Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by bsder » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

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…

Itanium was a gigabuck and drove everybody out of the high-end processor market except IBM leaving Xeon for Intel to monopolize for a decade+. I'd qualify that as a business success even if Itanium was a technical failure.

And, it may be paying off after all. Graphics cards are effectively giant VLIW machines. And while Intel's new cards get slaughtered on DirectX 11 or older games, they are quite competitive when used on the DirectX 12+ stuff which basically wants a giant multi-core parallel processor.

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

#212

Post by philistine » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

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.

Was this marketing to Linux perverts worth all this money that Intel poured? For the vast majority of normies, Intel Inside was useless noise.

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

#213

Post by outside1234 » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

keepquestioning wrote: post #42

spamizbad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might make sense: If you're selling mostly to mobile OEMs and data centers you need a completely different sales/marketing strategy that's more focused on whale hunting than building "brand awareness" to a broad consumer market.

"Intel Inside" worked..

Did it? Or was there no other option for a long time?

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

#214

Post by tuatoru » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

cowmix wrote: post #117

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…

SOP.

IBM crippled the AS/400 when it looked like it could eat into their mainframe business, for example.

It's the innovator's dilemma.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

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

#215

Post by anothernewdude » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #193

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.

Perhaps. Though I'd be a bit slower to react to the market here. Depending how sales are handled, removing staff can remove the relationships that they have developed. It's a pretty bad sign to be doing this.

Might be different for Intel though, everyone has to drink at the same oasis.

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

#216

Post by Sylamore » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

spfzero wrote: post #166

cowmix wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If someone is going to eat your current business, it's better if it is you. Fear of cannibalization is basically, "our customers will find out we have an even better product for them than the one they are currently buying from us." It's a good thing for your customers, and it's good for the long-term competitiveness of your company.

I've always told my business partners when discussing future products that if you aren't afraid to cannibalize your own revenue streams, your competitor (or another internal team) will.

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

#217

Post by JoshTriplett » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

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.

> graphics performance

For the Linux users I was referring to, the most graphically intensive thing many of them run is a desktop compositor.

But yes, today, AMD iGPUs are a great choice for mobile, and AMD dGPUs are a great choice for desktop or for i-don't-care-about-battery gaming laptops.

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

#218

Post by Entinel » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

It's insane to me that Intel just can't figure out what to do vs AMD. They continually position themselves as the premium choice and price their products accordingly even though that isn't true any more.

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

#219

Post by foobarian » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

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"?

Tangential, but what are the consequences of upcoming layoffs cutting across the industry and impacting mostly these "soft" non-technical roles? Will this create a large disgruntled segment enough to start upheaval the like of the French or the October revolution?

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

#220

Post by UncleOxidant » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

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.

I can think of another aspect of the badness: It's bad for geographical regions that have become dependent on the company. Intel is Oregon's largest private employer, for example, and most of this employment is in the Portland metro area. If Intel were to go away next year this area would be hit very hard economically. That's not going to happen, of course, but one can imagine a long slow decline. Tektronix used to be a very large employer here - employed about as many at it's peak in the late 80s as Intel employs here now. Tek went into decline in the 90s, fortunately Intel's star was rising then. As Intel's star declines it's tough to see a new replacement for the area.