8 ms·

One must understand that this is re-structuring. Intel is probably letting go of some divisions it no longer intends to pursue. In the not-so-distant past, Micr

One must understand that this is re-structuring. Intel is probably letting go of some divisions it no longer intends to pursue. In the not-so-distant past, Microsoft did an internal re-structuring when Satya Nadella became the CEO. It isn't as bad as it is portrayed to be as most people end up getting re-hired in other groups or take the severance and join a new company.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- trollingineeer 11y ago
  And a voice of stupidity replying to the voice of reason comment.
theandrewbailey 11y ago
News like this out of the blue is strange. I was pretty sure that the post-PC era was a sham. It still is, right?
- 5ilv3r 11y ago
  How much of your time is now on a mobile that used to be on a desktop? Their core business is drying up.
  - malchow 11y ago
    Am I the only person for whom the answer to this question is "almost none?" I'm serious: about 80% of my day is meeting with real people in the real world. Mobile phones haven't changed that. The other 20% of my day is sitting at my desk creating original work product (mathematical models and thoughtful memoranda) or reviewing the work product of others. Mobile phones haven't changed that, either. No doubt the drought in PC sales is real and permanent. But I wonder how much of that is because people just don't need to keep their laptops up to date in the age of great cloud services.
    - bduerst 11y ago
      Yeah, mobile hasn't figured out a good way to take over the workspace. Some of the tablet/laptop hybrids are getting closer. As for entertainment though, are you watching Youtube extensively on your desktop?
      - Nullabillity 11y ago
        > Yeah, mobile hasn't figured out a good way to take over the workspace. Some of the tablet/laptop hybrids are getting closer. There already is a relatively mobile tablet/desktop hybrid that works pretty great for both consumption and getting work done. It's called a laptop. > As for entertainment though, are you watching Youtube extensively on your desktop? Yes. I have a phone, a tablet, a desktop, and a laptop. The tablet is pretty much only used for netflix and textbooks, and the phone is for travelling. The tablet is absolutely worthless for browsing, coding, writing, or gaming; and the phone is only saved by the form factor. If I had (the space for) a TV then the tablet would be a completely unjustifiable purchase.
        bduerst 11y ago
        Laptops typically aren't considered mobile devices (if we're being pedantic). Try running mobile apps on your laptop. And yes, mobile devices have taken away entertainment share from the desktop as well as televisions.
        Nullabillity 11y ago
        Sure, say portable if that makes you happier. Not that it matters though, mobile programs are the ones trying to catch up to desktop programs, not the other way around.
      - duderific 11y ago
        I know this sounds crazy, but there are still some people who have cable subscriptions and watch TV on a TV. Oh the horror!
  - theandrewbailey 11y ago
    Less than 5%. My phone stays in my pocket most of the time, even when I'm nowhere near any other device, and everyone else around me is heads down in theirs.
    - cortesoft 11y ago
      I pull out my phone to get my 2FA number every now and then :D
  - fgonzag 11y ago
    All that mobile traffic increases server traffic. I don't think the switch to mobile is a big hit for Intel as long as they are the only major player in the high performance CPU market (let's see if AMD can turn it around with Zen, but I don't have my hopes up).
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    > How much of your time is now on a mobile that used to be on a desktop? None, since I don't want to have (and don't have or own) a portable surveillance and tracking device (also called mobile phone) in my pocket.
  - takno 11y ago
    For me, maybe 30%, mostly because I have a computer in front of me for coding most of the day anyway. For my brother's family it's nearer to 90%. He still has a PC for work, although it is on about a 5-7 year replacement cycle, and they no longer need the more-expensive second PC.
  - unimpressive 11y ago
    Almost none, the only time I use my mobile in lieu of a desktop is when my desktop is unavailable or my home Internet connection is down. I don't count time I spend out and about on my mobile, since that isn't time I was going to spend on my desktop anyway. (And I don't think having the option of going outside with a mobile has changed how often I do so.)
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    Yeah, I am not doing any development work on a mobile device. I have yet to go to an office where the cubes are filled with people working on iPads.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    Also chiming in with a "none". All mobile devices have done for me is expand my use of computing devices into realms in which I never used one before.
  - prewett 11y ago
    I think intel's core business has transitioned from desktop PCs to servers for the farms, which shows no signs of drying up. Plus, Intel provides almost all laptop chips, and I'm guessing most businesses still have either a desktop or a laptop per person, which will still get upgraded every so often. I doubt workers are going to be using iPads for data entry, although I suppose you never know.
- 0xEFF 11y ago
  This isn't at all out of the blue. As the article states, Intel revenues have been declining for over half a decade now. A few years after the first iPhone hit the market.
  - dman 11y ago
    Are you sure about the revenues going down? According to http://www.statista.com/statistics/263559/intels-net-revenue-since-1999/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/263559/intels-net-revenue... revenues seem to have gone up.
- wmf 11y ago
  It's probably possible for PC sales to decline while PCs remain dominant in computing. If so, Intel probably doesn't need to restructure; they just need to get smaller.
- mturmon 11y ago
  You can blame it on the end of Moore's law, or you can blame it on mobile computing. (The two are not unrelated.) But it is fundamental.
- scott_s 11y ago
  I think we're in a post-PC era. Yes, I spend my work days on a laptop. But most of my personal computing happens on an iPhone or an iPad. I think that PCs (and laptops) will increasingly become "things we do work on" and smartphones and tablets will become "things we consume stuff on". A lot of PC sales, I think, were coming from people buying them for personal use to consume stuff. That market is changing.
  - kirykl 11y ago
    On the consumer side its possibly back to a shared PC era. Instead of multiple PCs per household, just one PC to do work that's about 5 years old, and each person has their own annually updated phone/tablet for everything else.
  - Splines 11y ago
    On top of that productivity app companies are chasing mobile in order to not get left out in the cold, further exacerbating the PC decline.
  - emmab 11y ago
    They're so much slower to interface with though. I couldn't live without keyboard shortcuts.
- make3 11y ago
  To me, it's more that Moore's law is over and that observable speedups are much less obvious to the non gaming consumers
  - joering2 11y ago
    To me the Moore's law will end where we all have a mediocre CPU at home connected to a fiber... any anytime you need to do work, or someone else, without being aware we share our CPU with eachother. Then there is no more Moore law - just one huge SPU (Sharable Processing Unit).
- swalsh 11y ago
  I recently started working on a little eCommerce project. I found a way to indirectly estimate the sales of some of my competitors products. So I downloaded about 13gb of this data, processed it down into about 80 million rows and than ran a bunch of stats on it. Now 80 million rows is not "big data" scale, but it's not super small either. With my 16gb of memory (that I paid I think $400 for), my humble quad core i7 that i paid $300 for, and my 500 GB SSD. that I paid $100 for, My less than $1k desktop crunched through this dataset with no effort at all. I consider myself a "power" user, and my humble machine can do everything I can throw at it, and more. It'll be a long time before I upgrade again, and when I do, i'll probably buy the cheapest processor on the market. I'm probably not alone here.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - neoterics 11y ago
    This sounds intriguing, care to share any insights? Is this for Amazon?
  - icelancer 11y ago
    Yup. I do plenty of "medium data" work on my overclocked i5-2500k and 64 GB of RAM on Windows 7 / Ubuntu mixed machine. I've had the processor since the 2500k was the thing to have (years ago). No reason to upgrade yet. Got a new GPU after 6 years but that was about it.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    Yeah, I want to hear about estimating competitor sales too.
    - swalsh 11y ago
      Maybe i'll do a write-up in the future. I assume everyone does it already, but on the off chance they don't.... i don't see any upside in writing about something that might help my competition.
  - puranjay 11y ago
- morgante 11y ago
  No. Computer sales are at historic lows. We've reached the confluence of computers being "good enough" (there are no longer much performance gains from buying new computers) and more and more consumer computing moving to tablets/phones.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  There are plenty of PCs. Here's the problem. Running a five-year-old PC used to be an issue. Today, running a five-year-old PC is a Intel Sandy Bridge i7-2600K ( Passmark Score: 8,518 ). While a modern i7-6700K has a Passmark Score of: 10,987. FIVE YEARS, and FOUR generations of processors have created a gain of net 28% in multithreaded situations. Far less for single-threaded applications (maybe 15%). And absolutely negligible for gamers (which are 100% GPU throttled). If you're running a 5-year-old i7-2600K, there is absolutely no reason to upgrade to Intel Skylake. None at all. Maybe you want a new GPU to play those VR games... but Intel isn't making gains anymore in processor speed. Intel has been trying to get people to buy their power-efficient designs (Skylake is a hell-of-a-lot more power efficient...) so Intel continues to sell laptops at a decent rate. But no one I know has major issues with their desktop speeds. The only people I know who have upgraded their computers are those who have had hardware failures. There's still no need to upgrade a computer from Sandy Bridge.
  - bluedino 11y ago
    >> i7 2600k Sure, that's the top of the line $300 chip in the days of a whole PC being able to be bought for $300. What if you're on a five year old Pentium G620?
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      The cores are basically the same within the generations. A five-year-old Pentium G620 is only ~25% slower than the Skylake Pentium G4520. Both are dual-core CPUs that are cheaper than $100 aimed at the budget audience. Frankly, the fact that AMD Vishera FX-6300 still easily beats out the Pentium G4520 in multithreaded benchmarks... this demonstrates the absolute lack of Desktop CPU improvements. I'd only recommend the G4520 to someone who is really sure that they care about single-threaded performance (ie: Gamers). Most people will appreciate the lower total-cost-of-ownership that FX-6300 offers at that price point. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html * AMD FX-6300 Passmark: 6,342 * Modern Skylake Pentium G4520 Passmark: 4,261. The G4520 is a $80 chip, Released October 2015. FX-6300 was AMD's 2012 entry: a FOUR year old chip, now selling for $80 to $90 at Microcenter. Microcenter has some $0 Motherboards if you buy an FX-6300 from them. That's the kind of benefit you get from buying "old". And since CPUs aren't really much faster, why the hell should you buy cutting edge? -------- Hell, why are you spending $80 on a new G4520? Facebook just decommissioned their servers. You can get a Dual socket ready Sandy Bridge 8-core 16-thread E5-2670 on Ebay for $80. Amazon for $70 http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B007H29FRS/ref=dp_olp_used http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B007H29FRS/ref=dp_olp... Go get yourself a dual-socket 16-core 32-threads E5-2670 Sandy Bridge Workstation, just $80 per CPU. Intel can't even compete against their own ghost from 5 years ago. Is it a wonder that sales are low?
- Nihilartikel 11y ago
  The particulars of Intel's situation aside, there are some (notably not all) watching the markets that believe we may be well into the prelude to a market recession.
- protomyth 11y ago
  I'm thinking its not so much a post-PC era as a customizable SOC era, and Intel does not want that at all.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  We're pretty much post-PC froth/churn.
- matwood 11y ago
  Out of the blue? There have been articles for a long time about the internal mess at Intel as they try to figure out mobile and IoT. One of the latest ones just last week: http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-leaked-memo-murthy-renduchintala-blasts-lack-of-focus-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-leaked-memo-murthy-rend...
bcook 11y ago
and I am not down-voting you, I am re-structuring your karma. Yes, this may be good for the future of Intel or the employees losing their jobs... but right now, 12000 people are having their lives affected in drastic, unexpected ways.
- mc32 11y ago
  I agree that it's likely the majority of those people are in unenviable positions. I've been thru cuts, it sucks, but at the same time, as you say it may be untenable for Intel to keep carrying them --also, it's possible Intel should have been more cautious in hiring (and maybe some of those people would have opted for personally more stable jobs, or maybe they would have taken worse jobs --it's hard to say.
- krschultz 11y ago
  It doesn't say that they are firing 12,000 people. Certainly some people will be laid off, but a reduction in head count of 12,000 is distinct from layoff count. Assuming people stay in a job 4 years, you can get a 25% reduction in headcount per year by just not hiring. Intel has over 100,000 employees. They are likely hiring 10k-25k people per year just to stay at a constant size.
ececconi 11y ago
I doubt with the CFO being let go most people will end up getting re-hired in other groups. Their revenues are down, they're closing up shop in some areas or realizing they need to run some areas with less people. It's actually a pretty big deal.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  the CFO being let go He's not "being let go". From the article: Stacy Smith, who has been chief financial officer since 2007, will move to a new role as head of manufacturing and sales I'm not sure what to make of the move, but if they really wanted to let him go they wouldn't have given him this different role. Edit: just to elaborate, Intel is first and foremost a manufacturing company. Their manufacturing currently has a 61 percent gross margin. You don't put someone in charge of that if you want to let him go!? But I'm not an Intel employee or close observer of the company. Maybe some Intel insiders can chime in with that they think this means.
  - ececconi 11y ago
    You're right. I made a bold statement without looking into the details. Looking at their yearly balance sheet, though, their yearly liabilities are going up. They've got quite a bit of debt. A good 1/3 of their assets are in property plant and equipment value. That means that the fair market value of that stuff can tank if they don't keep up the pace of growth because what if they can't sell as much of their products anymore because of a shift to other technologies? This is for sure a move because their revenue forecasts are grim in many areas they operate in.
- sitic 11y ago
  Intels profit has grown 3 percent and their revenue is up 7 percent compared to same quarter a year ago.
  - ececconi 11y ago
    You're right. I made a bold statement without looking into the details. Looking at their yearly balance sheet, though, their yearly liabilities are going up. They've got quite a bit of debt. A good 1/3 of their assets are in property plant and equipment value. That means that the fair market value of that stuff can tank if they don't keep up the pace of growth because what if they can't sell as much of their products anymore because of a shift to other technologies? This is for sure a move because their revenue forecasts are grim in many areas they operate in.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

trollingineeer 11y ago
And a voice of stupidity replying to the voice of reason comment.

theandrewbailey 11y ago

News like this out of the blue is strange. I was pretty sure that the post-PC era was a sham. It still is, right?

5ilv3r 11y ago
How much of your time is now on a mobile that used to be on a desktop? Their core business is drying up.
- malchow 11y ago
  Am I the only person for whom the answer to this question is "almost none?" I'm serious: about 80% of my day is meeting with real people in the real world. Mobile phones haven't changed that. The other 20% of my day is sitting at my desk creating original work product (mathematical models and thoughtful memoranda) or reviewing the work product of others. Mobile phones haven't changed that, either. No doubt the drought in PC sales is real and permanent. But I wonder how much of that is because people just don't need to keep their laptops up to date in the age of great cloud services.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    Yeah, mobile hasn't figured out a good way to take over the workspace. Some of the tablet/laptop hybrids are getting closer. As for entertainment though, are you watching Youtube extensively on your desktop?
    - Nullabillity 11y ago
      > Yeah, mobile hasn't figured out a good way to take over the workspace. Some of the tablet/laptop hybrids are getting closer. There already is a relatively mobile tablet/desktop hybrid that works pretty great for both consumption and getting work done. It's called a laptop. > As for entertainment though, are you watching Youtube extensively on your desktop? Yes. I have a phone, a tablet, a desktop, and a laptop. The tablet is pretty much only used for netflix and textbooks, and the phone is for travelling. The tablet is absolutely worthless for browsing, coding, writing, or gaming; and the phone is only saved by the form factor. If I had (the space for) a TV then the tablet would be a completely unjustifiable purchase.
      - bduerst 11y ago
        Laptops typically aren't considered mobile devices (if we're being pedantic). Try running mobile apps on your laptop. And yes, mobile devices have taken away entertainment share from the desktop as well as televisions.
        Nullabillity 11y ago
        Sure, say portable if that makes you happier. Not that it matters though, mobile programs are the ones trying to catch up to desktop programs, not the other way around.
    - duderific 11y ago
      I know this sounds crazy, but there are still some people who have cable subscriptions and watch TV on a TV. Oh the horror!
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  Less than 5%. My phone stays in my pocket most of the time, even when I'm nowhere near any other device, and everyone else around me is heads down in theirs.
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    I pull out my phone to get my 2FA number every now and then :D
- fgonzag 11y ago
  All that mobile traffic increases server traffic. I don't think the switch to mobile is a big hit for Intel as long as they are the only major player in the high performance CPU market (let's see if AMD can turn it around with Zen, but I don't have my hopes up).
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > How much of your time is now on a mobile that used to be on a desktop? None, since I don't want to have (and don't have or own) a portable surveillance and tracking device (also called mobile phone) in my pocket.
- takno 11y ago
  For me, maybe 30%, mostly because I have a computer in front of me for coding most of the day anyway. For my brother's family it's nearer to 90%. He still has a PC for work, although it is on about a 5-7 year replacement cycle, and they no longer need the more-expensive second PC.
- unimpressive 11y ago
  Almost none, the only time I use my mobile in lieu of a desktop is when my desktop is unavailable or my home Internet connection is down. I don't count time I spend out and about on my mobile, since that isn't time I was going to spend on my desktop anyway. (And I don't think having the option of going outside with a mobile has changed how often I do so.)
- cortesoft 11y ago
  Yeah, I am not doing any development work on a mobile device. I have yet to go to an office where the cubes are filled with people working on iPads.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Also chiming in with a "none". All mobile devices have done for me is expand my use of computing devices into realms in which I never used one before.
- prewett 11y ago
  I think intel's core business has transitioned from desktop PCs to servers for the farms, which shows no signs of drying up. Plus, Intel provides almost all laptop chips, and I'm guessing most businesses still have either a desktop or a laptop per person, which will still get upgraded every so often. I doubt workers are going to be using iPads for data entry, although I suppose you never know.
0xEFF 11y ago
This isn't at all out of the blue. As the article states, Intel revenues have been declining for over half a decade now. A few years after the first iPhone hit the market.
- dman 11y ago
  Are you sure about the revenues going down? According to http://www.statista.com/statistics/263559/intels-net-revenue-since-1999/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/263559/intels-net-revenue... revenues seem to have gone up.
wmf 11y ago
It's probably possible for PC sales to decline while PCs remain dominant in computing. If so, Intel probably doesn't need to restructure; they just need to get smaller.
mturmon 11y ago
You can blame it on the end of Moore's law, or you can blame it on mobile computing. (The two are not unrelated.) But it is fundamental.
scott_s 11y ago
I think we're in a post-PC era. Yes, I spend my work days on a laptop. But most of my personal computing happens on an iPhone or an iPad. I think that PCs (and laptops) will increasingly become "things we do work on" and smartphones and tablets will become "things we consume stuff on". A lot of PC sales, I think, were coming from people buying them for personal use to consume stuff. That market is changing.
- kirykl 11y ago
  On the consumer side its possibly back to a shared PC era. Instead of multiple PCs per household, just one PC to do work that's about 5 years old, and each person has their own annually updated phone/tablet for everything else.
- Splines 11y ago
  On top of that productivity app companies are chasing mobile in order to not get left out in the cold, further exacerbating the PC decline.
- emmab 11y ago
  They're so much slower to interface with though. I couldn't live without keyboard shortcuts.
make3 11y ago
To me, it's more that Moore's law is over and that observable speedups are much less obvious to the non gaming consumers
- joering2 11y ago
  To me the Moore's law will end where we all have a mediocre CPU at home connected to a fiber... any anytime you need to do work, or someone else, without being aware we share our CPU with eachother. Then there is no more Moore law - just one huge SPU (Sharable Processing Unit).
swalsh 11y ago
I recently started working on a little eCommerce project. I found a way to indirectly estimate the sales of some of my competitors products. So I downloaded about 13gb of this data, processed it down into about 80 million rows and than ran a bunch of stats on it. Now 80 million rows is not "big data" scale, but it's not super small either. With my 16gb of memory (that I paid I think $400 for), my humble quad core i7 that i paid $300 for, and my 500 GB SSD. that I paid $100 for, My less than $1k desktop crunched through this dataset with no effort at all. I consider myself a "power" user, and my humble machine can do everything I can throw at it, and more. It'll be a long time before I upgrade again, and when I do, i'll probably buy the cheapest processor on the market. I'm probably not alone here.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- neoterics 11y ago
  This sounds intriguing, care to share any insights? Is this for Amazon?
- icelancer 11y ago
  Yup. I do plenty of "medium data" work on my overclocked i5-2500k and 64 GB of RAM on Windows 7 / Ubuntu mixed machine. I've had the processor since the 2500k was the thing to have (years ago). No reason to upgrade yet. Got a new GPU after 6 years but that was about it.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  Yeah, I want to hear about estimating competitor sales too.
  - swalsh 11y ago
    Maybe i'll do a write-up in the future. I assume everyone does it already, but on the off chance they don't.... i don't see any upside in writing about something that might help my competition.
- puranjay 11y ago
morgante 11y ago
No. Computer sales are at historic lows. We've reached the confluence of computers being "good enough" (there are no longer much performance gains from buying new computers) and more and more consumer computing moving to tablets/phones.
dragontamer 11y ago
There are plenty of PCs. Here's the problem. Running a five-year-old PC used to be an issue. Today, running a five-year-old PC is a Intel Sandy Bridge i7-2600K ( Passmark Score: 8,518 ). While a modern i7-6700K has a Passmark Score of: 10,987. FIVE YEARS, and FOUR generations of processors have created a gain of net 28% in multithreaded situations. Far less for single-threaded applications (maybe 15%). And absolutely negligible for gamers (which are 100% GPU throttled). If you're running a 5-year-old i7-2600K, there is absolutely no reason to upgrade to Intel Skylake. None at all. Maybe you want a new GPU to play those VR games... but Intel isn't making gains anymore in processor speed. Intel has been trying to get people to buy their power-efficient designs (Skylake is a hell-of-a-lot more power efficient...) so Intel continues to sell laptops at a decent rate. But no one I know has major issues with their desktop speeds. The only people I know who have upgraded their computers are those who have had hardware failures. There's still no need to upgrade a computer from Sandy Bridge.
- bluedino 11y ago
  >> i7 2600k Sure, that's the top of the line $300 chip in the days of a whole PC being able to be bought for $300. What if you're on a five year old Pentium G620?
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    The cores are basically the same within the generations. A five-year-old Pentium G620 is only ~25% slower than the Skylake Pentium G4520. Both are dual-core CPUs that are cheaper than $100 aimed at the budget audience. Frankly, the fact that AMD Vishera FX-6300 still easily beats out the Pentium G4520 in multithreaded benchmarks... this demonstrates the absolute lack of Desktop CPU improvements. I'd only recommend the G4520 to someone who is really sure that they care about single-threaded performance (ie: Gamers). Most people will appreciate the lower total-cost-of-ownership that FX-6300 offers at that price point. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html * AMD FX-6300 Passmark: 6,342 * Modern Skylake Pentium G4520 Passmark: 4,261. The G4520 is a $80 chip, Released October 2015. FX-6300 was AMD's 2012 entry: a FOUR year old chip, now selling for $80 to $90 at Microcenter. Microcenter has some $0 Motherboards if you buy an FX-6300 from them. That's the kind of benefit you get from buying "old". And since CPUs aren't really much faster, why the hell should you buy cutting edge? -------- Hell, why are you spending $80 on a new G4520? Facebook just decommissioned their servers. You can get a Dual socket ready Sandy Bridge 8-core 16-thread E5-2670 on Ebay for $80. Amazon for $70 http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B007H29FRS/ref=dp_olp_used http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B007H29FRS/ref=dp_olp... Go get yourself a dual-socket 16-core 32-threads E5-2670 Sandy Bridge Workstation, just $80 per CPU. Intel can't even compete against their own ghost from 5 years ago. Is it a wonder that sales are low?
Nihilartikel 11y ago
The particulars of Intel's situation aside, there are some (notably not all) watching the markets that believe we may be well into the prelude to a market recession.
protomyth 11y ago
I'm thinking its not so much a post-PC era as a customizable SOC era, and Intel does not want that at all.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
We're pretty much post-PC froth/churn.
matwood 11y ago
Out of the blue? There have been articles for a long time about the internal mess at Intel as they try to figure out mobile and IoT. One of the latest ones just last week: http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-leaked-memo-murthy-renduchintala-blasts-lack-of-focus-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-leaked-memo-murthy-rend...

bcook 11y ago

and I am not down-voting you, I am re-structuring your karma. Yes, this may be good for the future of Intel or the employees losing their jobs... but right now, 12000 people are having their lives affected in drastic, unexpected ways.

mc32 11y ago
I agree that it's likely the majority of those people are in unenviable positions. I've been thru cuts, it sucks, but at the same time, as you say it may be untenable for Intel to keep carrying them --also, it's possible Intel should have been more cautious in hiring (and maybe some of those people would have opted for personally more stable jobs, or maybe they would have taken worse jobs --it's hard to say.
krschultz 11y ago
It doesn't say that they are firing 12,000 people. Certainly some people will be laid off, but a reduction in head count of 12,000 is distinct from layoff count. Assuming people stay in a job 4 years, you can get a 25% reduction in headcount per year by just not hiring. Intel has over 100,000 employees. They are likely hiring 10k-25k people per year just to stay at a constant size.

ececconi 11y ago

I doubt with the CFO being let go most people will end up getting re-hired in other groups. Their revenues are down, they're closing up shop in some areas or realizing they need to run some areas with less people. It's actually a pretty big deal.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
the CFO being let go He's not "being let go". From the article: Stacy Smith, who has been chief financial officer since 2007, will move to a new role as head of manufacturing and sales I'm not sure what to make of the move, but if they really wanted to let him go they wouldn't have given him this different role. Edit: just to elaborate, Intel is first and foremost a manufacturing company. Their manufacturing currently has a 61 percent gross margin. You don't put someone in charge of that if you want to let him go!? But I'm not an Intel employee or close observer of the company. Maybe some Intel insiders can chime in with that they think this means.
- ececconi 11y ago
  You're right. I made a bold statement without looking into the details. Looking at their yearly balance sheet, though, their yearly liabilities are going up. They've got quite a bit of debt. A good 1/3 of their assets are in property plant and equipment value. That means that the fair market value of that stuff can tank if they don't keep up the pace of growth because what if they can't sell as much of their products anymore because of a shift to other technologies? This is for sure a move because their revenue forecasts are grim in many areas they operate in.
sitic 11y ago
Intels profit has grown 3 percent and their revenue is up 7 percent compared to same quarter a year ago.
- ececconi 11y ago
  You're right. I made a bold statement without looking into the details. Looking at their yearly balance sheet, though, their yearly liabilities are going up. They've got quite a bit of debt. A good 1/3 of their assets are in property plant and equipment value. That means that the fair market value of that stuff can tank if they don't keep up the pace of growth because what if they can't sell as much of their products anymore because of a shift to other technologies? This is for sure a move because their revenue forecasts are grim in many areas they operate in.