Wonder what this kind of news means for AMD
I'm guessing they axe at least 20% in the same time period.
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
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
"@x 7 You've had a spelling catastraphe! ;-)"
'twas a deliberate error to see how many of you were on the ball today. At least that's one theory.
The other was that I was worrying too much about that kilocat weapon (or was it a megacat?). That would have been a catasstrophe
nautica implied that "...Microsoft has....killed the PC..." ...plus the Penguin icon.
Yes. And given that, it's funny how everyone hasn't immediately switched to Linux.
That in itself should be 'food for thought' for the Linux crowd. As in: What are they still doing wrong?
A veritable surplus of 'case study' topics here.
"That's why 2016 thus far has been the Year of the Linux Desktop."
You may or may not have noticed, you may or may not like it, but this is the era (not just the year) of Linux Everywhere. From mass market stuff like your TV to your PVR to your broadband router, to globally competitive supercomputing engines, and in a zillion other places too, outside the boundries of the Certified Microsoft Dependent. A world of places where neither x86 nor Windows have ever been relevant, and probably never will be.
Enjoy your Wintel desktops, they were fun (for some) while they lasted.
It's true that Microsoft has fixed things so that you get Windows "free" whenever you buy a computer, thus making the fact that Linux is free less important. And we all know what Linux is doing wrong; making it painful to write Linux drivers for hardware, by changing the interface with each new kernel, and banning closed-source drivers from some Linux distributions. Not to mention that different Linux distros use different package managers.
So if I need shrink-wrapped software, it will be for Windows. But I may be able to get free software of a similar kind for Linux.
I'll echo the previous posters:
Intel is hardly struggling. Sales are still growing. Profits margins are fat. The only they are lacking is meaningful competition that forces them to invest in improving their products. What's the reward for the employees that put them in this position? A layoff, or at least the stress of wondering if you are next.
Intel lobbied for more H1B visas. They'll lobby for more next year. We need a change to the system so that layoff such as this disqualifies them from taking advantage of low-cost workers.
How is it that they can lay off employees but not H1B visa workers? Once layoffs start the employees on special work visas should be the first to go. I mean, that is what those special work licenses are for right? They are simple to fill labour gaps aren't they? Acts like this are starting to make me wonder if companies don't have other reasons for wanting H1B visas ;)
But we need pc chips to differentiate us from the filthy console morons. Innovations in games come from keeping the bar high. If it's just dependant on rehashing games for the mentally retarded console crowd then Jelly Dash or whatever those console idiots play will become the technology to aim for.
Real gamers will lose.
My laptop I use every day is a 2011 Sony Vaio SE 15.5" i5 8gb with Windows 7 ultimate.
It is an absolute workhorse and nothing is too much for it.
Why buy a new laptop that won't necessarily be any better and with a far worse OS.
Sad that I prefer my 5 year old machine to a brand spanking new one but that's exactly both Intel and Microsoft's problem.
I'm on an even older machine.
That said: I can think of some workloads (compiling / CI) where a beefier processor would make a noticeable difference. And you can never have enough RAM. But such workloads are rare enough not common enough to warrant a new machine, even though I can offset the costs as a business expense. Indeed priority for my next machine is better mobility: I'm getting sick of lugging around over 2 kg a machine when travelling.
I suspect many people are in a similar situation which makes it harder for vendors.
Looking at the numbers published, the client group had more or less the same operating profit then the server and IoT group combined. IoT profits are still less than one tenth of the client unit profits.
It's clear PC sales are slowing down until they find a new equilibrium point due to the decreased need of updating them before five years, while people spend in other devices also. But that decline will halt, PCs are not going away, but maybe for the low-end users.
Meanwhile, IoT is pushed more by data slurping companies hoping to put their sensors everywhere around you than true user needs - most of the applications shown are pretty "meh". And the security implications don't help them to sell more as well.
I understand a company may want to act fast - but isn't Intel just panicking?
I understand a company may want to act fast - but isn't Intel just panicking?
Not really, probably reacting to sliding orders from PC manufacturers. The costs of maintaining Moore's law need to be offset by future sales: costs for better process are rising and future sales of the high-margin chips look to be stable at best.
Intel has had a near-monopoly in the PC business for years which has meant for very high margins. Unfortunately, the PC business is now in decline so retrenchment (less R&D and slower development cycle) is required to avoid having lots of chips and the related, and very expensive, manufacturing capacity that no one wants any more.
Data centres are still doing very well but growth seems to be topping out. The IoT market gets lots of hype but is at best nascent. If it ever does take off, margins will be much smaller and the competition fiercer.
It looks to me that there's a new form factor for PCs - the convertible one - that needs processors less power hungry and less "hot", while still maintaining full x86 compatibility.
Moreover if more x86 CPUs find their ways in SDN hardware it should be also a boost for Intel sales, but again they may need specific developments.
Actually, if your business shrink, killing R&D is actually the wrong way to go. What could find new business opportunities if not R&D? I can understand it could impact the manufacturing lines because you have to plan for a reduced demand, sales, marketing... but R&D?
Because if it comes down to a choice between the long term viability of the business and the short term interests of the executive flacks, the latter who actually call the shotd, are always going to do what's best for themselves. Execs rarely see pay cuts when the business they're mis- managing starts to crater. If things go really bad they just pull the ripcord on their golden parachute and voila: no personal consequences from their actions. An employee owned and operated company, much like a family business, has a much different set of priorities. For them viability over the long term comes first.
Another dick move from a company with questionable business practices. (well, to be fair, like all of them) Things are trending down? New "paradigm" in mind? Axe 10% of your workforce, that'll make it better!
What's always irked me about moves like this is companies expect their workers to give 100%, be loyal, support corporate directives, culture, etc. But when dark clouds loom, employees are not entitled to any fealty in return, other than (if you're lucky) a bit of severance pay and not being escorted out by security. (maybe) Most CEOs seem to be too high to see down, and don't realize what an upheaval a layoff is for most people, or have little enough conscience that a move like this is a first/best option. Of course, I may be biased, having been laid off several times.
My suggestion is to layoff a few overpaid non-essential executives and use the savings to keep the workers and R&D for newer and better chips using the new tech discovered for building better quad structure blocks for processing on chips.. Can't quite remember the details as my meds are fracking with me right now. But I think most of you out there know what I am talking about.
This is a very bad decision for intel to make. although the demand for Intel pre-made computers are down as no one wants just what is offered today. The market for Intel processors is up. The reason is that most people are now computer literate and either have their computer built to their specifications or buy the parts and build their own computers or just keep updating the computer they have as it is needed for what they use their computer for.
If the average person could build their own laptop they would be doing that too or updating their laptops on their own. The smarter the public get, the less we want what someone else's idea is of the perfect computer is for us. I want a laptop. But i want a hundred core processor, with a video card with a hundred terra- byte of video memory and a hard drive with 100,00 terra-bytes of storage and 10,000 terra-bytes on DDR? memory. Intel should work on that. 1,200 people should be a good start abd intel will still show a profit as I have to update my hardware again.
"most people are now computer literate and either have their computer built to their specifications or buy the parts and build their own computers or just keep updating the computer they have as it is needed for what they use their computer for."
Got any evidence for that?
There may be more computer literate people than a decade ago (though it's widely documented that the Raspberry Pi Foundation was started because that *wasn't* true, for their definition of 'computer literate people'). But there are *massively* more people now than ten years ago who just use computers as tools and don't care what's inside, so long as it can surf, email, what have you.
Ten years ago many of these people would have been poterntial Windows users, but Vista and Windows 8/10 in one corner, together with Android, OSX, etc in the other, have shown that Windows is not always the sensible option, and that lots of people can do their emailing surfing etc perfectly adequately without x86 and without Windows.
My experience of the current teen generation (I teach them every day) is that they are computer literate as long as it involved FB, Instacrap, twatter and the like. If it is anything out of their social media needs they a haven't a clue and are more than likely to give up, call the tech a piece of crap and walk away FBing their experience. This is not really their fault, the opportunities for learning about tech have diminished over the years due to the prevalent attitude that "the kids know the tech coz they use it all the time", consequently even the simplest applications based courses have been canned. It really is time to call bollocks on that. Currently the only students who have a clue are less than 5% of the school population that I work in, if you look at the teachers it's about the same if not less.
This fallout stems directly from the bigger fish just up the food chain; the folks in Redmond. Four tiresome years of tiles, with the hope that the world would somehow think Microsoft's tablet was useful. Total wreck of an operating system. The latest atrocity was to limit Windows 7 to run only on older hardware. Of course Intel can't sell new Skylake chips if Microsoft's only useful OS is cripped to only run on Broadwell and older.
always a bad sign when the CFO moves to an operations role.
Usually it means the company management has lost control of the business and the banks and investors have the knives out for the existing board. The board then try to put a close accounting eye on the whole business prior to breakup, disposal and/or closure.
Or else it means the CFO has been deemed incompetent and has been placed in a sinecure position to keep him employed and out of the way until his contract runs out. If that's the case here, then there should be direct reporting lines which bypass him. Whats certain is that NO well-performing company moves its chief accountant into a non-accounting function.
Got any shares in Intel? I'd sell them. Quickly, before the bad news comes out. Somethings wrong
The new PC market is driven by hardware replacement, not new technology at this point. Many homes already have several PCs.
The reasons to upgrade and purchase are fewer these days. Many PCs more than capably handle what is thrown at them. When once a body wanted a newer computer just to get a word processor loaded within a minute, now even older PCs load the latest processor near instantly.
If the PC makers want the market to be anything other than a maintenance market, they will have to:
1. raise the standard of living in areas where new PC purchases are currently less likely. There's a lot of potential in this one.
2. create new PC specific applications that people both 1. want and 2. would consider purchasing a newer PC to run better. 'Have fun.
3. Create PC specific applications that require bigger screens i.e. get people off their backs and back in front of a PC.
I do understand that InHell need to make a profit, but it might be a wise idea if, instead of slashing jobs, they cut their prices instead. It seems quite unreasonable for current-gen processors to cost in excess of $400 if bought on their own, but then the manufacturers somehow manage to sell a system based on said processors for $500.
I would buy a bar of ice, if because of oligopolistic measures forced to, instead of a IoT fridge.
Don't blame the Personal Computer, that's just for the show.
Clash of power interests. That's to blame for the lack of interest on Power Rigs. Just recount what you were allowed to work on then and not anymore, except in a professional way.
You as an industry decided to pull them out of Home emplacements.
Historically, Intel made megabucks from gouging and squeezing its buyers into tighter and tighter margins. Stung by Intel's tactics, few companies want to go with Intel on other product lines because of their bad experience with them. Intel will remain a PC giant for as long as the PC era lasts. After that, they might as well bring down the shutters. They don't have too much goodwill to fallback on.