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Intel CEO Letter to Employees
- java-man 1y agoI have instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me A surefire path to success!
- stefan_ 1y agoThis guy gave up his engineering degree for business administration. Actually that sounds like what Intel is.
- viraptor 1y agoBut also somehow > We will become a faster, more agile and more vibrant company. We will eliminate bureaucracy and empower engineers to innovate with greater speed and focus. It really is a weird PR piece rather than serious communication.
- samrus 1y agoChatgpt thought it fit
- 93po 1y agoNothing says fast and agile like asking your employees to spend 2 hours a day getting ready for work, going to work, and getting home from work. 2 hours sometimes means someone is going to have 0% free time in their evenings. I don't see how this is empowering engineers or giving them speed and focus.
- wmf 1y agoApple worked that way; maybe it still does. If a product wasn't important enough for Steve Jobs to review it then they simply didn't develop that product.
- I-M-S 1y agoApple was built around Steve Jobs - he didn't parachute in the company like your average bean-counting CEO does
- supportengineer 1y agoThis is what I wonder about Elon Musk. In retrospect, of course humans could build sexy electric cars, reusable rocket boosters, and ubiquitous satellite data services. But humans, or perhaps more accurately, corporations and governments, DID NOT do those things. It takes an overwhelmingly powerful personality to get anything done, despite the fact there are billions of capable people on this planet.
- scarface_74 1y agoI can assure you that Tim Cook doesn’t review every product. I seriously doubt he even knows what’s going on with half of them. There is absolutely no way that he used the butterfly keyboards and said they were acceptable. Compare that to Jobs who after he announced the iPhone and started using it, saw how much the screen scratched and went back to the drawing board and had then re-engineer it before it shipped six months later. He even announced they were doing it. Better yet, the infamous “what does Mobile Me suppose to do?…Then why the f%%% doesn’t it do that?”. You noticed that Cook didn’t wear the Vision Pro once during the introduction? Compare that to Jobs introductions of the iPhone and the iPad. Rumors are, that Cook doesn’t even use a Mac day to day. On the other hand, Jobs didn’t use a Mac after his return until OS X was released. He was also definitely not a fan of the Motorola phone with built in iTunes that he introduced on stage. Can you imagine Cook writing an open letter on Apple.com like “Thoughts on Music” or “Thoughts on Flash”?
- _verandaguy 1y agoWe're surely no more than 18 months away from the world's first 4nm micromanagement processor!
- wnevets 1y agoIs that something a CEO of a massive company like Intel actually has the time to do in an impactful way? I'm no chip designer but a major chip design sounds incredibly complex and would require a tremendous amount of time & effort to review meaningfully.
- jiggawatts 1y agoI consult for large bureaucracies where this kind of thing is occasionally enforced. There’s nothing more fun than a carefully thought out cohesive design that takes into account all business and technical constraints being randomly “improved” by a too-busy senior manager who’s been “off the tools” for decades. “You should switch to NoSQL.” — a nearly verbatim quote from a meeting just last week. No justification or elaboration, just… abandon a relational database platform with two decades of built up business value on a whim. “Rejoice! For you have been managed!”
- mattkevan 1y agoI used to work for a chief exec like that. They’d see something on someone’s screen and demand changes, destroying months of carefully planned work with a single comment. In the end, we’d build in ‘breakpoints’ - things that we knew they’d pick up on and want to change so they felt like they’d had some input without damaging anything important. This worked very well.
- wnevets 1y agoJust remove the duck
- fsloth 1y agoStrong Jensen Huang cosplay vibes here but I see some missing elements for this approach to be very effective.
- wmf 1y agoIt sounds more like "Why are we making this chip? If you don't have a good answer, it's canceled."
- kgeist 1y agoA friend of mine recently quit his job because the CEO insisted on personally reviewing and approving designs. The thing is, as a CEO, he was super busy with other CEO stuff, so my friend could only get small time slots, like 5 to 15 minutes every few days. Each time, the CEO would give tons of small, random suggestions, then disappear for several days before reviewing again. He'd request more tweaks, then repeat the cycle. Because of all this back and forth, even simple tasks that should've taken a couple of days ended up dragging on for a month. In the end, my friend got so frustrated with the whole process that he just quit.
- anal_reactor 1y agoI'm having this right now with my manager
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago“Major” feels like a weasel word allowing for any level of review. Given the number of “major” chips Intel produces-weren’t they already being presented to the C-Suite? What stealth chips were being sold without high level involvement?
- sys_64738 1y agoThis time next year they'll be spinning it as giving underlings more decision making authority to execute faster, blah de blah. All corporate speak for bouncing off the wall in another direction because what they're currently doing isn't working. Do something different. Anything!
- knifie_spoonie 1y agoYou left out the best part at the end "...before tape-out" So, he's going to wait until the tape out stage of a major new chip design before he reviews it? Bold move.
- dboreham 1y agoIt's like a PR review before merge.
- samrus 1y agoAgentic AI? How exactly does a chip manufacturer focus on agentic AI? Thats software. How does riding that hype bubble help them male better chips?
- wickedsight 1y agoFor the same reason Kodak presented KodakCoin... The stock price boost of joining the herd.
- ZiiS 1y agoWanting to be Nvidia is fairly understandable.
- zahllos 1y agoAnd Intel do make GPUs.
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoI am not sure whether NVidia's luck will continue to last as it is currently.
- roboror 1y agoIs driving down the roads you paved luck?
- hx8 1y agoThere's a lot of luck involved in the Nvidia story. Twenty five years ago no one was assuming there would be a need for $100M LLM training projects. No one expected the crypto mining demand either. To be honest they are lucky that CPU manufacturing didn't move into SIMD space and that the gaming market grew so much between 2000-2012. Yeah they paved the road, but it's a surprise that it lead to many good destinations.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
- pydanny 1y agoReturn to office so you can join zoom meetings!
- giancarlostoro 1y agoMy favorite part about working hybrid is that no matter what, nobody meets in person, except the managers once a week, everything else is a Teams meeting at your desk.
- konfusinomicon 1y agoit's called collaboration, and thanks to those sets of complementary off brand noise canceling headphones that welcomed you back to a desk, it's clearly increasing!
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI find it such a darn waste. I spend anywhere from one to two hours commuting on what some consider one of the deadliest highways here, not sure how I-4 fares against the rest of the country though. Accidents every single day it feels like.
- LtWorf 1y agoMine aren't even noise cancelling, and are so terribly designed that my skull gets painful after just 5 minutes of wearing them. But I can (at least for now) wfh for the most part.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoHa! They took away my desk, hotelling space for everyone. At least when the layoffs come, easier to pack.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoThey did this here too, then learned everyone goes back to the same desk, so they're going to do away with it is what I heard.
- enraged_camel 1y agoIntel is circling the drain. At this point I'm of the opinion that the sooner it dies the better. Its death will probably result in a lot of spin-offs and startups, which might be what the US chip industry needs.
- duped 1y agoThe federal government won't let Intel fail.
- Mistletoe 1y agoMaybe this is why they and Boeing are such a mess. The rich kid that can’t fail usually is a total screwup.
- rwmj 1y agoThe failson theory of business. Someone should write a book.
- scheeseman486 1y agoThey may let them get bought, though.
- colin_mccabe 1y agoIt’s hard to argue that Intel is critical to national security when we have TSMC making chips in the US now.
- sshtml 1y agoThey've already spun off their RealSense camera/sensor product line.
- mullingitover 1y agoIt'll never happen. It's the standard US playbook: - Allow industry to consolidate to a tiny group of winners, or just one winner - Turn a blind eye to anticompetitive behavior in the marketplace - Protect the uncompetitive winner from innovative global competitors - Bail it out because national security depends on it It's funny because we don't have socialism, government doesn't 'own' heavy industries, but at the same time the major firms will obviously never be allowed to fail on national security grounds.
- bearcobra 1y agoIn the context of the the lack of confidence investors seem to have in Intels long term vision this makes sense but it really doesn't feel like a good sign for their future
- akmarinov 1y ago> 15% headcount reduction to 75,000 > Return to office in September So 15% reduction now and another stealth reduction in September
- hn8726 1y agoThe letter says > we plan to end the year with a global workforce of about 75,000 employees as a result of workforce reductions and attrition so it looks like the explicit reduction might be lower, but accounting for people leaving on their own, the final amount of employees should be ~75k
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago"attrition" is in the plan :)
- rwmj 1y agoAnd if we get them to resign, we save money on redundancies.
- electriclove 1y agoThese big companies are run as inefficiently as the government. They can’t fire anyone so they have to do the dance of making things unpleasant - but it backfires because only talented people leave (because they can get a job elsewhere) and all the dead weight stays because they have no alternative so they will just do their commute and sit unproductive hours in their seats and complain. It takes a real leader to turn something like Intel around - not sure if they have that
- rybosworld 1y agoYeah it's interesting that a RTO is included, as if remote work was somehow part of the problem. Intel's spiral started at least 10 years before remote work was normalized, and you can make a pretty good argument that they stopped innovating in the early 2000's. This is a company that declined to supply chips for the iPhone because they didn't think the margins would be good enough. Consider how much that one decision has favored competitors. And that's just one bad decision of countless.
- spwa4 1y agoTLDR: "we've gotten ourselves into deep shit by saving money for shareholders. That caused a financial disaster so we'll fire 15% of you and save some more money. What could go wrong?" Some mutterings were heard about the definition of insanity ...
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoThat's not really what got Intel into deep shit. They got where they are now by ignoring the main business, and spending giga$ on every trend they could stumble headfirst onto. The money returned to the shareholders was reasonable, all the written down acquisitions and failed product lines were not. So far as the firings concentrate on all the ancillary stuff that Intel shouldn't have gotten into in the first place, it's positive.
- spwa4 1y agoI don't agree. They got the trends right. They got the "giga$" right. They just totally failed to execute. For example, there WAS tons of money in making mobile CPUs. Intel invested in it ... and failed to make them. Despite that their mobile cpus were better, I've used them (in other words: it wasn't the technical department failing to produce good enough/better chips. It was sales and marketing failing to sell from a position of having the better product)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- snvzz 1y agoAnybody worth shit has already left for the RISC-V startups.
- bfrog 1y agoHey I know a few started up former hw design people that worked at intel just prior... maybe you've all heard of tenstorrent?
- atleastoptimal 1y agoIntel is in freefall. This seems to happen to most American companies that fail to reinvent themselves.
- rvba 1y agoJack Welch thought strikes again
- deelowe 1y agoI've worked under their leadership. Toxic does not begin to describe it. I'm not surprised at all they are in this state.
- dlivingston 1y agoAnything juicy you can share?
- deelowe 1y agoPublishing papers, filing patents, and stacking degrees is more valuable than doing anything actually impactful. Managers expect expertise to be transferrable to any and all domains regardless actual education or experience. Team management is not there to build teams, mentor, create structure, etc. Instead, their job is to be the smartest and most capable person in the room at all time again regardless of background or experience. If they aren't that means the manager is useless. Senior management feels their job is to constantly work on finding out who's secretly hiding how bad they are at their job and then fire them. It's the only organization I'd ever worked in where the smartest and most capable folks were the ones no one ever talked to and management ignored or was actively trying to push out of the org. A colleague of mine said it felt like working for the mafia. I think that's a pretty apt description.
- polarbear67 1y ago> 2. Revitalize the Intel x86 Ecosystem Extremely sad. What's the justification for ignoring ARM / RISC-V?
- tomrod 1y ago$$$+patents
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoWhat competitive advantage does Intel have with either of those? ARM winning would be a catastrophe for Intel, and RISC-V would only be slightly better. But the main reason to focus on x86 is that it has 47 years of existing software built for it, and with the high end mostly still on it, more gets made every day.
- samrus 1y agoThats like saying why should kodak focus on digital cameras. Intel could throw its muscle behind RISC-V and beat the other big boys there
- Panzer04 1y agoThere's no fundamental difference between risc, arm and x86. It looks like when all else is equal (fab, die size) the chips tend to have about the same performance characteristics - so why mess with what's working?
- micromacrofoot 1y ago"We're mad about NVidia and we're taking it out on you"
- poszlem 1y ago"Streamline" must be one of the most weaselly buzzwords floating around today's corporate jargon, and, for some inexplicable reason, LLMs seem particularly fond of it too.
- AdmiralAsshat 1y agoNo love lost for Intel if it goes away, other than that their Linux support has historically been great.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoI wouldn't be thrilled about AMD having a de facto monopoly on x86 production through. Granted, ISA is less crucial than it used to be, but there's still a lot of x86 binaries in the world.
- heraldgeezer 1y ago>Granted, ISA is less crucial than it used to be Depends on what you do. Gaming PC = x86 Work laptop = x86 So AMD or Intel. "Switch to Mac" means ripping out the whole MS management stack. Or keep/move to 365 and Intune but tune it to Mac. Or keep 365 but move management to Jamf. Can be done ofc, but it's a process. That's how I still see it. Maybe I'm out of touch :)
- ori_b 1y ago> "Switch to Mac" means ripping out the whole MS management stack. Surely that's not the only advantage?
- heraldgeezer 1y agobahahaha xddddd Not but really, yes it is doable but takes time and hiring new admins or re-train. Yes if you are company of 20 people go buy Macs and GSuite.
- dcassett 1y agoTrue except for their GMA500 graphics [1] [1] https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Very-poor-Linux-support-for-GMA500/m-p/217891 https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Very-poor-Linux-supp... Disclaimer: I own a netbook and spent a very long time researching getting it to work with Linux
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoIts happening, the CEO's are using ChatGPT to write the letters they use to lay off people with. What an awesome future!
- meepmorp 1y agoI for one would welcome our new AI overlords a bit more if C-suite jobs were the get first ones LLM'd into obsolescence.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cherryteastain 1y ago> we have decided not to move forward with previously planned projects in Germany and Poland Did they end up getting any German/EU money to build that cutting edge foundry? EU's chip strategy seems to be in shambles, and they took their eyes off the ball since the end of the Covid chip crisis.
- mgol94 1y agoThey were planning to receive $1.8bn of aid from Poland[0], not sure how much they actually received [0] https://www.gov.pl/web/cyfryzacja/inwestycja-intela-w-polsce-przyspiesza https://www.gov.pl/web/cyfryzacja/inwestycja-intela-w-polsce...
- whatever1 1y agoSo cut headcount and pray that things will get better! Inspiring vision! It will definitely work !
- neverrroot 1y agoIt worked for Twitter, very well from an IT point of view.
- owebmaster 1y agoIt works great for Twitter. Every other month there is a strategy failure to get some media attention.
- neverrroot 1y agoI still remember the doom preached at the crossroads. Guess what happened over the next years.
- lossolo 1y agoThey didn't go down, but the lack of staff is starting to show in some areas. For example, clicking on certain links in their developer docs leads nowhere. There are also API issues, such as disappearing likes. Everything has its consequences.
- owebmaster 1y agoDid Twitter get any better?
- SlowTao 1y agoIt wasn't a total collapse like some were expecting, they haven't really done much new however. Cutting some of the fat was a good idea but they might have gone a little too lean in places.
- astrange 1y agoTwitter fired all the advertising account managers, and no longer makes money because it essentially no longer has ads.
- tumidpandora 1y agowhat does "50% streamlining of management layers" mean?
- shawabawa3 1y agoMy understanding is that say the average employee had 6 levels of management up to CEO before, now they have 4
- lnkl 1y agoNothing, really
- rwmj 1y agoI'm assuming they look at the org chart, measure the max depth from the CEO to the lowliest employee, and cut that number by half. It's actually the least worse thing in this letter.
- hibikir 1y agoDepending on which layers they cut. I know of a company that last year cut the bottom layer of management, giving managers an average of 20 reports. Maximum disruption
- horns4lyfe 1y agoIs it? I have a feeling is God cutting the lower layers that actually get things done
- wmf 1y agoFour layers instead of eight? A large company could easily have IC -> manager -> senior manager -> director -> VP -> SVP -> CxO. Maybe Intel was even worse.
- fullstackwife 1y agoPractically it is more than eight, because when multiple branches of managerial deposits cross on the project you are working on, all of sudden your work depends on decisions of dozens of people and their management chains. Cutting this to four may give compound effect, but IMO this is focusing on the symptoms instead of the real causes like for example people being territorial or obsessed about their promo package. Convoluted managerial chain is often just a weapon to achieve your hidden agenda.
- generationP 1y agoWhen I get fired, the news better come in an email titled "Steps in the Right Direction".
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- rybosworld 1y agoRant: There are too many companies out there that started with a good product/service - and then bureaucrats took over. Smart companies minimize layers of management, and manager headcount. Bad companies don't - and they eventually are unable to grow/innovate. A shockingly high percentage of corporate America is parasitic management. Intel happens to be in an industry that moves so fast that this doesn't work for long, relatively.
- readthenotes1 1y agoAbout 70 years ago, C Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson's Law fame) wrote an essay on "injellitance" that you might enjoy.
- wslh 1y agoMore here, Forbes 1989 article: https://adamsmitheconomics.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/how-do-you-cure-injelitance/ https://adamsmitheconomics.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/how-do-y... It seems like the author of this article requires another reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brimelow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brimelow
- AdrianB1 1y agoIt is not the layers of management that is the problem, it is the quality of management. While great engineers mind their own business and deliver great products, the people that are not great engineers manage their way into management. They are more and more incompetent and corrupt and this is killing the companies, slowly or not that slow. So it is incompetent and corrupt management, not too much management.
- rybosworld 1y agoIf they are moving into management and causing more harm than benefit, then isn't that by definition too much management? Said another way, not having that manager would make things better, all else being equal.
- mlsu 1y agoAnother flipflop. Canceling the Germany fab, bringing SMT back. > Looking further ahead, we’re developing Intel 14A as a foundry node from the ground up in close partnership with large external customers. This is essential to designing a process that meets specific customer requirements and enables us to address a broader segment of the market. Going forward, our investment in Intel 14A will be based on confirmed customer commitments. There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense. We will build what our customers need, when they need it, and earn their trust through consistent execution. are these large external customers in the room with us right now?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wbeckler 1y agoI hope that pun is intentional.
- BeetleB 1y agoFor those downvoting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)
- kstrauser 1y agoI am ashamed at having totally missed that. I shall surrender my nerd card.
- fancy_pantser 1y agoAs OP, I think I'm supposed to arrange for the card to be collected... oh hey you're Kirk! It's Sean formerly of Amino as well :)
- kstrauser 1y agoSean! Hah, small world. It's great seeing you! If you're going to be in Vegas in a couple weeks, drop me an email (in my profile here) and let's say hi.
- F0UKYOU-HN 1y agoJust the CEO giving 'Lip' service...
- I_dream_of_Gen1 1y ago[dead]
- papichulo2023 1y agoThe most of interesting part for me is the acked that dropping SMT was a mistake. I wonder if this means the end of E and P cores.
- jeffbee 1y agoThey are saying SMT for data center. There are no heterogeneous Intel CPUs for that market, right?
- eredengrin 1y agoNot sure if there are true heterogeneous server CPUs or not, but with Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) you can mimic some similar features. SST allows you to set some cores to be higher base frequency, turbo frequency, etc, in return for other cores having corresponding lower frequencies. Naturally, the cores are not inherently different here, it's just distributing the power/thermal loads differently, so it's not a true heterogeneous system.
- mrheosuper 1y agoSMT leads to some nasty bugs. Some customers already turn it off due to security concern. Better adding real core(E cores) than SMT.
- nullc 1y agoPlenty of computing uses don't run third party potentially malicious code. SMT, implemented well, can significantly increase execution unit usage in the face of memory latency. Now, if it makes business sense to have cpus with such a major functionality that is only useful for render farms and other compute clusters is another question.
- rvz 1y agoI see lots of doomers in here talking about Intel failing. Well, the truth is the government will just bail them out again. But instead let's discuss some turnaround suggestions, starting with: (1) Acquiring at least one or two AI chip technology startups. (Lightmatter, Cerebrus, etc) (2) Assembling an AI hardware research team focused on efficient AI + software compatibility with existing AI accelerator libraries. (3) Investing heavily in the PyTorch team at Intel. (1) is the most important and urgent action that Intel can do to sort out their issues.
- ac29 1y ago> (1) Acquiring at least one or two AI chip technology startups. (Lightmatter, Cerebrus, etc) Intel spent $2B on Habana and it went nowhere. Too bad, the hardware seemed promising enough.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago> bail them out again. when did they get bailed out before? And don't say CHIPS because Intel only actually received $2B to build fabs - and that's only a tenth of the cost of building its new fab in Ohio. That's not a bailout.
- johngalt 1y agoThe strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad? There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."
- Lammy 1y agoSame as it ever was except they learned not to write it down lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- ryandrake 1y agoIt's almost as if CEOs aren't really that smart or creative, got to their position through mostly politics, and look externally for clues about what to do.
- thbb123 1y agoCEOs like to brag about how AI is going to replace skilled workers. Yet, it should be obvious to anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI. Just keep smooth talking everyone into cost reductions and make arbitrary decisions to make it feel like you're actually in charge.
- dylan604 1y agoWouldn't that be funny to see an AI bot replace the CEO of something like Boeing, and then see the company turn around in positive moves? Feed an LLM all of the business data that a CEO would have and then ask it to make the same decisions the CEO would be expected to make. Since layoffs would be the trend online for LLMs to train on, would they come up with slop that looks like they too follow the trends? If companies are willing to replace dev with AI, why are boards not looking at all of the C-suite offices with the same mindset?
- DebtDeflation 1y agoHe will announce they're selling the foundry business within the next 12-18 months. I'm certain of it.
- cubefox 1y agoTo Nvidia?
- twoodfin 1y agoIf I were Nvidia, the last thing I’d want is a foundry. Much better to have multiple capital-intensive suitors—and governments!—bending over backwards for my business.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- axoltl 1y agoIt'd be the final piece of Apple's vertical integration puzzle.
- delfinom 1y agoWhy would Apple want a foundry years behind anything TSMC is doing?
- zuhsetaqi 1y agoFor the same reason they would want a modem business years behind anything Snapdragon is doing.
- MangoCoffee 1y agoApple aims to design its own modems and retain ownership of the intellectual property. Apple is not in the business of manufacturing. its not the same reason
- heraldgeezer 1y agoHyberbipeline is back :DDDDDD https://imgur.com/a/dvUSgA3 https://imgur.com/a/dvUSgA3 Honestly, good. AMD is amazing for laptop/desktop and server now, but may flop like Intel did. Always good with competition. But I need a new CPU and right now AMD is king. Phone only plebs need not apply.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lynguist 1y agoIntel headcount in 2022 was 131,900. Intel’s projected headcount for 2025 is 75,000. Intel fired 43% of its staff over the course of 3 years (when approximating natural retirements at zero and assuming a stop in new employments).
- tibbar 1y agoIt's honestly impressive. Even during the major tech cuts of 2022-2023, I think many companies ended up about the same size or a even little larger over the course of a year, due to all the other hiring happening and the fact that the cuts may have partially overlapped with existing performance management anyway. 43% an incredible shrinkage for any company in such a short timescale.
- ac29 1y ago> Intel headcount in 2022 was 131,900. Not sure if you intentionally picked the all time high headcount, but you did. Intel's headcount was relatively stable between 100-110k people between 2014 and 2021 [0]. So, getting down to 75k is definitely still a major reduction, but 2022 was also an outlier. A lot of companies overhired during Covid, and Intel particularly was the beneficiary of WFH pulling in a lot of corporate spending on laptops etc. [0] https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/intel-2025-q1-financials https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/intel-2025-q1-financial...
- iamleppert 1y agoYou can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless. Compare this to someone like Jensen, a nerd's nerd who gets up on stage with the latest GPU, can talk about new CUDA API's and goes deep on specs like memory bandwidth. He knows exactly who his customer is, and what kinds of workloads they run for AI. It's just such a massive difference. You can tell Lip-Bu spends his weekends playing golf while Jensen is checking out the latest model from Huggingface. You can't buy passion or genuine interest in what you're doing.
- homefree 1y agoIt's one reason why founders matter so much and why founder led companies often have better outcomes. Intel is in trouble, it's not clear how or if they'll be able to get out of the hole they're in. Their only saving grace is natsec concerns and even that may not be enough to save them. I was hoping Gelsinger would be able to do it, but it was too late.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoIf Jensen was that much of a nerd, he wouldn't be into AI grifting, but would be excited about games. He's into AI because he's a businessman, not a nerd.
- tptacek 1y agoIf there's one thing I've learned in my 48 years of nerding out, it's that all of us are into games. If you're not into games, you're not a nerd. Seems simple.
- dreamcompiler 1y agoI dunno. I can build a CPU from a bucket of transistors, design an ISA for it, microcode it, and write an OS for it in assembler. But games bore the shit out of me. Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
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- combinator_y 1y ago[flagged]
- aurareturn 1y agoI think your comment is retarded too, no offense.
- cubefox 1y agoFor those who don't know: Intel lost its technological leadership in chip production to TSMC years ago, which means their chips are no longer competitive and have to be sold at a much lower profit margin or even use chips that are produced by TSMC, which leaves Intel little money to develop and build their chip fabs. If they can't catch up, which seems somewhat likely at this point, they will have to sell their fab business (if anyone wants it) and focus on just designing CPUs, similar to AMD.
- sys_64738 1y agoI blame INTC marketing that restricted innovation when they had a clear lead to squeeze maximum profits from the current generations. I hope INTC crashes and burns spectacularly.
- Coffeewine 1y ago> Across client and data center, I’ve directed our teams to define next-generation product families with clean and simple architectures, better cost structures and simplified SKU stacks. In addition, I have instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me before tape-out. This discipline will improve our execution and reduce development costs. One would hope they would figure out if a design was a good fit for the company well before tapeout. Ideally before they were done with the rtl.
- somehnguy 1y agoStatements like >I’ve directed our teams to define next-generation product families with clean and simple architectures always make me skeptical. It's said as if teams were focusing on dirty & complicated architectures without a leader to push them in a different direction. It's a meaningless statement at the end of the day.
- sidewndr46 1y agoHypothetically what this means is that teams will now be able to design products that are designed for tomorrows markets, rather than continuing to design products that are fundamentally designed to be sold to existing customers in profitable segments. In other words, product teams don't have to satisfy existing requirements of existing customers. No more legacy consideration In theory this this sounds great. Based on the descriptions I've heard of how Intel works internally, my confidence in this happening is about 0.12%.
- freediver 1y agoThe most worrying aspect of this statement is the lack of vision from the CEO himself. You direct teams to execute a vision, not to come up with one.
- tremon 1y agoBut Intel got big on its dirty&complicated architecture, didn't they? There's a reason why their processors support more than 2000 different instructions. The only relatively "clean" parts of the architecture are the base 64-bit extensions, which came from AMD, and AES-NI, where the operations were already well-defined before Intel implemented them in hardware. So for such a statement to be coming from the new Intel CEO could indicate a radical turnaround in Intel's approach to processor development. Or, alternatively, maybe he just hasn't met the company yet.
- barchar 1y agoTbh APX is a big and welcome addition. Much more useful than yet more vector instructions
- hollerith 1y agoIntel's market capitalization was approximately $150 billion in 2015, which translates to about $193 billion in 2023 dollars. 2022 saw a significant decline, with the market capitalization falling to approximately $100-110 billion, which when adjusted for inflation, is $104-114.5 billion in 2023 dollars. In late 2023 and early 2024, Intel's market capitalization recovered and was generally in the range of $180 billion to $200 billion. But since then it has gone down a lot, and today it is $98.7 billion, which is $93.2 billion in 2023 dollars.
- arresin 1y agoAnd their response is to double down? Isn’t this a clear enough signal to them?
- imperfect_light 1y agoAnyone have examples of companies that were in trouble and cut employees and spending heavily and that led them back to success? My personal experience with working for such companies is that it leads to a death spiral, but I recognize my sample size is small.
- jonnycoder 1y agoApple but only because of Steve
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- Jensson 1y agoMost big companies has done that at some point, why would it lead to a death spiral? Death spiral happens when you cut too late, so you are forced to cut but you are still running a deficit and just has to cut and cut and cut without thinking.
- imperfect_light 1y agoI'm not arguing that layoffs lead to a death spiral. I'm arguing that if you're on a downward trajectory and your primary strategy is layoffs and cutting expenses, rather than investing, you're not going to recover.
- bfrog 1y agoIntel is absolutely in a death spiral. Not much else to say. They are cutting cost with no real plan on growth if they are saying they won't invest in the foundry anymore. Foundry was a solid play by Pat, really their only play. Instead Intel seems set to lose whatever remaining relevance they have to their Arm, TSM, Nvidia, and AMD competitors which have a lead in both design and manufacturing a decade in the making.
- bnop 1y agoWhen will people wake up and see that venture capital is driving execs to show growth, overhire, then RIFF to consolidate wealth and drive profit metrics? When will people see that technology and AI is not the solution to save the world, but one that is actively killing it? One that is actively driving us apart and radicalizing us? As a kid, I grew up loving sci fi, games, and tech. It is a shame these same dreams drive so us to destroy our planet and civilization. Our curiosity is going to be our end As the zen parable says, the man is flying by on a horse and is asked “where are you going?”, to which he replies, “i dont know, ask the horse!” I hope people can self reflect and challenge themselves on if what they believe is really right. The only way is for us to open our views
- colin_mccabe 1y agoIntel is not funded by venture capital.
- jerrygenser 1y agoYou could remove venture and it would still be accurate
- colin_mccabe 1y agoSorry, but I don’t find it a very insightful comment. (Removed comment about it being AI-generated since that might be unfair.)
- bnop 1y agoIts not AI generated. Sorry friend. Even if it was, assess the message, not the medium :)
- selimthegrim 1y agoThe new fabs were funded by PE.
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- streblo 1y agoIntel missed GPUs, missed ARM, missed ASICs, missed everything right under their nose for the last 15 years. This from Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" company, a company that in it's own past pivoted from commoditized RAM production to become the one that won the CPU race, a company perfectly positioned to win the next big cycle as the dominant leader in the industry. This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
- ethbr1 1y ago> They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone. The issues with MBAs and bean counters are that they rarely have intuition about which is which, and only investing in areas a company is already successful in is rarely a winning long term strategy.
- wpm 1y agoIt was put best by Steve Jobs: “John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.” I’m watching this happen at my current company. It’s tragic, and so obvious.
- mhh__ 1y agoElon should buy intel. He bit off more than he could chew with X and trump but this is purely weak leadership and engineering being stuck in a local maximum. Seems almost perfect for the way he likes to run companies.
- scoreandmore 1y agoIntel was ~20k when I started in 1988. When we started to flirt with 100k in 1999~2004 there were so many senior people complaining what it would do to bonuses and raises and revenue… everyone started getting the executive bonus and stock options around this time, too, not just grade 7+, which added to the fear and greed. People were claiming Intel only had “5 years left” and more than a few smart people left. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I really think it was 20 years of stagnation and failure to take risks that landed them in such a fragile position to respond to disruption. Just weird looking back on the new-hire-a-phobia from 25 years ago.
- giantrobot 1y agoIntel CEO: Wintel hegemony will save us! Triple down!! Everyone under 30 reading this dreck on their iPhone with a 5G radio: What the fuck is a Wintel? Mobile in general (SoCs, CPUs, etc) has been a major growth sector for a decade and a half. Between IoT and actual mobiles (smartphones) it's a tens of billions of units a year market. Intel has not only avoided this market but actively dropped out by selling off any offerings they had in it. They've retreated to their less than a billion units moved per year CPU market to the exclusion of nearly everything else. It's been insane to watch. Intel is doomed. They're going to Motorola themselves. Hopefully any useful pieces end up with someone with a clue. Unfortunately the fire sale will mean a ton of negotiation for all of the long term licenses around stuff like x86. What a shit show of their own making.
- this_user 1y ago> Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad? Some of it is reacting to the general environment. Some of it also may be opportunism to do the thing you wanted to do anyway, like laying off people. It's easier to explain when everyone else is already doing it. Apart from that, there is also the factor of career risk. If you are senior management and you do whatever everyone else is currently doing, and it doesn't work, then you can point to the fact that everyone else was wrong too, and you will probably be fine. But if you go against the herd, and you are wrong, you look like an idiot, and you are probably getting fired. Of course, the truly great CEOs have the stomach to keep making bold moves. But the people who can do that - and be right most of the time - are truly rare. Those are the Jobs and Bezoses of the world, and they were able to make moves that no one else could even see at that moment.
- gary_0 1y agoNo real mention of GPUs, instead they're "revitalizing the x86". Reading between the lines, my guess is that Arc is getting cancelled soon. (Don't spend it all in one place, NVDA shareholders.)
- adrian_b 1y agoBesides no mention about GPUs, there was no mention about their future server CPUs. He said only that they will attempt to squeeze more money from the existing Granite Rapids, which uses CPU cores that are obsolete in comparison with AMD Zen 5 and in comparison with Intel's own CPU cores from consumer products. The emphasis for future products has shifted mainly on laptops (Panther Lake) and less importantly on desktops (Nova Lake). It is true that lately the only profitable division of Intel has been the one selling "client" CPUs, mainly for laptops, but instead of making any attempt to revitalize the other divisions it seems that the new CEO only wants to abandon those markets. I do not care much about Intel CPUs, because they did not show anything interesting on their public roadmap, but I would have been interested to see better GPUs. I have recently bought an Arc B580, for the reason that while all the other vendors have reduced their FP64 performance, Intel has increased it, matching or exceeding in performance per dollar the GPUs that could still be bought 5 years ago (like Radeon VII) for which no replacement has existed at other vendors.
- gary_0 1y agoI almost get the feeling the only thing Intel thinks it has left in terms of value is the brand name itself; a blue sticker to put on consumer/business devices, nothing more. I also would have liked to see Intel continue to pursue its own GPU technology but the engineering culture required to keep that going might have died a long time ago, and the MBA vultures running Intel are only just now burying it for good.
- cubefox 1y agoRelated breaking news, Intel openly contemplates exiting further cutting edge node development: > "If we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading-edge nodes on a go-forward basis," a statement by Intel in a 10Q filing with the SEC reads. "In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects." https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/intel-might-cancel-14a-process-node-development-and-the-following-nodes-if-it-cant-win-a-major-external-customer-move-would-cede-leading-edge-market-to-tsmc-and-samsung https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/in...
- BeetleB 1y agoThis is a reasonable thing to put in an SEC filing. It's like Coinbase pointing out the customers may not be able to withdraw their cash. Public companies are required by law to make statements like these.
- kevinventullo 1y agoImagine being one of their potential customers reading that. Oof.
- fijiaarone 1y agoWell, in Intel's case, they were already in a nose dive, so it's not really macroeconomic. But for most tech companies, yeah -- when money isn't free (or cheaper) there is no business model.
- AIorNot 1y agoHaving been on board meetings - most people just follow the trends - honestly musk triggered this way back when he laid of twitter and nothing happened
- electriclove 1y agoYeah people still have a hard time accepting how effective that was.
- booleandilemma 1y agoTo any software engineer, it was obvious that was going to work. Software companies are bloated with people who...don't make software.
- barchar 1y agoI mean they also have a large number of people producing investment goods vs doing operations. If you cut the former it's gunna take quite a few years to see the effect. Twitter was never an attractive business and isn't one now, unless the goal is to have control over the hype cycle.
- BeetleB 1y agoTwitter was not a capital heavy business.
- MinimalAction 1y agoThat letter really does not inspire investor or employee confidence. Seems to be written to falsely bolster a sense of we-have-it-together-folks, but nothing seems to be a concrete plan to generate capital. So far, they announced lay-offs and discontinuation of several plants to save capital, rather than precisely pointing where are they signing new customers. Interesting times. We are seeing a new Kodak in the falling.
- porsager 1y agoAnd even so they can't follow demand for their popular chipsets that aren't AI related but in high demand. We currently can't get N1xx for our devices even though we're ok paying the recent increase in price.
- Madmallard 1y ago15% reduction in headcount, 15% increase in foreign headcount INC
- musicale 1y ago"Thanks for working so hard to help us exceed our numbers and boost our stock price slightly this quarter. That kind of hard work means we can get more work done with fewer people, so we're excited today to announce across-the-board layoffs to accelerate the 'fewer people' process. We've always said that Craptech is like a family, so just think of yourself as that estranged uncle that nobody talks to anymor, and who doesn't have a job."
- musicale 1y ago*anymore ; edit timeout
- eboynyc32 1y agoUck intel? What have they done in the last 20 years?? I would never purchase any intel computer. Apple m series are spectacular.
- ksec 1y agoDepending on how well AMD execute, this may be all too late. And if I am reading in between the line, I dont think Intel or specifically Lip-Bu understand much about Foundry business, and that is despite him being CEO of Cadence. I am guessing Intel will give up on GPU as well. Their Foundry is 3 - 4 years behind in terms of technical, volume and capacity. TSMC is aiming to do N2 next year in US, accelerating from previously expecting US Fabs to be 2 years behind Taiwan. Not only has TSMC be able to execute well, they manage to execute at speed beyond anyone thought was possible. Somewhat along the line Server CPU market is finally cracked by AMD. In between 2022 - 2024 Intel's sales people managed to pull off some magic along with heavy discount, Intel managed to maintained 60 - 70% market share, at a cost of significant reduction of profits and revenue from Server sector. Current Zen 5 suggest AMD just broke the 50% market share and the trend will continue to increase. Zen 6 and Zen 6c is about to arrive. One of Intel's cash cow is no longer there. Just when they need cash flow to rejuvenate their Foundry side of business. GPU burning cash, x86 losing business to ARM on PCs, Server market not competing well and nothing much on roadmap, foundry does not have any competitive advantage. May be a chance for AMD to buy Intel in a few years time. There isn't any thing left with Intel.