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Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

bloomberg.com

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Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#111

Post by systemvoltage »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #32

I think this is the first major layoff announcement at a big, established tech firm I've heard this year that is anywhere near this size. I mean, there have been loads of "couple hundred" employee layoffs, and certainly a lot of hiring slowdown/freezes, but again, haven't seen anything else near this big, and the layoffs previously seem to have been concentrated in unprofitable VC-funded companies. I know Tesla laid…

If you look at Intel's history, they do this consistently and at predictable cadence regardless of the state of the broader economy.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#113

Post by AshamedCaptain »

agloeregrets wrote: post #51
Kukumber wrote: post #22

Hopefully for them that includes executives and managers, they are the ones responsible of the death of that company, not the engineers Congrats to Apple and AMD for having done better Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers

> Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers I think the entire new surface line-up is a giant conspiracy. The Surface Pro 9 5G has a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 with some tweaks called the SQ3. It does not match the performance of 12 Gen intel in a 15w power envelope, which is important because the Surface Pro 9 non-5G (intel) uses an i5-1235u, a 15w chip. But the last…

People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked...

E.g. when the first Surface Pro ARM was released (the X, 2020ish), it was ridiculously more expensive, less performing and had less battery life (!) than the cheaper Intel options https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-Review...

The previous Surface non-Pro ARM attempts (RT, 2012ish) were even crappier (Tegra procs) but at least they were cheaper than the Pro/Intel variants...

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#114

Post by icapybara »

indymike wrote: post #96
jason-phillips wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that's a great thing. I don't want companies to stay giant in perpetuity... Except that semiconductors are a national security issue at the moment.

> Except that semiconductors are a national security issue at the moment. Maybe too big is a national security issue, too. Too big to fail is a real problem for any part of our economy.

Computer chips are a product that is only possible to produce at the largest scales. Everything, from the supply chain to design to manufacturing, is a globalized effort. You’ll never have small mom and pop fabs.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#115

Post by m_mueller »

chrisseaton wrote: post #55
gspencley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a lot of the details, but everything I've heard over the last couple of years indicated that AMD was absolutely crushing Intel. A recent laptop I purchased, as well as the last desktop I put together (~2 years ago) each have Ryzen chips. I forget the details but in addition to performance issues, didn't Intel CPUs also have some major security vulnerabilities? And was it that they were related to instruc…

> I don't know anyone who is buying or recommending Intel CPUs at the moment. Aren’t the major cloud providers still mainly running on and buying Intel?

ARM is increasingly being a factor there afaik.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#116

Post by christkv »

disillusioned wrote: post #30

Isn't this just a culmination of nearly a decade of unforced errors and mismanaged strategy? I'm a complete outsider but I see a couple of fundamental huge misses by Intel over the past 10 or so years: 1) Completely missed the boat on mobile. Their ARM-competitive chips (Atom, etc.)... weren't. Missed on every measure from power to performance. Let Qualcomm and Samsung eat their lunch. 2) Missed too many ticks and re…

Never understood why they did not just get a new ARM license and make a mobile chip it was not like they were going to impact existing business.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#117

Post by cowmix »

disillusioned wrote: post #30

Isn't this just a culmination of nearly a decade of unforced errors and mismanaged strategy? I'm a complete outsider but I see a couple of fundamental huge misses by Intel over the past 10 or so years: 1) Completely missed the boat on mobile. Their ARM-competitive chips (Atom, etc.)... weren't. Missed on every measure from power to performance. Let Qualcomm and Samsung eat their lunch. 2) Missed too many ticks and re…

I've typed this before but I'll type it again here. About 10 years ago I ran the local Python Meetup group here in Phoenix. Intel had/has a big presence here and one of they guys who worked on the Atom team (doing compiler optimizations for that chip family) told us (at one of the Meetups)Intel corporate didn't like how good a processor Atom was shaping up to be. They were worried it would start to cannibalize their desktop and server processor lines -- so they did everything possible to cripple its development.

He and his whole team were furious.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#118

Post by jws »

disillusioned wrote: post #30

Isn't this just a culmination of nearly a decade of unforced errors and mismanaged strategy? I'm a complete outsider but I see a couple of fundamental huge misses by Intel over the past 10 or so years: 1) Completely missed the boat on mobile. Their ARM-competitive chips (Atom, etc.)... weren't. Missed on every measure from power to performance. Let Qualcomm and Samsung eat their lunch. 2) Missed too many ticks and re…

Itanium was a bet that seemed the way forward at the time. Making an x86 instruction set processor that did on the fly analysis and conversion to a superscalar computation core sounded really hard, so VLIW was the safe "we'll do the superscalar decomposition at compilation time and run that". Turned out to be a bad bet because a miracle¹ occurred on the other side.

I think of it as a peer to the 2005 proposition that electric cars didn't need to be golf carts and the technology was coming into place to make high performance, real cars that were purely electric. Could have been true. As they say "very dangerous, you go first." That one paid off.

I wonder if there is a list of large dollar, novel, engineering expeditions and how they turned out.

␄

¹ Where "miracle" means some really smart people worked really hard at it for a long time.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#119

Post by twelve40 »

jrockway wrote: post #58
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's absolutely incredible to watch these formerly phenomenally innovative companies falter at that very core competency of staying cutting edge but we see it happen over and over again. To be frank, I think that's a great thing. I don't want companies to stay giant in perpetuity, I think it's great that they are essentially "recycled" when new, better companies come along and eat their lunch. If anything I think i…

> I think it's great that they are essentially "recycled" when new, better companies come along and eat their lunch. Don't you have on the order of tens of thousands of dollars invested in Intel through retirement savings, though? When S&P 500 companies fail, your retirement savings become worthless. (Apple is really the one you want to watch out for, though!)

intel doesn't have to go up in flames, not sure why you view it as all or nothing. They can keep milking legacy stuff and even make money like IBM (what paul graham calls irrelevant), while someone else can keep inventing better chips.

Re: Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

#120

Post by tehnub »

gspencley wrote: post #46
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #32

I think this is the first major layoff announcement at a big, established tech firm I've heard this year that is anywhere near this size. I mean, there have been loads of "couple hundred" employee layoffs, and certainly a lot of hiring slowdown/freezes, but again, haven't seen anything else near this big, and the layoffs previously seem to have been concentrated in unprofitable VC-funded companies. I know Tesla laid…

I don't know a lot of the details, but everything I've heard over the last couple of years indicated that AMD was absolutely crushing Intel. A recent laptop I purchased, as well as the last desktop I put together (~2 years ago) each have Ryzen chips. I forget the details but in addition to performance issues, didn't Intel CPUs also have some major security vulnerabilities? And was it that they were related to instruc…

I don't have any data, but from word of mouth and variously seeing posts and videos online, 12th gen Intel CPUs seem pretty popular for gaming builds. They're winning in benchmarks against 50 series AMD (as they should, being newer), but are also cheaper. I'll be curious to see how 13th gen Intel vs. 70 series AMD plays out. There are always complicating factors, such as motherboards for 70 series AMD being quite pricey for now.
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