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Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

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

#151

Post by AnimalMuppet »

piggybox wrote: post #127
chongli wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely missed the boat on mobile I think their main error was short-termism. They were addicted to high margin (workstation/server) devices. They had no interest in the low margins of mobile devices. They could not imagine how low-power devices would take over the world.

It's reported Steve Jobs did ask Intel to provide CPU for the first gen of iPhone, but the offer price was too low so Intel would lose money. If you were the CEO of Intel, how would you explain it to the board that "we should make this deal with Apple even with loss, because I think iPhone will be the next big thing"?

Did Intel counter-offer? I mean, if someone offers you a bad deal, your options are not restricted to "yes" and "no".

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

#153

Post by NikolaNovak »

BobbyJo wrote: post #121
srinivgp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF a company goes bad, it's great that new companies eat their lunch. It's bad for a company to go bad. It's bad for a company to lock out competition.

> It's bad for a company to go bad. Hard disagree, so I wonder what your basis for this bullet is. Agree on the other two though.

Not the op, but:

1. Tautological: from company's perspective, it's bad for the company (itself) to go bad.

2. More broadly, it's reasonably self-evident that it's bad for employees, and bad for shareholders of a company, for that company to go bad

3. Where we can have discussions, and probably for a long and fun if not necessarily fruitful time, is whether it's "good" or "bad" from market's, or consumer's perspective for companies to go bad. I personally think not.

I think we'll likely mostly agree that it's good for market to filter out and punish bad companies or companies that go bad, once they go bad, for whatever reason; but that doesn't necessarily imply or follow that's it's good for companies to go bad.

In other words, what's your perspective/bias - why would it be GOOD for a company to go bad? Why would it not be absolutely fantastically wonderful if all companies perpetually stayed good and we lived in utopia of rainbows and unicorns? :>

(all this without defining what "company going bad" means, left as an exercise for the student :)

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

#154

Post by pclmulqdq »

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…

> 2) Missed too many ticks and replaced them with tocks. Fell far behind because of ridiculous tilt-at-windmill folly around Itanium and other architectural decisions that absolutely didn't pay off. Ended up taking way too long to get further down on process size.

I applied to Intel's architecture group in 2015, and when I asked one interviewer "does Intel have a strategy if TSMC catches up on process tech?" I was left with a blank stare, as though nobody in the group had contemplated the possibility. I didn't end up working there...

That said, Intel got exceptionally unlucky on which technologies they pursued and which they didn't, so I hope they can turn things around. They missed on through-silicon vias and chiplets, EUV, Cobalt wires, and several low-power transistor technologies.

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

#155

Post by tannhaeuser »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #86
mort96 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it did? Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU? I know I always bought Intel laptops because Intel laptops were the only things available, not because I have some high view of Intel as a brand. I imagine the vast majority of laptop buyers wouldn't even know what an Intel is.

> Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU? If you're a Linux user, Intel integrated graphics have always been the most compatible and most well-supported option.

That was a long time ago. AMD has shipped iGPUs/integrated platforms and dGPUs with fully mainlined drivers for ages now. Only recently has Intel gained credibility with Iris iGPUs beating AMD's, whereas for the longest time you had to pair Intel platforms with Nvidia GPUs to get any kind of graphics performance, spelling trouble due to Nvidia's insistence on closed drivers and binary blobs.

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

#156

Post by indymike »

icapybara wrote: post #114
indymike wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Computer chips are a product that is only possible to produce at the largest scales

Perhaps, or perhaps we're dealing with monopolization.

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

#157

Post by klelatti »

jws wrote: post #118
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 tha…

I’m not sure the timeline really works for this argument. Pentium was the first x86 superscalar and that was 1993 so it predates Itanium.

Rather Intel wanted to leave the baggage of x86 behind, segment the market for higher profits and hoped to get better performance than superscalar x86. But they never achieved the latter and most people just wanted 64 bit and software compatibility.

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

#158

Post by bluGill »

causi wrote: post #126
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…

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. I'm gonna add the caveat that the failure didn't happen out of the gate. Xscale was leagues ahead of anything else two decades ago. Atom stumbled at the start but Cherry Trail had a better price to performance ratio than anything tha…

In this market what counts is performance/watt ratio. Battery power is a big selling point for cell phones, and so you can charge a bit more for less watts. Though of course price does matter too. There are also embedded markets where you have to be passively cooled, again watts matter.

My impression is Intel hit the price for embedded just fine, but at higher watts, and thus they can't compete.

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

#159

Post by wahern »

magicloop wrote: post #124
chongli wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely missed the boat on mobile I think their main error was short-termism. They were addicted to high margin (workstation/server) devices. They had no interest in the low margins of mobile devices. They could not imagine how low-power devices would take over the world.

Actually that is the "Innovator's Dilemma" in action. Managers will always prefer to safeguard and enhance the high margin aspects of the business and discourage/under-invest in low margin disruptor aspects of the business due to cannibalization of profits and thus missing profit guidance for the quarter (thus losing compensation personally). They knew the tide was changing but organisation dynamics prevents a course…

> missing profit guidance for the quarter

The Innovator's Dilemma isn't about missing quarterly guidance. The dilemma is that it's perfectly rational and profit maximizing to continue focusing on your cash cow even when obsolescence is a foregone conclusion. It wouldn't be a true dilemma, otherwise.

The incumbent is the only player that can maximally squeeze the very considerable remaining profits from old technology, and they should do so with gusto. Moreover, switching to new technologies comes with more risk, even when it seems obvious what the new market will look like because the old market has almost zero risk--it's completely proven.

All the "solutions" to avoid the dilemma, like selling the old technology to take future profits and then pivoting to the new market, are just corporate branding shell games. They might even be in fact sub-optimal, but in any event the fundamental dynamics remain the same.

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

#160

Post by mewse-hn »

mattfrommars wrote: post #36
QuarterRoy wrote: post #10

I’ve been through two layoffs at tech companies - one of 14,000 and one of 15,000. One touched a lot of teams including my own. The second was mostly smoke and mirrors - they took multiple factories and supply chain employees and sold them or outsourced them to a company that picked up the payroll for those employees. Only a handful of roles were truly culled. The announcement of the layoffs was theatre for Wall Stre…

Sorry, care to explain why did you mention Wall Street in your post? What does it signify?

If a company is experiencing a dipping stock price (poor growth or whatever other reason) they can announce a huge layoff to attempt to bolster the stock price
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