34 ms·

Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown

304 points by oumua_don17 4y ago

metadat 4y ago
https://archive.ph/P2gjN https://archive.ph/P2gjN
aitchnyu 4y ago
Is the 15% sales "tumble" because people and companies are holding on to their PCs for a longer time? This could be good news for the environment.
- me_me_me 4y ago
  PC/laptop is a luxury goods for middle income families. Currently uncertain times are definitely not helping sales. And if they are forced to buy a new one a budget options are more likely (cheaper chip option - amd).
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Companies maybe not, but more likely, people just dont need PCs. My wife and I share one computer at home for like doing taxes. If we want another I’ll probably get a Chromebook for cheap. I do everything on my phone.
samson8989 4y ago
The cause is the international economic downturn/ high inflation, combined with a collapse in cloud computing orders. Around 30%-40% of PC sales were going to cloud compute. This is slowing.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I wonder how much profit Intel really makes on the data center. The tech press never questions it, but Intel does a lot of gaslighting and notoriously has many sock puppets in the industry press. We are told all the time that the data center is subsidizing the consumer but I wonder if the truth is the other way around... Certainly Intel wouldn't have gotten within 100 miles of the data center if it hadn't been for the volume of client parts being able to pay for technology that pulled ahead of SPARC, MIPS and all the legacy chips. On one hand, the data center gets better utilization, maybe gets more value, and maybe turns over hardware faster. (e.g. why do I want to buy a new computer when the IGPU is just going to make it crash faster?) On the other hand there is more competition for the data center, particularly cloud providers who could amortize rewriting simple but large scale applications like Amazon S3 for ARM or RISC-V over a large fleet of machines. If the data center is able to drive a hard bargain, it may well be that the client is still subsidizing the data center, but we just get told its the other way around so that we won't ask for me and complain about the e-waste Intel tries to pass off on us. (e.g. "try" because their sales are collapsing) --- A good example of the gaslighting is this article https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-kernel-update-kills-laptop-displays https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-kernel-update-kills-... which should have the headline "Intel iGPU kills laptop displays".
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    I imagine tomshardware has to "play nice" so they get free demo units to do benchmarks, articles, overclocks etc with.
nly 4y ago
It's kind of mind boggling that they employer 114,000 people to begin with
PaulHoule 4y ago
Intel is always planning thousands of job cuts. As soon as you get a job an Intel you'd better start looking for your next job.
superchroma 4y ago
Damn, that's a lot of people. Wow.
- dozgon 4y ago
  I made a mistake here. I no longer stand fully by that statement. For details, consider my later reply. Original text: It is. The article does not say where this will occur. They cannot lay off people from the EU like that. It's not that easy. Unlike the US, EU countries are welfare states.
  - prottog 4y ago
    Harder to fire, harder to hire, without fail.
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
      If you have a strong welfare state, it should make it easier to fire. This is the case in Denmark, some countries offer incentives to lay staff off temporarily but, generally, it isn't the case (which is why you have unbelievable levels of unemployment in Europe).
      - dozgon 4y ago
        My mistake was to assume such rules in other EU countries. In Germany, there is a thing called "Kündigungsschutz"[1]. I am not sure about Ireland, but I assumed there are similar rulings. So at least in Germany, it is not that easy, but possible. 1) http://www.rechtslexikon.net/d/kuendigungsschutz/kuendigungsschutz.htm http://www.rechtslexikon.net/d/kuendigungsschutz/kuendigungs...
        skippyboxedhero 4y ago
        Germany has strong works councils because it has very strong companies that, essentially, are given a licence to print money by the state. Ireland is an example of a country with a totally different political economy (more similar to the UK) with high levels of competition/innovation. Either way, the point is that if you have high levels of protection that should mean that it is easier to fire someone...because they have something to fall back on. That is why the UK and the US have universal welfare states. Germany does not have a universal welfare state, and the only way that is possible is by having high employment security/strong labour laws and huge companies that are profitable due to low competition. This, obviously, comes with downsides (this is why Germany has struggled with high unemployment in the past, and has things like Kurzabeit to subsidise companies even further against firing staff). An exception to this is Denmark which has almost total union participation and very weak labour laws, they achieve this through a much more expensive system of social insurance. They have, for Europe, relatively high levels of innovation so this all offsets (you get high security and relatively high levels of innovation).
alexnewman 4y ago
I worked at Intel and it kicked off my career. I believe putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this. I wonder if apple will ever end up in the same situation
- pengaru 4y ago
  > I worked at Intel and it kicked off my career. I believe putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this. I wonder if apple will ever end up in the same situation Are you referring to past leadership? Because Pat Gelsinger has never been a CFO...
  - djmips 4y ago
    He's just mopping up though?
- ar_lan 4y ago
  Pat Gelsinger was a CEO of VMware prior to Intel, COO at EMC prior to that, and CTO at Intel before that. He was never a CFO.
  - djmips 4y ago
    I think they are talking about the previous captain that pointed them at the iceberg.
    - typon 4y ago
      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 5 years through these changes)
      - hangonhn 4y ago
QuarterRoy 4y ago
I’ve been through two layoffs at tech companies - one of 14,000 and one of 15,000. One touched a lot of teams including my own. The second was mostly smoke and mirrors - they took multiple factories and supply chain employees and sold them or outsourced them to a company that picked up the payroll for those employees. Only a handful of roles were truly culled. The announcement of the layoffs was theatre for Wall Street.
- mattfrommars 4y ago
  Sorry, care to explain why did you mention Wall Street in your post? What does it signify?
  - mechanical_bear 4y ago
    They laid people off only on paper, essentially moving those people to outsource roles. This made their ongoing expenses look better to investors, when presented in a dishonest manner.
  - lalaithion 4y ago
    Wall Street is metonymy for the stock market.
  - brokencode 4y ago
    “Wall Street” refers to stock investors and analysts who put pressure on the company to increase their profit and share prices above all else. They are motivated primarily by making a profit on their investment rather than long term health of the company. This is due to the New York Stock Exchange being located on Wall Street in New York.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nicholasjarnold 4y ago
    > The announcement of the layoffs was theatre for Wall Street. I'm interpreting this as "the (publicly-traded) company used a layoff announcement to appease investors and show them that executive management is taking steps to ensure the company operates more efficiently, thereby keeping it within the good graces of these investors/hedge-fund managers/etc".
Proven 4y ago
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  How many people have they hired in the last few years?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - capableweb 4y ago
    If Linkedin data is trustworthy, headcount growth has been 9% last year, 16% last two years. https://imgur.com/a/tTjb2ZM https://imgur.com/a/tTjb2ZM
UncleOxidant 4y ago
And this isn't even counting the number of contractors that are being let go.
pengaru 4y ago
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.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  And ‘people not at home’? What does that even mean? People take their laptops to coffee shops? But so what?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I'm under the impression that for a large chunk of the population, spending most of their time on their PC during the pandemic was actually an undesirable lifestyle change. I suspect they might be changing back to doing whatever it was they did beforehand.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    This seems like a reference to the situation during the height of Covid lockdowns, where people were stuck at home buying tech products. In that case, the deeper read of the situation is that the Covid crisis helped them kick the can down the road by 3 years on responding to the trends of 2019.
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    There was a huge surge of people buying new gear to outfit home offices for WFH. That's over now. Not everyone is back in the office fulltime (obviously), but we'e not out rushing to buy new stuff when we just did all that not too long ago.
- irrational 4y ago
  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.
arberx 4y ago
Kukumber 4y ago
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
- chao- 4y ago
  >Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers For those of us who are bad at subtext, could you elaborate further? What are the questions that this is the answer to?
  - xdavidliu 4y ago
    my guess: "will Microsoft continue to take AMD as seriously as it does Intel?"
- hinkley 4y ago
  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 + 6 + 36 = 43. Go to three levels and that’s 1 + 6 + 36 + 216 = 259, or 43 / 259 or about 1/6. But if you want to keep production capacity, you should move to slightly more reports per manager, not maintain steady state. Just to keep the math simple, if you had 216 developers reporting to an organization of 43 managers, if you went to 7 reports per manager you need 31 line managers, not 36, which is a 2% RIF without losing a single producer. Or if you do both you get about 1/5th of laid off people as managers if you lay off less than half your developers. Edit: fractions and ratios are not interchangeable, bad math.
  - twodave 4y ago
    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!
deleted 4y ago
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norwalkbear 4y ago
Whoa that's a lot of people. The financialization of the global economy has been disaster of boom bust cycles that destroys the mental health of the population.
- icedistilled 4y ago
  >financialization of the global economy has been disaster of boom bust cycles ??? Hasn't there been booms and bust cycles in america since founding?
disillusioned 4y ago
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 replaced them with tocks. Fell far behind because of ridiculous tilt-at-windmill folly around Itanium and other architectural decisions that absolutely didn't pay off. Ended up taking way too long to get further down on process size. 3) Lost their competitive edge so much that Apple finally realized they can do it better and suffer the transitional costs of building a middleware layer to translate off of x86. Apple's fully committed to that, so Intel doesn't just lose the "no one is using a PC anymore" market, they're also losing the "those people who DO use home computers which happen to be Apples" market. 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > 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 it's quite bad that over the past 25ish years that a lot of big companies have really learned the lessons of "disruption" and have responded by just buying up the smaller but up-and-coming competition before they can overtake (looking at you Adobe and Figma).
  - srinivgp 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
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 off a couple thousand people this summer, that's the closest thing that comes to mind. Intel certainly has its own unique challenges, but even, for example, AMD had been doing pretty great up until this year, and they also just announced a big shortfall for their 3rd quarter results. Just wondering if this is really the tip of the iceberg for a true, broad retrenchment in tech, after the past 9 months of "Is a recession coming? Is a recession coming?"
- gspencley 4y ago
  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 instruction-level performance optimizations that, when disabled to address the security vulnerabilities, led to even worse performance? So if AMD isn't doing great at the moment either, I can't imagine how hard Intel has been hit. I don't know anyone who is buying or recommending Intel CPUs at the moment.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > 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?
    - cantaloupe 4y ago
      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-cpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-...
bell-cot 4y ago
Reports elsewhere ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/report-intel-plans-layoffs-as-shrinking-demand-punishes-pc-makers/ 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"?
- spamizbad 4y ago
  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.
  - keepquestioning 4y ago
    "Intel Inside" worked..
    - mort96 4y ago
      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.
      - whymauri 4y ago
        Before Ryzen, I strongly preferred Intel CPUs and Intel-compatible motherboards for building PCs.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Intel marketing is NOT aimed at customers. It’s aimed at Dell and HP et al.
        4y ago
keepquestioning 4y ago
This is insane. Surely they can't ALL be sales and marketing people.
- deleted 4y ago
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npalli 4y ago
While Intel has had it's own shortcomings, the PC market is cratering [1] and Intel among others is very exposed. I was very curious about the very steep discounts on Apple Macbooks recently and thought it was due to latest versions coming out in October; but looks like there is a massive reset in shipments after the massive boom during the pandemic. [1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-10-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-declined-19-percent-in-third-quarter-of-2022 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-1...
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  I would be surprised if anyone actually thought the surge in PC demand seen in 2020/21 would be anything but short-lived. Computers don't just become obsolete in the blink of an eye anymore; most of those new computers will still be perfectly servicable well into the 2030s.
mattst88 4y ago
Ouch. Very sorry for those affected. I worked at Intel for >8 years, and I still have a lot of friends there. I have little faith in Intel's management. They apparently plan to continue increasing their dividend payouts, while cutting back on investment in fabs according to https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/intel-cuts-fab-buildout-by-4b-to https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/intel-cuts-fab-buildout-... ... and in the context of the recently-passed CHIPS Act... I wish they'd be more of an engineering-driven bottom-up company. IMO there's a huge company culture to contend with that is primarily top-down. So much scar tissue in the company prevents changing things for the better. So many good people capable of making these sorts of changes get burned out and leave the company. Intel's compensation compared to FAANG certainly helps to push people out of the company.
b2hhaQ 4y ago
The cited source states that "Some divisions, including Intel’s sales and marketing group, could see cuts affecting about 20% of staff". This article extrapolates that out to "All divisions will cut 20% of staff". It's unfortunate for a lot of people regardless, but the report seems (for now) to be exaggerated.
SevenNation 4y ago
Can't read the article, but for context Intel's share price never recovered from the "dot com" bubble of 2000: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=INTC https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=INTC It's one of a few large companies with that distinction. Shares now offer a (relatively) regal 5.3% dividend yield and a price/earnings ratio just above 5. Of course, as profits dwindle, both metrics will be recalibrated downward. This seems relevant because during the late 1990s Intel was allegedly the company whose shares one bought and never sold. I could name a couple of those whose positions today are argued to be equally ironclad.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Intel's share price never recovered from the "dot com" bubble of 2000 As you observe, this is true only if one ignores dividends, which are a material component of total returns for a mature company like Intel. > during the late 1990s Intel was allegedly the company whose shares one bought and never sold This has never been true for any public company. And it’s driven by investor style more than company fundamentals.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    > This has never been true for any public company. Not really true. Most billionaires utilize the "buy, borrow, die" strategy of borrowing against their holdings instead of selling to get around taxes. As long as the equity increases in price more than inflation you come out ahead, plus save the 20% on taxes. Then when they die their capital gains are reset so no taxes ever paid.
  - pixelbeat__ 4y ago
    Even with dividends reinvested, $INTC gave zero real returns from Dec 1998 to now, and a net loss if invested after July 2014. Also $AMD now has a larger market cap, and $NVDA is 3 times larger! An amazing decline. https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VFINX,VBMFX,USDOLLAR,INTC?start=1997-01-01 https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VFINX,VBMFX,USDOLLAR,INTC?sta...
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
Aperocky 4y ago
Wouldn't be surprised if data center is already overtaking the PC chip market. But it doesn't look good for Intel on that front either.
throw8383833jj 4y ago
TLDR. there's something I don't understand: car companies and everyone else can't seem to get enough Chips and yet Intel is laying off employees?
- LegitShady 4y ago
  PC shipment are way down YoY, according to gartner, and people are worrying about inflation and potentially even worse disruptions so they aren't spending money on frivolous things like unnecessary computer upgrades and purchases. car companies need specific chips for their cars. Intel makes its money selling different chips. Car companies don't want to redesign for different chips all the time. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-10-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-declined-19-percent-in-third-quarter-of-2022 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-1...
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  They don't really need Intel's general purpose CPUs.
- structural 4y ago
  If everyone's not designing new products due to lack of availability of cutting-edge stuff, selling more lower-end products than usual anyways (because buyers are more cost-conscious).... then the organization may need to lay off people who are focused on high-end products so that they can spend the money elsewhere. The people you need to grow fab and manufacturing capacity are different than the people you need to design cutting-edge new products. And the sales team you need to offer fab services to other companies is different than selling CPUs to consumers.
excsn 4y ago
Intel invested a lot into EUV thus enabling ASML to do it, but did not take advantage of the technology because they thought not to take "risks" even though they could have easily set up different teams invested into different technologies and picked the best one. Business people running the company was a failed experiment clearly. Good thing Pat is back and now going with EUV to remain competitive.
keeptrying 4y ago
Used to work at Intel campus on previous job with another company. No one really worked and would go home early. It was really weird.
synthetigram 4y ago
> After the quarterly report on October 27, nothing better can be expected. How to tell an article is written by a hedge fund shorting the company.
- tester756 4y ago
  Sell rumors, buy facts :)
uptownfunk 4y ago
Yikes, this is pretty scary. Hope everyone impacted at Intel comes through this. FWIW I have also heard of freezes at many other large tech companies, offers being rescinded, and over hired teams having to reallocate people to other teams.
mrkramer 4y ago
This blog post[0] explains it pretty well: "Fewer and fewer computer users think their computer is too slow." And therefore they only buy new computer if the current one breaks. "This happens less and less often. Even most disk drives, which are about the most mechanical part of a computer system, come with at least a 3 year warranty." "It means that computer purchasing decisions are no longer made based on price/performance or just performance, like in the dark ages. Now, when somebody decides to buy a new computer it will be price alone, or maybe price and service, that determines which computer to buy." [0] https://jlforrest.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/the-forrest-curve/ https://jlforrest.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/the-forrest-curve...
- deleted 4y ago
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Aaronstotle 4y ago
I remember 10 years when I get interested in building a computer and the general consensus was that AMDs bulldozer debacle had them on life support. Intel's dominance was practically guaranteed for five years, I knew Zen was going to be successful but I was surprised to see that they've successfully flipped the script and Intel is in a bind.
rajangdavis 4y ago
How does this work with the recent passing of the CHIPS Act? Aren't they supposed to be expanding their workforce?
seydor 4y ago
Is big tech intentionally trying to increase unemployment so as to appease the Fed ?
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  Maybe? Or maybe to give the Right some wins to that Big Corp can beg for some tax-payer funded bailout cash when the looming recession hits.
jcadam 4y ago
I just got laid off by my employer last week. Just remember, we're not in a recession.
- jcadam 4y ago
  That was sarcasm, downvoter.
  - rvz 4y ago
    I didn't downvote, but reading your comment reminded me of the denials some have made about a 'recession' and finding more excuses to deny and wait for the official 'figures'. By the time they are released, it is too late. I still stand by what I said about already being in a recession months ago since November, in this classic comment: [0] but then one said: "No. That is completely false. We are most certainly not in a recession. Nor did one start in November. You can check the Fed data here and verify you claim is false" "The economy is considered to have entered into a recession if it experiences a decline in GDP for two consecutive quarters. And that has not happened." Now that in [1] the US GDP fell again in the 2nd quarter, the top comment in [1] (and many others) mostly all talking about a recession. So those in [1] still waiting for the official figures by the Fed, NBER, etc which those are lagging indicators to tell them it is too late? I don't think businesses would like the sound of that. Really unsurprising, that all of this is happening. The time to prepare was November. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263444
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
rvz 4y ago
Much larger than the Meta layoffs if true, given that this layoff is 20% of Intel's staff getting the cut.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
Intel lived from the climb on moores law enforcing its standards, now that this is plateaued out, others have become the new intel setting standards into the performance relevant fields (arm for low energy compute (cellphones), nvidia for parallelization, etc.). He who steals the fires from the gods, can force his standards upon men for the time the flames last.
hulitu 4y ago
> “Thousands” of Intel layoffs planned as PC demand slows and revenues fall They get what they asked for: EFI, ME, expensive processors, feature locking, core as a service the bullshit that USB is.
theropost 4y ago
This is going to become the norm for a while - many of these massive tech companies have a lot of dead weight, and these current conditions allow for the shedding of such weight. It will be painful, and not great for many - but at the end of the day we should emerge a more agile, stable, and innovative society. At least that is the hope. The age of exuberance is gone, time to put our heads together, and work hard again.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Too bad mass layoffs don't target folks based on performance at Intel. They just lay off entire buildings.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/e6672 https://archive.ph/e6672
deleted 4y ago
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Entinel 4y ago
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.
- hbbwebw 4y ago
  Seems like Pat Gelsinger has at least a couple of ideas what to do. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/4/23385652/pat-gelsinger-intel-chips-act-ohio-manufacturing-chip-shortage https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/4/23385652/pat-gelsinger-in...
arroz 4y ago
Intel is laying off so they can increase their profit margin from 45% back to 60% so investors are happy? Am I reading this correctly?
- lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
  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.
  - ZoomerCretin 4y ago
    Those are people. Each one could have a family with kids. Don't be so callous.
  - arroz 4y ago
    a company that has low profit and employees a lot of people as a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite
    - arroz 4y ago
      is *
      - arroz 4y ago
        Geez I wrote everything wrong a company that has low profit and many employees is a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite
    - orangecat 4y ago
      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.
mandeepj 4y ago
PC slowdown or Apple is taking food off of your plate? They caused few ripples in Meta's world as well.
ghaff 4y ago
PCs? Gamers (and non-Mac high-end desktop performance users) would seem to be a pretty small slice of the pie these days. I have a high-end current M1 laptop but I do a lot of my work on a couple of 7 year old Intel-based desktop/laptop machines which are perfectly fine although they're about to go out of OS support. (Though I'll probably use them for a few more years anyway.) I remember when you wanted a new PC with every tick of the processor cycle. These days, for most people, who cares?
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  Can't recall where I heard this recently, a podcast I think, there was a CS professor talking about undergrad introductory programming classes. He said that about 5 years back his students stopped coming in with experience using a PC because they'd only been using phones/tablets. So the prof said it was kind of like going back ~25 years when not a lot of incoming students had PC experience either.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Was talking to someone at work and their kid didn't want a laptop because they were fine with doing papers on their phone. Blows my mind (and that of others) but I guess that's where we are. Interesting situation. I never touched a PC until after college. But, yeah, there was at least a period where basic "computer literacy" was expected. Maybe things have shifted again.
    - ar_lan 4y ago
      I, and most of us on here, are likely power users of computers, and beyond my job, they are a big portion of my hobby as well. I acknowledge I'm in a unique situation where I run a home lab and so I have a local cloud, but because of that, I can effectively do 100% of my job off an iPad Pro (I don't want to for quite a few reasons, but I could). If I didn't have my home lab, I could get close by deploying my OS on AWS/Digital Ocean/etc. and have the same effect (though latency would drive me nuts eventually + internet connectivity issues - though this would break my job anyway). If I weren't coding, I'd probably entirely switch to the iPad. I do all my document editing on it. I do my code reviews on it, architecture planning, etc. I could realistically see the average consumer never needing anything more powerful than something like an iPad Air. I complpetely believe we will head to the era where the only hardware the average consumer needs includes: * Great resolution screen * Great internet connection * Great input controls * Minimal CPU/RAM to run a robust, hardened portal to cloud services iPads are basically beefier versions of even that.
thehappypm 4y ago
Wait. Intel and AMD are both headquartered in Santa Clara, CA?
- kccqzy 4y ago
  Yup. Nvidia is also based in Santa Clara. AMD for a long time had been headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, but they moved just a few years ago. They are now building homes at the former AMD site.
twobitshifter 4y ago
Intel just received money from the US government and they swiftly started laying off American workers. The money is supposed to be for the new Ohio plant and 3000 jobs, but now we’re losing thousands of jobs up front?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- giantg2 4y ago
  Same as always. I'm pretty sure Ford did something similar several years ago. They got money for jobs, then closed the plant like a year later or something.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    What should they have done if they aren’t manufacturing enough cars to keep the factory at capacity?
    - giantg2 4y ago
      I seem to remember them moving the production out of the country. So I'm not sure if the numbers were down or not.
- sensitivefrost 4y ago
  Uh, yeah, you didn't realise it was a scam when all the politicians trying to get that bill passed had investments in the companies getting the money?
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    The US Govt regularly robs the tax paying people to give kickbacks to their corporate allies. It's just business as usual
    - hgdfhgfdhgfhg 4y ago
giantg2 4y ago
I have a desktop that had decent specs 10 years ago. I still use it today. I did add a graphics card, more ram, and more storage over the years. Guess what? It's still decent specs and able to play many new games. That's a long time compared to when I was growing up. I also have a 14 year old laptop. That one's days are probably numbered. Maybe I'll get one in the next two years.
alfor 4y ago
Hire Jim Keller back and build the next thing instead of milking the same customers. The company developing a competent alternative to the M1/M2 or nvidia GPU is going to have a good business. Seems to me that Intel is alway in this cycle of greatness and then crash while sitting on their laurels. It seem they need to have a fire under their buts to make the right decisions.
- acchow 4y ago
  Intel’s newest chips have efficiency cores alongside performance cores. They are actually somewhat competitive to M1 now
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    It would be more accurate to say Intel CPUs will have performance cores alongside efficiency cores from 13th gen onwards. That is to say, i9 13900K will have 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores if I recall correctly. Many of the mobile CPUs in 12th gen also have more efficiency than performance cores.
    - acchow 4y ago
      For the desktop, they mostly have more P cores than E cores. For mobile chips, it's reversed.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  I love comments like this. I don't think any other industry has this kind of sport-team mythos in the mind of the layman. If Ford or Toyota has a bad year, people think "Hmm they need to make better cars". If Intel or AMD has a bad year, people say "Clearly they need do hire that guy who was in charge when they made all those good chips". It's incredibly lazy thinking, and I love it.
  - alfor 4y ago
    If Ford or Toyota had a Steve Job or Elon musk they wouldn’t be in the same place. Listen to interview with Jim Keller, yes, there is a whole team doing the work, but you need a technical/management person with the credibility and willingness to make the hard choices and take risks. 99% of people hired for CEO roles will be happy to coast, take their bonus on short time gains and move to the next opportunity. Who is willing to take risks for long term success that will not appear on the quarterly report? You need someone who can get that job and at the same time doesn’t give a damn about what people think and about the money. Those people are rare. That’s why Apple doesn’t have ’another’ Steve Job, Apple will coast on the previous trajectory for a while, but won’t disrupt anything else major, they will play safe. The same is true for Google, they got their own money printer going nonstop, who would be crazy enough to take risks with that? The last disruption of Google was Gmail/GSuite and was started as a side project. How many top engineer do they have, where is all their output? For Intel they need to disrupt their own products to move forward, that’s why it’s hard to do, you don’t want to kill the golden goose. But it’s either you now or the competition in a few years. Man Intel was really sleeping on this one to be kicked that hard by Apple on the first release of their desktop chip. So in a nutshell: talented engineers are everywhere in those companies, that’s not the diferenting factor, good leadership is and the incentives reward those who don’t take risks. BTW: your comment is mostly an ad hominem with a condescending tone: mind of the laymen, incredibly lazy thinking, I love comment like this! Try with arguments instead.
dirtyid 4y ago
Right after CHIPs?
osigurdson 4y ago
Failing companies always blame things on the macro environment.
low_tech_punk 4y ago
So many questions behind this decision... 1. Is desktop computing still relevant? 2. Is server CPU market not making enough return? 3. I thought Intel needs talent to bootstrap their US-based fabs. 4. Does this mark the beginning of an end for PC?
ktzar 4y ago
It only took 2 years after Apple stopped using their chips for all the Macbooks that are shipped around the world.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
With laptop oems transitioning to Arm, I don’t see where they have a future other than competing with AMD. I don’t think a company like Intel was ever designed around innovation past what made them dominant in Windows PCs. And like Microsoft, they’re going to need to diversify.

304 points by oumua_don17 4y ago

https://archive.ph/P2gjN https://archive.ph/P2gjN

Is the 15% sales "tumble" because people and companies are holding on to their PCs for a longer time? This could be good news for the environment.

me_me_me 4y ago
PC/laptop is a luxury goods for middle income families. Currently uncertain times are definitely not helping sales. And if they are forced to buy a new one a budget options are more likely (cheaper chip option - amd).
thehappypm 4y ago
Companies maybe not, but more likely, people just dont need PCs. My wife and I share one computer at home for like doing taxes. If we want another I’ll probably get a Chromebook for cheap. I do everything on my phone.

samson8989 4y ago

The cause is the international economic downturn/ high inflation, combined with a collapse in cloud computing orders. Around 30%-40% of PC sales were going to cloud compute. This is slowing.

PaulHoule 4y ago
I wonder how much profit Intel really makes on the data center. The tech press never questions it, but Intel does a lot of gaslighting and notoriously has many sock puppets in the industry press. We are told all the time that the data center is subsidizing the consumer but I wonder if the truth is the other way around... Certainly Intel wouldn't have gotten within 100 miles of the data center if it hadn't been for the volume of client parts being able to pay for technology that pulled ahead of SPARC, MIPS and all the legacy chips. On one hand, the data center gets better utilization, maybe gets more value, and maybe turns over hardware faster. (e.g. why do I want to buy a new computer when the IGPU is just going to make it crash faster?) On the other hand there is more competition for the data center, particularly cloud providers who could amortize rewriting simple but large scale applications like Amazon S3 for ARM or RISC-V over a large fleet of machines. If the data center is able to drive a hard bargain, it may well be that the client is still subsidizing the data center, but we just get told its the other way around so that we won't ask for me and complain about the e-waste Intel tries to pass off on us. (e.g. "try" because their sales are collapsing) --- A good example of the gaslighting is this article https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-kernel-update-kills-laptop-displays https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-kernel-update-kills-... which should have the headline "Intel iGPU kills laptop displays".
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  I imagine tomshardware has to "play nice" so they get free demo units to do benchmarks, articles, overclocks etc with.

nly 4y ago

It's kind of mind boggling that they employer 114,000 people to begin with

PaulHoule 4y ago

Intel is always planning thousands of job cuts. As soon as you get a job an Intel you'd better start looking for your next job.

superchroma 4y ago

Damn, that's a lot of people. Wow.

dozgon 4y ago
I made a mistake here. I no longer stand fully by that statement. For details, consider my later reply. Original text: It is. The article does not say where this will occur. They cannot lay off people from the EU like that. It's not that easy. Unlike the US, EU countries are welfare states.
- prottog 4y ago
  Harder to fire, harder to hire, without fail.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    If you have a strong welfare state, it should make it easier to fire. This is the case in Denmark, some countries offer incentives to lay staff off temporarily but, generally, it isn't the case (which is why you have unbelievable levels of unemployment in Europe).
    - dozgon 4y ago
      My mistake was to assume such rules in other EU countries. In Germany, there is a thing called "Kündigungsschutz"[1]. I am not sure about Ireland, but I assumed there are similar rulings. So at least in Germany, it is not that easy, but possible. 1) http://www.rechtslexikon.net/d/kuendigungsschutz/kuendigungsschutz.htm http://www.rechtslexikon.net/d/kuendigungsschutz/kuendigungs...
      - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
        Germany has strong works councils because it has very strong companies that, essentially, are given a licence to print money by the state. Ireland is an example of a country with a totally different political economy (more similar to the UK) with high levels of competition/innovation. Either way, the point is that if you have high levels of protection that should mean that it is easier to fire someone...because they have something to fall back on. That is why the UK and the US have universal welfare states. Germany does not have a universal welfare state, and the only way that is possible is by having high employment security/strong labour laws and huge companies that are profitable due to low competition. This, obviously, comes with downsides (this is why Germany has struggled with high unemployment in the past, and has things like Kurzabeit to subsidise companies even further against firing staff). An exception to this is Denmark which has almost total union participation and very weak labour laws, they achieve this through a much more expensive system of social insurance. They have, for Europe, relatively high levels of innovation so this all offsets (you get high security and relatively high levels of innovation).

alexnewman 4y ago

I worked at Intel and it kicked off my career. I believe putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this. I wonder if apple will ever end up in the same situation

pengaru 4y ago
> I worked at Intel and it kicked off my career. I believe putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this. I wonder if apple will ever end up in the same situation Are you referring to past leadership? Because Pat Gelsinger has never been a CFO...
- djmips 4y ago
  He's just mopping up though?
ar_lan 4y ago
Pat Gelsinger was a CEO of VMware prior to Intel, COO at EMC prior to that, and CTO at Intel before that. He was never a CFO.
- djmips 4y ago
  I think they are talking about the previous captain that pointed them at the iceberg.
  - typon 4y ago
    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 5 years through these changes)
    - hangonhn 4y ago

QuarterRoy 4y ago

I’ve been through two layoffs at tech companies - one of 14,000 and one of 15,000. One touched a lot of teams including my own. The second was mostly smoke and mirrors - they took multiple factories and supply chain employees and sold them or outsourced them to a company that picked up the payroll for those employees. Only a handful of roles were truly culled. The announcement of the layoffs was theatre for Wall Street.

mattfrommars 4y ago
Sorry, care to explain why did you mention Wall Street in your post? What does it signify?
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  They laid people off only on paper, essentially moving those people to outsource roles. This made their ongoing expenses look better to investors, when presented in a dishonest manner.
- lalaithion 4y ago
  Wall Street is metonymy for the stock market.
- brokencode 4y ago
  “Wall Street” refers to stock investors and analysts who put pressure on the company to increase their profit and share prices above all else. They are motivated primarily by making a profit on their investment rather than long term health of the company. This is due to the New York Stock Exchange being located on Wall Street in New York.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nicholasjarnold 4y ago
  > The announcement of the layoffs was theatre for Wall Street. I'm interpreting this as "the (publicly-traded) company used a layoff announcement to appease investors and show them that executive management is taking steps to ensure the company operates more efficiently, thereby keeping it within the good graces of these investors/hedge-fund managers/etc".

Proven 4y ago

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

UncleOxidant 4y ago
How many people have they hired in the last few years?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- capableweb 4y ago
  If Linkedin data is trustworthy, headcount growth has been 9% last year, 16% last two years. https://imgur.com/a/tTjb2ZM https://imgur.com/a/tTjb2ZM

UncleOxidant 4y ago

And this isn't even counting the number of contractors that are being let go.

pengaru 4y ago

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.

chrisseaton 4y ago
And ‘people not at home’? What does that even mean? People take their laptops to coffee shops? But so what?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I'm under the impression that for a large chunk of the population, spending most of their time on their PC during the pandemic was actually an undesirable lifestyle change. I suspect they might be changing back to doing whatever it was they did beforehand.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  This seems like a reference to the situation during the height of Covid lockdowns, where people were stuck at home buying tech products. In that case, the deeper read of the situation is that the Covid crisis helped them kick the can down the road by 3 years on responding to the trends of 2019.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  There was a huge surge of people buying new gear to outfit home offices for WFH. That's over now. Not everyone is back in the office fulltime (obviously), but we'e not out rushing to buy new stuff when we just did all that not too long ago.
irrational 4y ago
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.

arberx 4y ago

Kukumber 4y ago

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

chao- 4y ago
>Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers For those of us who are bad at subtext, could you elaborate further? What are the questions that this is the answer to?
- xdavidliu 4y ago
  my guess: "will Microsoft continue to take AMD as seriously as it does Intel?"
hinkley 4y ago
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 + 6 + 36 = 43. Go to three levels and that’s 1 + 6 + 36 + 216 = 259, or 43 / 259 or about 1/6. But if you want to keep production capacity, you should move to slightly more reports per manager, not maintain steady state. Just to keep the math simple, if you had 216 developers reporting to an organization of 43 managers, if you went to 7 reports per manager you need 31 line managers, not 36, which is a 2% RIF without losing a single producer. Or if you do both you get about 1/5th of laid off people as managers if you lay off less than half your developers. Edit: fractions and ratios are not interchangeable, bad math.
- twodave 4y ago
  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!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

norwalkbear 4y ago

Whoa that's a lot of people. The financialization of the global economy has been disaster of boom bust cycles that destroys the mental health of the population.

icedistilled 4y ago
>financialization of the global economy has been disaster of boom bust cycles ??? Hasn't there been booms and bust cycles in america since founding?

disillusioned 4y ago

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 replaced them with tocks. Fell far behind because of ridiculous tilt-at-windmill folly around Itanium and other architectural decisions that absolutely didn't pay off. Ended up taking way too long to get further down on process size. 3) Lost their competitive edge so much that Apple finally realized they can do it better and suffer the transitional costs of building a middleware layer to translate off of x86. Apple's fully committed to that, so Intel doesn't just lose the "no one is using a PC anymore" market, they're also losing the "those people who DO use home computers which happen to be Apples" market. 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.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> 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 it's quite bad that over the past 25ish years that a lot of big companies have really learned the lessons of "disruption" and have responded by just buying up the smaller but up-and-coming competition before they can overtake (looking at you Adobe and Figma).
- srinivgp 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

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 off a couple thousand people this summer, that's the closest thing that comes to mind. Intel certainly has its own unique challenges, but even, for example, AMD had been doing pretty great up until this year, and they also just announced a big shortfall for their 3rd quarter results. Just wondering if this is really the tip of the iceberg for a true, broad retrenchment in tech, after the past 9 months of "Is a recession coming? Is a recession coming?"

gspencley 4y ago
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 instruction-level performance optimizations that, when disabled to address the security vulnerabilities, led to even worse performance? So if AMD isn't doing great at the moment either, I can't imagine how hard Intel has been hit. I don't know anyone who is buying or recommending Intel CPUs at the moment.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > 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?
  - cantaloupe 4y ago
    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-cpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-...

bell-cot 4y ago

Reports elsewhere ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/report-intel-plans-layoffs-as-shrinking-demand-punishes-pc-makers/ 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"?

spamizbad 4y ago
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.
- keepquestioning 4y ago
  "Intel Inside" worked..
  - mort96 4y ago
    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.
    - whymauri 4y ago
      Before Ryzen, I strongly preferred Intel CPUs and Intel-compatible motherboards for building PCs.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Intel marketing is NOT aimed at customers. It’s aimed at Dell and HP et al.
      - 4y ago

keepquestioning 4y ago

This is insane. Surely they can't ALL be sales and marketing people.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

npalli 4y ago

While Intel has had it's own shortcomings, the PC market is cratering [1] and Intel among others is very exposed. I was very curious about the very steep discounts on Apple Macbooks recently and thought it was due to latest versions coming out in October; but looks like there is a massive reset in shipments after the massive boom during the pandemic. [1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-10-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-declined-19-percent-in-third-quarter-of-2022 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-1...

Dalewyn 4y ago
I would be surprised if anyone actually thought the surge in PC demand seen in 2020/21 would be anything but short-lived. Computers don't just become obsolete in the blink of an eye anymore; most of those new computers will still be perfectly servicable well into the 2030s.

mattst88 4y ago

Ouch. Very sorry for those affected. I worked at Intel for >8 years, and I still have a lot of friends there. I have little faith in Intel's management. They apparently plan to continue increasing their dividend payouts, while cutting back on investment in fabs according to https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/intel-cuts-fab-buildout-by-4b-to https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/intel-cuts-fab-buildout-... ... and in the context of the recently-passed CHIPS Act... I wish they'd be more of an engineering-driven bottom-up company. IMO there's a huge company culture to contend with that is primarily top-down. So much scar tissue in the company prevents changing things for the better. So many good people capable of making these sorts of changes get burned out and leave the company. Intel's compensation compared to FAANG certainly helps to push people out of the company.

b2hhaQ 4y ago

The cited source states that "Some divisions, including Intel’s sales and marketing group, could see cuts affecting about 20% of staff". This article extrapolates that out to "All divisions will cut 20% of staff". It's unfortunate for a lot of people regardless, but the report seems (for now) to be exaggerated.

SevenNation 4y ago

Can't read the article, but for context Intel's share price never recovered from the "dot com" bubble of 2000: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=INTC https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=INTC It's one of a few large companies with that distinction. Shares now offer a (relatively) regal 5.3% dividend yield and a price/earnings ratio just above 5. Of course, as profits dwindle, both metrics will be recalibrated downward. This seems relevant because during the late 1990s Intel was allegedly the company whose shares one bought and never sold. I could name a couple of those whose positions today are argued to be equally ironclad.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Intel's share price never recovered from the "dot com" bubble of 2000 As you observe, this is true only if one ignores dividends, which are a material component of total returns for a mature company like Intel. > during the late 1990s Intel was allegedly the company whose shares one bought and never sold This has never been true for any public company. And it’s driven by investor style more than company fundamentals.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  > This has never been true for any public company. Not really true. Most billionaires utilize the "buy, borrow, die" strategy of borrowing against their holdings instead of selling to get around taxes. As long as the equity increases in price more than inflation you come out ahead, plus save the 20% on taxes. Then when they die their capital gains are reset so no taxes ever paid.
- pixelbeat__ 4y ago
  Even with dividends reinvested, $INTC gave zero real returns from Dec 1998 to now, and a net loss if invested after July 2014. Also $AMD now has a larger market cap, and $NVDA is 3 times larger! An amazing decline. https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VFINX,VBMFX,USDOLLAR,INTC?start=1997-01-01 https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VFINX,VBMFX,USDOLLAR,INTC?sta...
skippyboxedhero 4y ago

Aperocky 4y ago

Wouldn't be surprised if data center is already overtaking the PC chip market. But it doesn't look good for Intel on that front either.

throw8383833jj 4y ago

TLDR. there's something I don't understand: car companies and everyone else can't seem to get enough Chips and yet Intel is laying off employees?

LegitShady 4y ago
PC shipment are way down YoY, according to gartner, and people are worrying about inflation and potentially even worse disruptions so they aren't spending money on frivolous things like unnecessary computer upgrades and purchases. car companies need specific chips for their cars. Intel makes its money selling different chips. Car companies don't want to redesign for different chips all the time. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-10-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-declined-19-percent-in-third-quarter-of-2022 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-10-1...
sgjohnson 4y ago
They don't really need Intel's general purpose CPUs.
structural 4y ago
If everyone's not designing new products due to lack of availability of cutting-edge stuff, selling more lower-end products than usual anyways (because buyers are more cost-conscious).... then the organization may need to lay off people who are focused on high-end products so that they can spend the money elsewhere. The people you need to grow fab and manufacturing capacity are different than the people you need to design cutting-edge new products. And the sales team you need to offer fab services to other companies is different than selling CPUs to consumers.

excsn 4y ago

Intel invested a lot into EUV thus enabling ASML to do it, but did not take advantage of the technology because they thought not to take "risks" even though they could have easily set up different teams invested into different technologies and picked the best one. Business people running the company was a failed experiment clearly. Good thing Pat is back and now going with EUV to remain competitive.

keeptrying 4y ago

Used to work at Intel campus on previous job with another company. No one really worked and would go home early. It was really weird.

synthetigram 4y ago

> After the quarterly report on October 27, nothing better can be expected. How to tell an article is written by a hedge fund shorting the company.

tester756 4y ago
Sell rumors, buy facts :)

uptownfunk 4y ago

Yikes, this is pretty scary. Hope everyone impacted at Intel comes through this. FWIW I have also heard of freezes at many other large tech companies, offers being rescinded, and over hired teams having to reallocate people to other teams.

mrkramer 4y ago

This blog post[0] explains it pretty well: "Fewer and fewer computer users think their computer is too slow." And therefore they only buy new computer if the current one breaks. "This happens less and less often. Even most disk drives, which are about the most mechanical part of a computer system, come with at least a 3 year warranty." "It means that computer purchasing decisions are no longer made based on price/performance or just performance, like in the dark ages. Now, when somebody decides to buy a new computer it will be price alone, or maybe price and service, that determines which computer to buy." [0] https://jlforrest.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/the-forrest-curve/ https://jlforrest.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/the-forrest-curve...

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Aaronstotle 4y ago

I remember 10 years when I get interested in building a computer and the general consensus was that AMDs bulldozer debacle had them on life support. Intel's dominance was practically guaranteed for five years, I knew Zen was going to be successful but I was surprised to see that they've successfully flipped the script and Intel is in a bind.

rajangdavis 4y ago

How does this work with the recent passing of the CHIPS Act? Aren't they supposed to be expanding their workforce?

seydor 4y ago

Is big tech intentionally trying to increase unemployment so as to appease the Fed ?

JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Maybe? Or maybe to give the Right some wins to that Big Corp can beg for some tax-payer funded bailout cash when the looming recession hits.

jcadam 4y ago

I just got laid off by my employer last week. Just remember, we're not in a recession.

jcadam 4y ago
That was sarcasm, downvoter.
- rvz 4y ago
  I didn't downvote, but reading your comment reminded me of the denials some have made about a 'recession' and finding more excuses to deny and wait for the official 'figures'. By the time they are released, it is too late. I still stand by what I said about already being in a recession months ago since November, in this classic comment: [0] but then one said: "No. That is completely false. We are most certainly not in a recession. Nor did one start in November. You can check the Fed data here and verify you claim is false" "The economy is considered to have entered into a recession if it experiences a decline in GDP for two consecutive quarters. And that has not happened." Now that in [1] the US GDP fell again in the 2nd quarter, the top comment in [1] (and many others) mostly all talking about a recession. So those in [1] still waiting for the official figures by the Fed, NBER, etc which those are lagging indicators to tell them it is too late? I don't think businesses would like the sound of that. Really unsurprising, that all of this is happening. The time to prepare was November. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263444
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rvz 4y ago

Much larger than the Meta layoffs if true, given that this layoff is 20% of Intel's staff getting the cut.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

Intel lived from the climb on moores law enforcing its standards, now that this is plateaued out, others have become the new intel setting standards into the performance relevant fields (arm for low energy compute (cellphones), nvidia for parallelization, etc.). He who steals the fires from the gods, can force his standards upon men for the time the flames last.

hulitu 4y ago

> “Thousands” of Intel layoffs planned as PC demand slows and revenues fall They get what they asked for: EFI, ME, expensive processors, feature locking, core as a service the bullshit that USB is.

theropost 4y ago

This is going to become the norm for a while - many of these massive tech companies have a lot of dead weight, and these current conditions allow for the shedding of such weight. It will be painful, and not great for many - but at the end of the day we should emerge a more agile, stable, and innovative society. At least that is the hope. The age of exuberance is gone, time to put our heads together, and work hard again.

Der_Einzige 4y ago
Too bad mass layoffs don't target folks based on performance at Intel. They just lay off entire buildings.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/e6672 https://archive.ph/e6672

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Entinel 4y ago

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.

hbbwebw 4y ago
Seems like Pat Gelsinger has at least a couple of ideas what to do. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/4/23385652/pat-gelsinger-intel-chips-act-ohio-manufacturing-chip-shortage https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/4/23385652/pat-gelsinger-in...

arroz 4y ago

Intel is laying off so they can increase their profit margin from 45% back to 60% so investors are happy? Am I reading this correctly?

lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
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.
- ZoomerCretin 4y ago
  Those are people. Each one could have a family with kids. Don't be so callous.
- arroz 4y ago
  a company that has low profit and employees a lot of people as a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite
  - arroz 4y ago
    is *
    - arroz 4y ago
      Geez I wrote everything wrong a company that has low profit and many employees is a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite
  - orangecat 4y ago
    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.

mandeepj 4y ago

PC slowdown or Apple is taking food off of your plate? They caused few ripples in Meta's world as well.

ghaff 4y ago

PCs? Gamers (and non-Mac high-end desktop performance users) would seem to be a pretty small slice of the pie these days. I have a high-end current M1 laptop but I do a lot of my work on a couple of 7 year old Intel-based desktop/laptop machines which are perfectly fine although they're about to go out of OS support. (Though I'll probably use them for a few more years anyway.) I remember when you wanted a new PC with every tick of the processor cycle. These days, for most people, who cares?

UncleOxidant 4y ago
Can't recall where I heard this recently, a podcast I think, there was a CS professor talking about undergrad introductory programming classes. He said that about 5 years back his students stopped coming in with experience using a PC because they'd only been using phones/tablets. So the prof said it was kind of like going back ~25 years when not a lot of incoming students had PC experience either.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Was talking to someone at work and their kid didn't want a laptop because they were fine with doing papers on their phone. Blows my mind (and that of others) but I guess that's where we are. Interesting situation. I never touched a PC until after college. But, yeah, there was at least a period where basic "computer literacy" was expected. Maybe things have shifted again.
  - ar_lan 4y ago
    I, and most of us on here, are likely power users of computers, and beyond my job, they are a big portion of my hobby as well. I acknowledge I'm in a unique situation where I run a home lab and so I have a local cloud, but because of that, I can effectively do 100% of my job off an iPad Pro (I don't want to for quite a few reasons, but I could). If I didn't have my home lab, I could get close by deploying my OS on AWS/Digital Ocean/etc. and have the same effect (though latency would drive me nuts eventually + internet connectivity issues - though this would break my job anyway). If I weren't coding, I'd probably entirely switch to the iPad. I do all my document editing on it. I do my code reviews on it, architecture planning, etc. I could realistically see the average consumer never needing anything more powerful than something like an iPad Air. I complpetely believe we will head to the era where the only hardware the average consumer needs includes: * Great resolution screen * Great internet connection * Great input controls * Minimal CPU/RAM to run a robust, hardened portal to cloud services iPads are basically beefier versions of even that.

thehappypm 4y ago

Wait. Intel and AMD are both headquartered in Santa Clara, CA?

kccqzy 4y ago
Yup. Nvidia is also based in Santa Clara. AMD for a long time had been headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, but they moved just a few years ago. They are now building homes at the former AMD site.

twobitshifter 4y ago

Intel just received money from the US government and they swiftly started laying off American workers. The money is supposed to be for the new Ohio plant and 3000 jobs, but now we’re losing thousands of jobs up front?

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giantg2 4y ago
Same as always. I'm pretty sure Ford did something similar several years ago. They got money for jobs, then closed the plant like a year later or something.
- scarface74 4y ago
  What should they have done if they aren’t manufacturing enough cars to keep the factory at capacity?
  - giantg2 4y ago
    I seem to remember them moving the production out of the country. So I'm not sure if the numbers were down or not.
sensitivefrost 4y ago
Uh, yeah, you didn't realise it was a scam when all the politicians trying to get that bill passed had investments in the companies getting the money?
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  The US Govt regularly robs the tax paying people to give kickbacks to their corporate allies. It's just business as usual
  - hgdfhgfdhgfhg 4y ago

giantg2 4y ago

I have a desktop that had decent specs 10 years ago. I still use it today. I did add a graphics card, more ram, and more storage over the years. Guess what? It's still decent specs and able to play many new games. That's a long time compared to when I was growing up. I also have a 14 year old laptop. That one's days are probably numbered. Maybe I'll get one in the next two years.

alfor 4y ago

Hire Jim Keller back and build the next thing instead of milking the same customers. The company developing a competent alternative to the M1/M2 or nvidia GPU is going to have a good business. Seems to me that Intel is alway in this cycle of greatness and then crash while sitting on their laurels. It seem they need to have a fire under their buts to make the right decisions.

acchow 4y ago
Intel’s newest chips have efficiency cores alongside performance cores. They are actually somewhat competitive to M1 now
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  It would be more accurate to say Intel CPUs will have performance cores alongside efficiency cores from 13th gen onwards. That is to say, i9 13900K will have 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores if I recall correctly. Many of the mobile CPUs in 12th gen also have more efficiency than performance cores.
  - acchow 4y ago
    For the desktop, they mostly have more P cores than E cores. For mobile chips, it's reversed.
phendrenad2 4y ago
I love comments like this. I don't think any other industry has this kind of sport-team mythos in the mind of the layman. If Ford or Toyota has a bad year, people think "Hmm they need to make better cars". If Intel or AMD has a bad year, people say "Clearly they need do hire that guy who was in charge when they made all those good chips". It's incredibly lazy thinking, and I love it.
- alfor 4y ago
  If Ford or Toyota had a Steve Job or Elon musk they wouldn’t be in the same place. Listen to interview with Jim Keller, yes, there is a whole team doing the work, but you need a technical/management person with the credibility and willingness to make the hard choices and take risks. 99% of people hired for CEO roles will be happy to coast, take their bonus on short time gains and move to the next opportunity. Who is willing to take risks for long term success that will not appear on the quarterly report? You need someone who can get that job and at the same time doesn’t give a damn about what people think and about the money. Those people are rare. That’s why Apple doesn’t have ’another’ Steve Job, Apple will coast on the previous trajectory for a while, but won’t disrupt anything else major, they will play safe. The same is true for Google, they got their own money printer going nonstop, who would be crazy enough to take risks with that? The last disruption of Google was Gmail/GSuite and was started as a side project. How many top engineer do they have, where is all their output? For Intel they need to disrupt their own products to move forward, that’s why it’s hard to do, you don’t want to kill the golden goose. But it’s either you now or the competition in a few years. Man Intel was really sleeping on this one to be kicked that hard by Apple on the first release of their desktop chip. So in a nutshell: talented engineers are everywhere in those companies, that’s not the diferenting factor, good leadership is and the incentives reward those who don’t take risks. BTW: your comment is mostly an ad hominem with a condescending tone: mind of the laymen, incredibly lazy thinking, I love comment like this! Try with arguments instead.

dirtyid 4y ago

Right after CHIPs?

osigurdson 4y ago

Failing companies always blame things on the macro environment.

low_tech_punk 4y ago

So many questions behind this decision... 1. Is desktop computing still relevant? 2. Is server CPU market not making enough return? 3. I thought Intel needs talent to bootstrap their US-based fabs. 4. Does this mark the beginning of an end for PC?

ktzar 4y ago

It only took 2 years after Apple stopped using their chips for all the Macbooks that are shipped around the world.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

With laptop oems transitioning to Arm, I don’t see where they have a future other than competing with AMD. I don’t think a company like Intel was ever designed around innovation past what made them dominant in Windows PCs. And like Microsoft, they’re going to need to diversify.