, the office would have a large field of unassigned desks and generic equipment. Every day you would come in, reserve a desk, take any belongings from a locker, and set up shop. At th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the more oddly axe-grindy articles I've seen in a while. Poorly edited English and writing what feels like angrily about some pieces of silicon--is this just the house style for this site? Maybe somebody can provide some context.
Why does “poorly edited English” matter when the content seems to be on point? Not everyone on the Internet is a “native” English speaker. Content matters, not who and how they wrote it.
It might not be fair, but I do like to know the mindset the article is written from.
Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…
hotdesking?
An unusually unfavourable article, even by the standards of semiaccurate.com. Can this new processor family be interpreted as something less terrible than "palpable desperation" and effectively giving up on the 10nm process? For example, prices might be aggressively low.
This is one of the more oddly axe-grindy articles I've seen in a while. Poorly edited English and writing what feels like angrily about some pieces of silicon--is this just the house style for this site? Maybe somebody can provide some context.
An unusually unfavourable article, even by the standards of semiaccurate.com. Can this new processor family be interpreted as something less terrible than "palpable desperation" and effectively giving up on the 10nm process? For example, prices might be aggressively low.
This is one of the more oddly axe-grindy articles I've seen in a while. Poorly edited English and writing what feels like angrily about some pieces of silicon--is this just the house style for this site? Maybe somebody can provide some context.
The counterbalance is that he's got one of the absolute best networks of moles in Silicon Valley and always seems to know things, often big things, before anyone else. Sometimes even before it's on anyone else's radar.
So if you're familiar enough with him to back out his style to see the underlying (likely) facts, which isn't too hard, you can learn a lot about the big chip industry. And that's not just interesting to people like us, but very very valuable to a lot of people.
(Disclaimer: I haven't read SemiAccurate much since he paywalled it ~10 years ago, a move that I don't like at all but completely understand from the perspective of his business.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Several of the engineers I worked with a few years ago left Intel (for the company I work at) after they switched to hotdesking to save money on facilities. Basically the concept was instead of engineers having an assigned office or desk, the office would have a large field of unassigned desks and generic equipment. Every day you would come in, reserve a desk, take any belongings from a locker, and set up shop. At th…
The worst part of hot-desking in my experience is you always seem to end up next to some guy from marketing who is on their phone all day, and as a result you get absolutely no thinking time.
Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…
Here are a couple good articles explaining it. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227720-how-intel-lost-10... https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/28919... The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate. Intel has b…
Are you saying that vertically integrated companies are inherently disadvantaged because pure-play companies have a bigger list of orders and can spend more on evolving technology?
There is advantage to be vertically integrated, namely a better global optimization across domains, like between design and manufacturing. Would be interesting to know why it's not enough - if it's always not enough. If not always, then this particular case needs more reasons.