Intel literally decimates workforce: 12,000 will be axed, CFO shifts to sales Intel will axe 12,000 employees globally – more than one in ten of its workforce – as it moves further away from being a PC chip company. The layoffs are among the biggest into the company's history, and come as PC industry continues to tank harder than Intel expected. The Santa Clara-based biz sees a lot of growth in the …
AMD is also getting into the ARM game. They are shooting for ARM based servers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/14/amd_arm_seattle_launch/
Personally, I don't care about AMD or Intel or any other company. What I fear the most is lack of competition.
This brave new high volume low margin CPU world just is not friendly to top heavy players even if they are a generation ahead in fab technology. Especially when the last generation was good enough. They are cutting now before those billions dollar profits start disappearing.
You have to wonder what is really going on.
Do you? They enjoy clear technology and market leadership in many of their product lines, but there's storm clouds on the horizon (global economy, increasingly "good enough" technologies, rise of mobile tech where they're relatively weak). As a shareholder owned corporation, it makes sense to plan and execute cuts now, rather than wait for things to become difficult. It's the job of government to run make-work schemes, not companies (well, unless you're somebody like Crapita in the UK, or Haliburton in the US).
It is of course purely coincidental that the executives' bonuses will be fattened up by sacking 12,000 peons, and their rewards further enhanced if the promise of juicy cost cuts makes their stock options worth more.
"Good Enough Tech" - it's been a while since I had a PC that struggled. I remember my youf when I always wanted a more powerful pc. For the last decade I've bought second hand. My 4 years 2nd hand laptop runs Windows 10 like you wouldn't believe.
Apart from the really big boys something similar is probably happening in servers.
In both fields it's about quantity of data, or spinnng rust rather than CPU that holds the key.
Untlil storage catches up with CPU - either SSD or cloud storage at CPU bus speeds Intel can probably rest on it laurels a bit. Unless it can come up with killer and cheap storage.
No executive lost his (safe bet it's a man) bonus firing people.
Depsite being caught up in a (shortish) 'bought by Intel, booted out by Intel' period, it is down to Intel to call the shots. Thats how companies work.
Saying all that ... Intel are their own worse enemy. The company was - and probably still is - stuffed to the gills with seat warmers. You have the fabrication people/site which, whatever you think about Intel, are very very good at what they do - them and TSMC best in world. However the cost of fabs is almost getting exponential and Intel no longer have $$$$$ from operating at 80% margins to keep those fabs in capital.
Im never sure whether Intel chip designers (who they buy in) or Intel chip tester are crap. One or both is. Intel fckup a lot of designs. You'll never hear of that as they either tell the person to foff or stuff them with money.
Which then leads me to ask - what do 60% of Intel employees actually do? I know bits and bos of what happened in Swindon but Id be fcked if knew what 80% did. Go to meetings, check their diversity and such like.
Cringely reckoned big techs companies vastly overemploy to keep te government off their backs and to have some meat to throw to the Wall street EPS lions. I think hes right.
If they had a 10% surplus of employees, shouldn't they have had a plan for those employees? I'm not aware of any major products failing to take flight (say Larrabee from a few years ago). Sure, people are buying less CPUs, but unless this 10% is coming straight from the fabrication and sales side of things, why are the other people now losing their jobs? "Uh-oh, sales are down, now it magically takes 10% less engineers to design the next architecture improvement!"
I don't like companies that have mass layoffs in anticipation of lean times, with the presumption that when things improve, they'll just hire most of those people back. But I suppose without a union, that's just what's going to happen. Welcome to America, foreign employees of Intel!
> with the presumption that when things improve, they'll just hire most of those people back
You should see how much manufacturers in the US are now whining they can't get people now that costs in China (and elsewhere) have started to rise and manufacturing is moving back. Guess that whole short term profits at the expense of the long term growth of the business was another baby boomer gift. Awful hard to encourage your kids to commit themselves to that sector seeing the misery it has caused and what it has thought of its workforce the last three decades especially in the upper mid west. (Disclaimer: am in manufacturing (as IT) but getting older and am probably one of the last generations that actually enjoys making real stuff as opposed to gig websites or financial derivatives that passes for creation today).
It's Israeli and Indian employees of Intel that rescued it from irrelevance when it was being trounced in performance by AMD, from the Core architecture designed in Israel to the Xeon chips done in India.
I'm guessing Italic is toast. The thing is, low-cost domains like IoT don't have the margins to fund cutting-edge fab technology, only smartphones, tablets, PCs and servers do.
Israeli - Yes. Super duper impressed with the core arch.
Indian? Nope. Ill be on the web somewhere but Intel did try and start an Indian silicon development centre quite a few years ago. A proper one bot just a pretend one to get government sales.
Staffed it with loads of Indians from the States. Big plans. Big ambitions.
(The following is hearsay from other employees and leaks)
After a year of so they went native (return to their naitve state??)
Fraud everywhere. People were charging everything against Intel - houses, cars, dumb nephews et etc.
Intel were royally ripped off, from the top to the bottom of the Indian site.
It was all shut down and everyone sacked. Big dark cloud.
What Intel would be if IBM had picked a different processor for the original IBM PC back in 1981?
I have doubts that it would be anything close to what it is now.
As for other directions, there is the ARM chips which are both cheaper and lower powered AND are being used in LOTS of mobile devices.
The X86 business is fading away.....
"The X86 business is fading away....."
Sure it is ... with 98% of the server market and about 100% of the fastest growing "consumption device" sector there is : "premium ultramobile" AKA "convertibles". All done with a 62% gross margin.
While phone and tablet markets are stagnant.
http://www.cnet.com/news/tech-will-be-anemic-in-2016-gartner-predicts/
Sure it is ... with 98% of the server market and about 100% of the fastest growing "consumption device" sector there is : "premium ultramobile" AKA "convertibles". All done with a 62% gross margin.
From a tiny base and growth is not big enough to compensate for the decline in the PC business.
While phone and tablet markets are stagnant.
But much, much bigger and with a faster replacement rate. Intel has repeatedly tried and failed to get into this business which is why it's now hidden in another category.
Microsoft has nothing to do with decreasing x86 sales (OSX and most Linux use them as well...) - unless you meant that what Intel needs is a new hyperbloated OS that can't run on older CPUs, more or less like Vista.
Today most PCs "overpower" their average users. Newer OSes and most applications run well on older machines too, while those obsessed by the need of having always the "latest and the greatest" are a minority of users (especially when they have to pay for it...)
Components quality is good enough to make the last several years. SSD disks have revitalized a lot of older PCs as well. People have to allocate their money on several different devices than just only one. And let's not forget in many areas of the world the economic outlook is still not good.
All together, that means that people and companies don't feel the need to replace most of their PCs before five years, or even longer.
>Microsoft has nothing to do with decreasing x86 sales
If Win 8 had been Win 7-but-better consumers would have carried on buying PCs for at least one more cycle, if only out of sheer habit.
If Win 10 had been Win 7-but-even-better-with-AI Intel could have moved into the space Nvidia is carving out now.
One thing that would be different is they way Microsoft developed. Intel had the concept to never obsolete instructions/compatibility and kept to that for a very long time. Unlike Motorola that created generally superior chips that were sufficiently incompatible that drop-in operations were difficult. Want to run that OS on the new Moto chip? Better recompile. On Intel? Just load it up. Not saying the incompatibility was 100% but Moto changed enough things that hanging on was more expensive.
What this means to Microsoft would be that they would have had much more difficulty in pushing their OS and may have been more like Apple (in the Moto house) where every few years they cut off their developers and buyers and pushing them to an entirely new ecosystem.
I think it would have been a better world where the best of computing could be migrated from the top down instead of trying to grow an OS running on junk into an enterprise solution. Why am I still stuck with letter names for network links/drives?
"Why am I still stuck with letter names for network links/drives?"
I don't know, why are you? If you are complaining about windows, use mklink if you want it to be a directory in your file system.
mklink local_dir \\ip_or_servername\sharename /d
mklink was introduced in 2006, in vista, which replaced the junction command created by sysinternals for 2000/XP
Declining sales of their core customers means declining sales. Intel, as many others, are caught by the fact for most a PC with a mid-range chip is more than adequate and should be adequate for 5 to 10 years for most users including business users. Faster chips with the latest software will not enhance most people's usage, they are not using all the power and features now.
Having gone on an M&A spree for the last four years and increasing the total head count at some point this was going to happen. every time the company gets North of 105k employees a cull starts. The company is going to shed an awful lot if talented hard working employees. If I'm lucky enough to keep my own job I know I'll be saying goodbye to a lot of great people.
And the people to go will probably be those they acquired - whose bosses don't have the political clout to protect their division.
So Altera is probably doomed - you buy them and the best people leave because they don't want to work for the new bosses, then you fire the rest, then you wonder why your $Bn acquire isn't doing as well as it was before you took over. So you write down loss as the goodwill - and look for the next outfit to buy.
Adding the like prefix qualifier accurately specifies to anyone under 40 that the word 'literally' might not actually be used literally in its literal sense. So:
Intel, like, literally decimates its workforce
...provides both the correct sentence structure for our younger hopefuls, but also the correct level of certainty. To allow the literally illiterate to literally enjoy the site too, may I suggest the addition of an apostrophe or two, as well as a strong value judgement to really finish off the article:
Intel, like, literally decimate's it's workforce, and that's like, so unfair, literally against my human rights
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