> Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engineers that put significant chunks of their lifetime into the company to enable their family (prob

> Your "waste" is the salary of tens of thousands of smart engineers that put significant chunks of their lifetime into the company to enable their family (probably) a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Likely, many/most of those engineers didn't play much of a role in Intel's success. Trust me, I know many current and former employees there. While they certainly have good SW people, they also have absolute trash (e.g. cannot write a function to compute a factorial, cannot handle branches in version control, cannot do anything on the command line - including a basic understanding of directories and how to navigate them). As I said, when a company is very profitable, it's easy to hire subpar engineers. And they did. When I say Intel is fat, I'm not exaggerating. They have a lot of poorly capable engineers who are not contributing much. That's one category. Then another category is hiring a lot of capable engineers for a zillion side projects - none of which are profitable. Ideally you'd move them to existing products that will be profitable, but there's no need for them - those products are already well staffed. What do you want Intel to do? Keep paying them for useless work (which is what they've been doing all along)? You're not wrong about the stock buybacks and the bad executives. But you're not proposing a solution either. They've raised compensation. They've stopped buybacks. They've cut and then eliminated the dividend. The reality is the company is bleeding money, and competitors are squeezing them. If they don't lay them off, they face extinction. Even the 15,000 number is low. Expect more layoffs in future years. Unless they can come up with another cash cow that their competitors cannot, they are not a viable company at this size. The only reason they were so wasteful in the past was their lead in Moore's Law. Now that Moore's Law is mostly dead, other companies have caught up (and temporarily surpassed them). Unless a revolutionary breakthrough occurs in semiconductor fabrication, which only Intel can capitalize on, the good (wasteful) days are gone forever. AMD had to go through this a long time ago. > - Mobile computing > ... > - Efficiency (higher IPC + lower clocks) I think you're not realizing the reality of the situation. With the exception of GPUs and the AI craze, for everything else you list: Even if they had become number 1 in those categories they would still be poorly profitable and fat. Just look at the competitors in those spaces - none are as inefficient or overstaffed as Intel. Even Nvidia, with their insane profits, remains relatively lean. All the things you mention aren't why Intel is suffering so much. It's due to the fundamental economics of running a fab, along with the stalling of Moore's Law. (And BTW, the sales and marketing team got cut 35% - and I bet if they reveal the numbers, you'll find that the cuts from the fab will be less than the 15% target. So it's not just engineers).