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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

#191

Post by aprdm »

briandear wrote: post #178
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…

Oracle is/was laying off thousands as of August. Within the past 12 months: Peloton laid off over 4000. Snap 1280 (which is 20% of the company,) Shopify 1000 (10%.) Groupon laid off 15%. Salesforce, 1000. Microsoft 1800. Carvana (while not "big established" it's still a lot of people) laid off 2500. Tencent laying off 5500. Alibaba: 9500, ByteDance: 1000, Zillow 2300. This definitely isn't really the first major layo…

Where you saw microsoft / alibaba?

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

#192

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

briandear wrote: post #178
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…

Oracle is/was laying off thousands as of August. Within the past 12 months: Peloton laid off over 4000. Snap 1280 (which is 20% of the company,) Shopify 1000 (10%.) Groupon laid off 15%. Salesforce, 1000. Microsoft 1800. Carvana (while not "big established" it's still a lot of people) laid off 2500. Tencent laying off 5500. Alibaba: 9500, ByteDance: 1000, Zillow 2300. This definitely isn't really the first major layo…

Yeah, understood it's a lagging indicator, but most of those US companies you mention (Peloton, Snap, Shopify, Carvana) are in the "unprofitable VC-funded camp". Salesforce and Microsoft obviously aren't, but their numbers are also much, much smaller and the amounts are a really teeny percentage of their overall workforce. Zillow is a bit of a special case because of their complete f'up with flipping houses. Oracle feels like the only one really comparable to me, but perhaps I'm just showing my personal bias that I'd really wish Oracle would lay off everyone and go under, but I digress...

I guess my main point was that, even with recent layoffs, feels like most of those folks wouldn't have had much difficulty getting snapped up by other companies, especially in engineering (not saying it wasn't disruptive to those involved). But once you start laying off 20,000 here and 10,000 there, you get to the musical chairs point where some folks are going to be left without a chair for some time.

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

#193

Post by koheripbal »

bell-cot wrote: post #33

Reports elsewhere ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/repor... ) suggest that the layoffs might be a bit concentrated in the Sales & Marketing departments. Is it just me, or do some other folks also smell "corporate bloat, which better management would not have allowed to happen"?

Seems normal that the number of employees in Sales would follow the rate of product sales.

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

#194

Post by pojzon »

tehnub wrote: post #120
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 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 pri…

Gamers prefer anything that has better performance for cheaper price.

Tho overall having a more stable PC that consumes less electricity is better in long term and ppl really see that.

It shows in sale numbers.

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

#195

Post by jcranmer »

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…

> 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".

The first superscalar x86 processor was the Pentium, which came out in checks notes 1993 (Wikipedia claims design work started in 1989, hit working simulation in 1990 and taped out in 1992). Intel didn't start work on Itanium until 1994, after Pentiums were already shipping to customers, and Itanium itself wouldn't ship until 2001.

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

#196

Post by wvenable »

Moral_ wrote: post #165
wvenable wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm that isn't doing them any favors.

It will do them great favors when the Qualcomm Hamoa Chip comes out which is supposed to be as good if not better than the Apple M2

The time-tested strategy of releasing many iterations of a terrible product and hoping people will still care once it's good.

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

#197

Post by pojzon »

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

I really hope that Intel will be a role model example to showcase what happens if you dont cut the cancer known as terrible management.

Far too long managers are not taking responsibility for their bad decisions - not only business decisions but also simple feedback disregard.

„Look at what happened to Intel thats what happens if you let your managers loose”

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

#198

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jason-phillips wrote: post #81
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 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.

Perhaps this is too much of a radical idea, but if a company is so critically important that it can't be allowed to falter without government support, then it should be nationalized.

At the very least the government support should be made explicit, and large, critically important companies should be forced to pay much higher insurance, i.e. the equivalent of what banks need to pay for FDIC insurance. Sick of the whole "privatize the profits and socialize the losses" mindset.

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

#199

Post by Der_Einzige »

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

Pfft, as bad as the managers are at Intel, don't try to pretend that they have top tier talent (in SW) when they are paying on average about half of what a FAANG pays.

When I was there, they called Intel "Great place to leetcode" (a corruption of Intel claiming they are a "great place to work" everywhere)

Intel is known for good WLB and quiet quitting because the non technical managers didn't have a clue about what was actually being done on their own team. It's easy for engineers to BS these kinds of people, and this was the norm since any passion for SW was killed by working there long term...

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

#200

Post by truncate »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #155
JoshTriplett wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Back when I was not on Mac, I always preferred laptops with Intel integrated graphics, regardless of performance. It was just better drivers, less battery drain and boards didn't fail either. My first laptop had NVIDIA graphics, and it was whole combination of bad drivers and motherboard frying because of overheating. Things have probably changed, but I'd just get one with Intel graphics -- just because I trust Intel to keep pushing better drivers based on their history.

Speaking on AMD, 10 years ago at-least, there were very few premium AMD laptops, and they used to overheat quite a bit, has that changed?

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