Live data from Hacker News

Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

bloomberg.com

271–280 of 484 posts

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

#271
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Intel meant to be a jobs program? Should they just hire and retain people they don’t need…just to keep them employed? Should they hire me to twiddle my thumbs for $100k a year just because they can afford to? Increasing productivity is a good thing actually.

a company that has low profit and employees a lot of people as a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite

Assuming output is the same in both cases, this is wrong. If a company is making $10 million in profits, is it better for society if they spend $9 million hiring people to dig ditches and then fill them in? No, because those people could be doing something else that is actually useful.

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

#272

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

> Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers I think the entire new surface line-up is a giant conspiracy. The Surface Pro 9 5G has a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 with some tweaks called the SQ3. It does not match the performance of 12 Gen intel in a 15w power envelope, which is important because the Surface Pro 9 non-5G (intel) uses an i5-1235u, a 15w chip. But the last…

> the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes every single chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air

Well yes, but then you have to use macOS and the locked down close ecosystem that is Apple. That's not really something they're directly competing against.

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

#273
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian Krzanich was cancelled/fired for sleeping with a coworker, so the then-CFO Bob Swan was made CEO after Intel tried to hire "externally" for a year or so. After MBA'fying Intel for a couple of years, he left to a16z, a perfect place for people like him. Pat Gelsinger then joined, probably too late, to try to steer the ship back in the right direction. Intel as an organization is finished. (I worked at Intel for…

Btw, they carefully never said the gender of the person who BK was porking. I'm convinced it was a man!

I don't think we should really care to probe into the details of people's lives like that, but also the WSJ clearly stated they were a woman: https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-ex-chiefs-affair-with-emp...

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

#274
post #17

I love how the PC market slowdown is being headlined as causal when Intel has clearly done this to themselves. Maybe if Apple's products were still "Intel Inside" Intel wouldn't be in this position.

I asked an Intel chip designer more than 10 years ago why they were not prioritizing mobile chips. He didn't have a good answer. It has been obvious for so long that everything was moving to phones, tablets, etc. The fact that Intel has no foot at all in that door is astonishing to me.

Neither does Microsoft; great isn't it?

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between historically high employment rates and historically low unemployment rates?

(employment rate) = (employed people) / (total people) (unemployment rate) = (people not currently working, but actively looking) / (total people) The first includes all people, the second excludes those not working, but also not looking.

And, obviously, the employment rate is harder to game than the unemployment rate. There are long term trends that affect it (women entering the workforce, etc.), but it's an overall more stable and valuable metric to look at.

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

#276
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TSMC does way more volume than Intel Do you have a source for this? The only one I found says Intel is 2x TSMC: https://www.statista.com/statistics/883715/microprocessor-ma...

That is revenue based, and not based who makes the chips. In the chart Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm are all fabless (outsourced production) and their chips are made by TSMC, Samsung, or other foundries. By wafers produced (including memory), TSMC is 2nd and Intel is 6th. TSMC is 2x the 5th placed company on the table, so Intel is even smaller than that. https://www.eetimes.com/chipmakers-increase-share-of-global-...

By wafer doesn't sound like the correct comparison as we mostly care about top nodes for this. Revenue actually sounds better to correct for that. Your link also shows that Intel sells their old nodes to others further skewing the per-wafer comparison.

Wafers at 14nm or better would probably be a good metric for who has the volume behind top nodes to then be able to stay in front. If that's TSMC by a large margin losing the mobile and GPU markets has really done a bigger number on Intel than I had assumed before.

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

#277
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're a Linux user, Intel integrated graphics have always been the most compatible and most well-supported option. You forgot to add, "worst performing by a mile" to the feature list.

In my experience nvidia with nouveau is slower than Intel with its free driver.

I recently unplugged an nvidia card from a machine because of kernel panics with the nouveau driver.

Of course I can install the proprietary one, but that means I can no longer just upgrade the system and expect it to work after reboot.

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

#278

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…

We just ordered 4 new dual Xeon workstations for the office.

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

#280

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?

The past 2 companies I've been at have or had huge efforts to migrate large parts of infrastructure to AWS Graviton which are 64-bit ARM iirc.
Post reply on HN