Intel To Cut Thousands of Jobs To Reduce Costs (yahoo.com) 50
Intel plans to eliminate thousands of jobs to reduce costs and fund an ambitious effort to rebound from an earnings slump and market share losses. Bloomberg: The workforce reduction may be announced as early as this week, according to people familiar with the company's plans, who asked not to be identified because the information isn't public. Intel, which is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings Thursday, has about 110,000 employees, excluding workers at units that are being spun out.
Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger is spending heavily on research and development aimed at improving Intel's technology and helping it return to prominence in the semiconductor industry. The company's once-dominant position eroded under Gelsinger's predecessors as rivals, such as Advanced Micro Devices, have caught up and taken market share.
Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger is spending heavily on research and development aimed at improving Intel's technology and helping it return to prominence in the semiconductor industry. The company's once-dominant position eroded under Gelsinger's predecessors as rivals, such as Advanced Micro Devices, have caught up and taken market share.
Death spiral? (Score:4, Interesting)
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And yet what was the penalty for buying "a new CPU" from AMD during that time? Simply getting a poorer performing CPU? Why would that be "uncomfortable"?
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The penalty was the jokes from your friends that you had to stand.
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Wow, that's some serious small dick energy.
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before the warranty expires (Score:2)
If if fails BEFORE the warranty expires that leaves Intel responsible for replacement not the consumer. Under certain circumstances Intel may also be responsible for other costs related to e.g. downtime, cost of labor to replace, lost business.
In the AMD example where you stated the product might fail after the warranty expires that would leave the consumer having to fund the replacement.
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So you're only thinking of the 6300/8300 line (Score:2)
AMD basicall
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Your operating on old software there, buddy.
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A hell of a lot more than that (Score:3)
AMD started to get their shit together with the 5800K APU bu
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And yet what was the penalty for buying "a new CPU" from AMD during that time? Simply getting a poorer performing CPU? Why would that be "uncomfortable"?
Yep, the Phenom II processors were not the fastest and were quite power hungry (and ran hot) but they were quite stable. I had one for about 5 years and realised that there's no point in a gaming rig spending thousands on a high end processor when a mid range one meets 100% of your demand. Save that cash for upgrading your GFX card, getting a better Mobo, more/faster RAM or a bigger SSD.
Currently running a 2021 era Ryzen 5 5600X and it will definitely outlive the GFX card (RTX 3070)
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The cutting edge will always be messy: bet on the right idea and you soar high for a while. Bet on the wrong tech, you get kicked in the.
The 64bit Alpha chip could have taken off if it gained enough market share such that software etc. was written for it, but it couldn't reach the threshold needed for the Network Effect to kick in, and thus lost. Intel was never the same after that.
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Cutting edge? Raptor Lake is not cutting edge. It's a rehash of Alder Lake on an aging 10nm node (Intel 7).
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Sounds like Intel is expecting a massive hit from a recall that affects large numbers of processors that were damaged by excessive voltage. Plus lawsuits on top from people who get their software fix that will inevitably affect performance.
OEMs are in the worst position, because they can't expect customers to swap CPUs. Customers will be swapping entire machines.
How many will be management? (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of the people actually doing the work to produce the products?
Re: How many will be management? (Score:2)
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Let's not forget one of the biggest foundries that couldn't keep up was AMD. They spun off their fabs as GlobalFoundries because it was consuming way too much of AMD's way too little cash back in the day,.
IBM and Texas Instruments gave up their fabs as well I believe. I thi
Re:How many will be management? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of the people actually doing the work to produce the products?
Yeah, I always hate these announcements. What were these thousands of employees doing last week? Why weren't they terminated last week? A business which suddenly terminates a bunch of employees either just made a major shift in what they do - which is understandable - or had a bunch of dead weight they didn't deal with - which is not. It's one thing to say "we are no longer doing X or making Y and thus need to terminate Z people". It's another to say "we um, are going to reallign our um... efficiencies to um... synnergize our strategic paradigm platform."
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See we're thinking of the on the ground reality. But shareholders see that earnings have gone up and they wank all over it.
We ask ourselves why they were able to can so many useless or underperforming employees, we remember working through the post layoff chaos and the years of impact.
None of those make it into the minds of shareholders. None of them even have the capacity to ask how intel plans on making money in a couple of years.... realistically. They do get a packet explaining that Intel has bold ne
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If you can lay off thousands of people with no impact, then what were they doing?
Those people were doing the stuff that was important but not urgent. I.e. with them gone, eventually sh*t will hit the fan. But by that time, Intel's management would have pocketed their big fat bonuses for "cutting cost" and be long gone.
Just like the Boeing management in the past who made the company what it is now.
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Just look at how many processor variants that Intel offers. Cutting the variants in half would require fewer people. Stopping development on the built-in graphics part of the CPU would also save resources and wouldn't impact many customers.
Intel is also working with networking, and maybe they are prepared to lose the edge there for now and hope they can reclaim it later.
Re:How many will be management? (Score:4, Informative)
Built in graphics would affect any customer using a laptop, or a business computer that does not have and currently does not need a separate graphics card. All the low power, small form factor and cheap computers use integrated graphics now.
Pushing that back out to the motherboard would mean goodness only knows how many variants needing different drivers etc. Plus it would mean more cost I think because of duplication of effort, by a bunch of people who haven't been doing this for 10+ years cause intel graphics.
I can tell you, most business computing would switch pretty quickly to AMD with their inexpensive integrated graphics to save money and headache with drivers as soon as the OEMs ramp those up.
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I'm more considering the development phase of it, they could still provide a stagnant graphics functionality in the CPU that don't have any substantially improved performance/functionality for a few processor generations.
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I almost wonder if it should be the opposite -- having graphics on all CPUs available. It may not be used, but having them present would save SKUs, and because if it isn't used, it isn't needing cooling, so it wouldn't require the PC maker to do anything more other than perhaps offer a choice to use the onboard graphics... if even that.
Built in graphics can always be useful.
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Notice that I stated stopping the development, not removing it from the CPU chip. Just roll with old design for a few generations on the embedded graphics.
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There's lots of research on how groups of humans work. They accumulate dead weight. It is understandable, because it happens to them all.
For companies in particular, it's easier to hire than to fire. Even with no unions, regulations or anything else, only the rare psychopath actually likes firing people. You might recognize that as a ratchet. Beyond that, managers, whether in a corporation, warlords, celebrities, high school mean girls, whatever, are incentivized to collect underlings. Management types alwa
Companies don't really have management anymore (Score:2)
That's not really a thing anymore because we broke the Unions in the 80s. These days Managers do the same stuff as line workers on top of filling out time cards and approving PTO. It's typically one of the line workers that became the subject matter expert and was given a promotion so they wouldn't jump ship to a competitor.
Intel is going to either fire sales & marketing, engineers or support staff...
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Intel was never unionized and was never at risk of unionizing.
You Know (Score:2)
People are quick to point out nobody owes you a living.
But you sure seem to owe your chickenshit boss a living until you get fired.
CHIPs act at work, folks. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why government handouts should come with some form of reasonable obligation. Now, I know, this isn't a direct result of the funding from CHIPs, but it absolutely shouldn't be something we see happening in a company that accepted 8.5 billion dollars in direct funding, plus another, what, 11 billion in loans? If you get government handouts to create value within the country, you should not get to, within only a few weeks, cut this many staff unceremoniously.
This is why government money should come with a seat on the board. At least when the price is this high. I'd like to see that seat allowed a public vote, but we all know that'd never fly. At the very least, there should be a committee dedicated to finding out what the American People, not the corporations, not the current regime of rich assholes that sponsor congress like other rich assholes sponsor NASCAR, the actual people, want. We should not be handing massive piles of cash to companies that are then cutting staff on this scale. Profit above all is ridiculous enough. Profit above all, plus government handouts, and massive job cuts, is like something out of a horribly written dystopian short-story about the evils of crony capitalism, except happening in real-time. It leaves us little people wondering what our illustrious leadership is doing. Aside from the obvious, "Rob from the poor, to feed the rich."
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I almost wonder if the government should have approached it from a different angle. Where the government is requesting a fab to be built. The fab would be owned by the government, but the building and upkeep contracted out, and it leased out and operated by a private company. This would not just ensure the fab is built and can be repurposed for wartime, but also ensure capacity is there, without having people scream "socialism!"... and to boot, the fab lease likely would pay for itself over time, similar
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I almost wonder if the government should have approached it from a different angle. Where the government is requesting a fab to be built. The fab would be owned by the government, but the building and upkeep contracted out, and it leased out and operated by a private company. This would not just ensure the fab is built and can be repurposed for wartime, but also ensure capacity is there, without having people scream "socialism!"... and to boot, the fab lease likely would pay for itself over time, similar to how TARP eventually was paid off.
I could get behind this idea. And having been involved in a few cross-corporation lease situations, it's not like the first lessee wouldn't have a chance to dictate some of the building process. You agree to the lease contract before it's built, you get a say. Leased out by term, this would be so much better than what our government does today. Now they start a program like this, hand literal billions over to giant corporations, and then sit on their hands in hopes they'll actually follow through.
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The majority of "government" waste comes from the public side of public-private partnerships. Remember that every dollar in profit is a dollar that didn't go to providing the product or service we paid them to deliver. With out private interference, the government can do things with frightening efficiency. Just look at the post office. Pick any "what about" you want, any I guarantee you'll find interference from the private sector.
More than half of our obscene "defense" budget goes to private contractor
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Ugh... That should read "the private side of public-private partnerships".
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What's the alternative? If the market is left as is, Xi will subsidize yet more marketshare away from democracies, creating military and supply chain risks.
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What's the alternative? If the market is left as is, Xi will subsidize yet more marketshare away from democracies, creating military and supply chain risks.
I honestly don't know. I do know that handing billions to corporations who either pocket it in executive bonuses or use it for stock buybacks, but don't follow through on the reason they received the money isn't going to help the United States any. It hasn't in forty years, why would it now? I think the real solution is the government cracking corporate heads when they pull this garbage. But I have little hope of that happening in my lifetime.
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The CHIPs gov't handout was not about increasing US jobs. It was about addressing a national security commerce issue, where the desired remedy was to get state of the art silicon wafer production inside US borders. The bill is designed such that a company such as Intel cannot take US taxpayer money and then do a Wisconsin "FOXCONN". It doesn't matter that Intel is cutting 110K jobs; none of those jobs have anything to do with SOTA wafer production.
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The CHIPs gov't handout was not about increasing US jobs. It was about addressing a national security commerce issue, where the desired remedy was to get state of the art silicon wafer production inside US borders. The bill is designed such that a company such as Intel cannot take US taxpayer money and then do a Wisconsin "FOXCONN". It doesn't matter that Intel is cutting 110K jobs; none of those jobs have anything to do with SOTA wafer production.
Certainly, and I didn't mean to imply there was a direct correlation. All I meant was that when the country throws money into a private business regardless of the reason, even in national security concerns, there should be some form of expectation that the company won't immediately turn around and shove a fist into the public's face.
And we all know the ultimate result of the CHIPs act is going to be a whole lot of money disappearing in a puff of outsourcing. That was the entire purpose of the entire act.
Lithograph Silicon is dollars for Intel. (Score:2)
They never have really been in the position to make x number of dollars from software specific to an industry before being cut out by their primary customers delivering solu
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Right now, Intel is sort of like General Motors or Ford. It likely is going to remain a "protected" company, where the government isn't going to let it be bought out, even if it completely flops, just because there isn't anyone else in the US that can make start of the art fabs reaching sub-nanometer (well, depending on how it is measured.) So, because of this, and it is a strategic advantage (although SMIC and Russia's fabs are closely nipping at their heels), Intel is going to be kept going, even if it
Naa, Intel is done for (Score:2)
Same as Boeing. Giants die slowly, but at a certain point there is no way to stop it anymore. The history of IT is full of enterprises that went that way.
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Indeed. Although HP and IBM are still around and selling crap.
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Those companies sort of just adapted, and kept their stock market prices up. HP split into HP and HPe, IBM moved from a "one stop shop" to competing with WITCH companies (Tata, HCL, WiPro, etc.), Oracle ate Sun, but still Sun products like the ZFS servers are still industry leaders for what they do, just because Sun was so good.
Of course, we are not talking about the cool stuff they do, because the days of something groundbreaking like the PC-AT announcement have given way to just announcements of YoY repo
Not sure how this is news. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you talk to people who have worked there, and read the news, Intel likes to do lay-offs, big or small, about every 6 months. In fact, some Intel job postings even say that the job offered is only for six months.
I get the impression they use they use "lay-offs" to get around wrongful termination lawsuits if they fire somene.