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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

#101

Post by beebmam »

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.

100%. It's worth considering that some of these people laid off may consider working for authoritarian governments if they were well compensated (or are ideologically aligned), and that's a huge national security risk too. Hope they aren't dumb enough to lay off engineers with important knowledge. Please tell me that US representatives have already met with Intel on this.

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

#102

Post by zhengyi13 »

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.

Eh, I think they always were; we're just finally being forced to pay them better attention.

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

#103

Post by maldev »

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…

AMD also had alot of those major bugs, but it wasn't reported as much since the original papers all targeted intel CPU's since they are the "standard", and then a couple months later someone would do it for AMD but it was old news.

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

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!)

[deleted]

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

#105

Post by twelve40 »

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.

yeah but it's not a good reason to prop up or keep bloating non-competitive corporations. Bloating Intel is not likely to result in another tsmc.

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

#106

Post by twodave »

hinkley wrote: post #38
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

That’s always the problem. An R&D group I worked for laid off developers but no managers, which lead to more layoffs because overhead went up, which mean rates went up, which meant more consultants came in instead. Really at least a fifth of your layoff should be managers. If you lay off about six reports, that’s one less manager you need. So 1/7. If you lay off six managers, that’s one skip level you don’t need. 1 +…

Why not both? Even much smaller organizations tend to have low-impact teams that could be absorbed by others and their work deprioritized. If you're going to fire a dozen managers then the implication (or at least possibility) exists that maybe even the bottom 20% of that group is assigned to low-priority projects and perhaps even under-performing.

Then 216 => 43 becomes 203 => 29

Now you've reduced the workforce by 10% and put some miserable projects entirely out of their misery at the same time!

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

#107

Post by cantaloupe »

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?

AWS developed two generations of an in-house ARM chip (Graviton), which I think is cheaper for an equivalent power to an x86 instance. Cloudflare has also begun switching to ARM, for 57% more performance per watt:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-...

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

#109

Post by makestuff »

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…

Also they are losing share in the datacenter space as well. AWS is fabricating their own chips for gravitron instances as well as some other special types. GCP has been doing this for awhile with their ML chips, and I am sure Azure is moving in that direction too. It looks like they will take the path of IBM where they are still massive due to legacy users not moving off of them, but it will be hard to capture new market share without some massive change happening.

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

#110

Post by feanaro »

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.

Luckily there are many, many countries in the world with no semiconductor industry of their own who benefit from no single company or country staying as the perpetual, unchallenged giant.
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