Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

They missed the boat twice. Once with their sale of their ARM XScale branch, in 2006 for 600MM (such bad timing). Later with their blunders with Atom on mobile.

If everyone realizes it's a national security issue, that might change. Sure, US, EU and China have players in the industry and can attract fabs with a bit of incentive, but what if Russia or India or Pakistan or Brazil or Iran want to ensure a steady supply even under sanctions? Some of them might open up smaller fabs that might not be economically viable but are of strategic importance.

My mistake was to assume such rules in other EU countries.

In Germany, there is a thing called "Kündigungsschutz"[1].

I am not sure about Ireland, but I assumed there are similar rulings.

So at least in Germany, it is not that easy, but possible.

1) http://www.rechtslexikon.net/d/kuendigungsschutz/kuendigungs...

You could fab chips in your basement. However your costs per chip would be in the tens of thousands each for basic chips. Large scales allows making those same chips for less than a dime each.

> 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.

As someone who worked related to those projects (PowerVR, which supplied graphics IP for some of those devices, on Android so other OSs may have a different view), I am completely not surprised they didn't go anywhere.

This was a good few years ago - I no longer work for PowerVR, and Intel seem to have completely given up on the market for some time. My memory isn't likely prefect, but I can give broad strokes.

It always felt like "Having" to go to PowerVR was an embarrassment for the teams, they kept trying to replace us with their internal GPU architecture, presumably completely fail to hit any power/performance targets, then last second call us again and try to rush everything through. Then, it feels like most of the time they drop the entire project before it made release anyway.

The teams that we worked with never felt high status - all the engineers we spoke to were either on that team because they couldn't move internally to something more prestigious due to some internal politics, or were actively in the process of changing teams. There were times where our internal engineering contacts changed monthly, if we had any engineering-level communication at all.

There's also some weird public claims about things around this - like PowerVR not providing driver source or similar, but that's simply not true. As the person packaging up the releases, they were only source releases, no obfuscation, with full documentation and build instructions.

The PowerVR driver model generally meant releasing a "reference" driver as source, with hooks for customers to hook up to their specific SoC implementation (think stuff like setting clocks, power management, bus endpoints etc.). The supplied package only had a couple of example backends. While one of those may have been an Intel chip, it was only minimally setup in order to make the graphics work for PowerVR testing. It was simply not possible to release a binary-only driver. But I've seen this claimed on a number of tech forums - often from people claiming to have knowledge from the Intel side, and if that's true and not exaggeration, I can only assume it's due to lack of communication between teams internal to Intel. I can assure you, someone in Intel had the full driver source.

Though WRT the internal communications, I sometimes saw this from the other side - we dealt with 2 Intel teams with different SoCs they intended to build, and it felt like 2 different companies. They never shared anything between them, almost as if they never spoke at all, and seemed resistant to changing that. I have no idea why, I guess it's just how their management structure is setup?

If you go through all that and end up with an actually good product, I feel it'll be almost luck rather than anything else.