[HN Gopher] Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slow...
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Intel plans thousands of job cuts in face of PC slowdown
Author : oumua_don17
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-10-11 23:26 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| alexnewman wrote:
| 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
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to this_
|
| The _why_ is more interesting to me and seems pretty self-
| evident: a CFO 's job is to keep bad things from happening.
|
| That's not the sole person you want running a company, because
| that's just dying more slowly, with good numbers.
| pengaru wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| He's just mopping up though?
| ar_lan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think they are talking about the previous captain that
| pointed them at the iceberg.
| typon wrote:
| 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)
| LegitShady wrote:
| > Intel as an organization is finished
|
| this will age poorly.
|
| Intel is already fighting back strongly and really only
| had 1-2 iterations where they weren't in some ways the
| performance kings. They'll be back, fabbing their own
| chips, while AMD and others pay TSMC to make them, and
| intel will make massive profits.
|
| Intel 12th and 13th gen competes with AMD on performance
| and price and its still using yet another 10nm finfet
| process while AMD is using TSMC's latest whatever.
|
| none of this is indicative of a 'finished' organization.
| It's just not quick, because nothing in basic research
| and chip design is quick.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Btw, they carefully never said the gender of the person
| who BK was porking. I'm convinced it was a man!
| vore wrote:
| I don't think we should really care to probe into the
| details of people's lives like that, but also the WSJ
| clearly stated they were a woman:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-ex-chiefs-affair-with-
| emp...
| hangonhn wrote:
| It's a little sad to hear that from multiple former Intel
| employees at multiple levels. They're all tremendously
| down on Intel. Maybe there's a bit of "refugee bias"? I
| really do hope Pat Gelsinger pulls through and defies our
| pessimism.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| They have US fabs, they are too big to fail from the
| perspective of the US government.
| irrational wrote:
| >I believe putting a Cfo in charge of a company will lead to
| this.
|
| That sounds like what happened to Boeing.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| And GE, and HP...
| Proven wrote:
| npalli wrote:
| 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/2022-10-1...
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| How many people have they hired in the last few years?
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| If Linkedin data is trustworthy, headcount growth has been 9%
| last year, 16% last two years. https://imgur.com/a/tTjb2ZM
| seydor wrote:
| Is big tech intentionally trying to increase unemployment so as
| to appease the Fed ?
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| And this isn't even counting the number of contractors that are
| being let go.
| [deleted]
| jcadam wrote:
| I just got laid off by my employer last week.
|
| Just remember, we're not in a recession.
| jcadam wrote:
| That was sarcasm, downvoter.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| samson8989 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-...
|
| which should have the headline "Intel iGPU kills laptop
| displays".
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I imagine tomshardware has to "play nice" so they get free
| demo units to do benchmarks, articles, overclocks etc with.
| theropost wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Too bad mass layoffs don't target folks based on performance at
| Intel. They just lay off entire buildings.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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?
| dont__panic wrote:
| It's worth noting that Intel has been stuck at a single tick in
| the processor cycle for... 7-8 years now?
|
| Interestingly, Mac sales are up _40%_ recently. So I guess a
| lot of people actually do care -- they just want in on the best
| laptop processors out there, which are decidedly not offered by
| Intel.
|
| With no good Windows support for ARM, I'm curious what trends
| we'll see over the next few years for PCs. Will they languor in
| their current state, using Intel's hot n' heavy processors?
| Will some manufacturers switch to ARM + Linux solutions to
| offer battery life and heat generation competitive with the
| Mac?
| ghaff wrote:
| The Mac number is still relatively small though and it sort
| of makes the point that the people who really care about
| their laptops are disproportionately going with Macs
| (relatively speaking). While the basic corporate box is
| mostly don't care.
|
| >Will some manufacturers switch to ARM + Linux solutions to
| offer battery life and heat generation competitive with the
| Mac?
|
| I don't know. You already have Chromebooks but those aren't
| really mainstream outside of education even though they're
| all a lot of people need. And Google exited as basically one
| of the most high-end hardware makers there.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pengaru wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And 'people not at home'? What does that even mean? People take
| their laptops to coffee shops? But so what?
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Sad thing is this has nothing to do with engineering and I'll
| bet a ton of those 20K employees will be engineers.
|
| Piss poor management strikes again.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| It happens. Data center computing is profitable, and Intel
| mastered the sales motion long ago. IBM never really got off
| mainframes for similar reasons. It's a variation of the
| Innovator's Dilemma.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I think IBMs case is a bit different -- after all, other
| companies may have innovated in the space, but they are the
| ones who actually came up with the PC standard we still use
| today (and then quickly lost control of it). By comparison,
| Intel has nothing to show on the mobile space, just a few
| half hearted attempts at mobile CPUs that fizzled out.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Neither does Microsoft; great isn't it?
| [deleted]
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's almost funny that Intel _did_ have a foot in that market
| in the 2000s. They sold off XScale right before the original
| iPhone was released. A lot of PDAs used XScale CPUs.
|
| I think Intel just bought into their own Wintel _uber alles_
| bullshit and couldn 't even conceptualize devices with TDPs
| under a watt. No one could possibly do anything worthwhile
| without Wintel so shed everything that's not Wintel!
| b2hhaQ wrote:
| 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.
| arberx wrote:
| SevenNation wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| > 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.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| > It's one of a few large companies with that distinction
|
| Because the rest went bankrupt.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I believe this shows total returns for Intel(i.e. including
| dividends):
|
| https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?INTC
|
| The picture is better, but not great. Folks who bought at the
| peak of the bubble would have needed to hold for about 18 years
| to break even.
| Kukumber wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| agloeregrets wrote:
| > Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a
| hint for the people looking for answers
|
| I think the entire new surface line-up is a giant conspiracy.
|
| The Surface Pro 9 5G has a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 with some tweaks
| called the SQ3. It does not match the performance of 12 Gen
| intel in a 15w power envelope, which is important because the
| Surface Pro 9 non-5G (intel) uses an i5-1235u, a 15w chip. But
| the last Gen, the pro 8 used a 28w 11th gen part. This means
| that the y/y perfromance is actually about the same (but better
| power/heat). If they used a matching 28w CPU it would have been
| a much bigger jump comapred to the ARM SQ3 5G.
|
| But then, it gets WAY weirder.
|
| The new (FOUR THOUNSDAND DOLLAR) Surface Studio 2+ ? 11th gen
| laptop CPU (11370H)...which is as fast as SQ3 will be.
|
| Surface Laptop 5? Exact same specs as Surface Pro 8.
|
| Casual reminder that the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes
| every single chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air.
| The would-be Surface Laptop AMD Ryzen 6800U would be right on
| par with M1...which would make that SQ3 look like a bad deal.
|
| Microsoft is sandbagging the lineup for ARM.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of
| Apple have kind of royally sucked...
|
| E.g. when the first Surface Pro ARM was released (the X,
| 2020ish), it was ridiculously more expensive, less performing
| and had less battery life (!) than the cheaper Intel options
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-
| Review...
|
| The previous Surface non-Pro ARM attempts (RT, 2012ish) were
| even crappier (Tegra procs) but at least they were cheaper
| than the Pro/Intel variants...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside
| of Apple have kind of royally sucked...
|
| I've got an SQ1 and Apple M2 and they're both truly
| excellent.
|
| (disclaimer: I worked years in engineering in both Qualcomm
| and Apple)
| moffkalast wrote:
| > the now two year old Apple M1 still smokes every single
| chip I just mentioned, all in a fanless iPad Air
|
| Well yes, but then you have to use macOS and the locked down
| close ecosystem that is Apple. That's not really something
| they're directly competing against.
| raverbashing wrote:
| So, it seems they're shooting themselves in the foot
|
| Surface pads do not seem to be too popular and might become
| even less now
| wvenable wrote:
| Microsoft has an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm that
| isn't doing them any favors.
| Moral_ wrote:
| It will do them great favors when the Qualcomm Hamoa Chip
| comes out which is supposed to be as good if not better
| than the Apple M2
| wvenable wrote:
| The time-tested strategy of releasing many iterations of
| a terrible product and hoping people will still care once
| it's good.
| pojzon wrote:
| I really hope that Intel will be a role model example to
| showcase what happens if you dont cut the cancer known as
| terrible management.
|
| Far too long managers are not taking responsibility for their
| bad decisions - not only business decisions but also simple
| feedback disregard.
|
| ,,Look at what happened to Intel thats what happens if you let
| your managers loose"
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Pfft, as bad as the managers are at Intel, don't try to pretend
| that they have top tier talent (in SW) when they are paying on
| average about half of what a FAANG pays.
|
| When I was there, they called Intel "Great place to leetcode"
| (a corruption of Intel claiming they are a "great place to
| work" everywhere)
|
| Intel is known for good WLB and quiet quitting because the non
| technical managers didn't have a clue about what was actually
| being done on their own team. It's easy for engineers to BS
| these kinds of people, and this was the norm since any passion
| for SW was killed by working there long term...
| chao- wrote:
| _> 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?
| hinkley wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| hinkley wrote:
| Just to check my math, let's look at an org that has a
| multiple of 62x72=1764 staff.
|
| We had 294 line managers, 49 managers, and 8+ program
| managers. 351 managers, 2115 employees total. I need to lay
| off at least 15% or 318 people.
|
| We go from 294 line managers to 252, plus reductions up the
| chain to 36 + 5 = 293. 58 down, 260 to go. I lay off 5
| managers, 35 line managers, and 245 staff, that's 58 + 285 =
| 343 people total, so I can argue for keeping a couple extra
| line managers and all their reports. Call it 327 layoffs, 96
| of them managers, 28.4%.
| QuarterRoy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorry, care to explain why did you mention Wall Street in your
| post? What does it signify?
| lalaithion wrote:
| Wall Street is metonymy for the stock market.
| brokencode wrote:
| "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]
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| 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.
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| > 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".
| [deleted]
| mewse-hn wrote:
| If a company is experiencing a dipping stock price (poor
| growth or whatever other reason) they can announce a huge
| layoff to attempt to bolster the stock price
| [deleted]
| norwalkbear wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >financialization of the global economy has been disaster of
| boom bust cycles
|
| ??? Hasn't there been booms and bust cycles in america since
| founding?
| Aperocky wrote:
| 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.
| disillusioned wrote:
| 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.
| makestuff wrote:
| Also they are losing share in the datacenter space as well. AWS
| is fabricating their own chips for gravitron instances as well
| as some other special types. GCP has been doing this for awhile
| with their ML chips, and I am sure Azure is moving in that
| direction too. It looks like they will take the path of IBM
| where they are still massive due to legacy users not moving off
| of them, but it will be hard to capture new market share
| without some massive change happening.
| christkv wrote:
| Never understood why they did not just get a new ARM license
| and make a mobile chip it was not like they were going to
| impact existing business.
| cowmix wrote:
| I've typed this before but I'll type it again here. About 10
| years ago I ran the local Python Meetup group here in Phoenix.
| Intel had/has a big presence here and one of they guys who
| worked on the Atom team (doing compiler optimizations for that
| chip family) told us (at one of the Meetups)Intel corporate
| didn't like how good a processor Atom was shaping up to be.
| They were worried it would start to cannibalize their desktop
| and server processor lines -- so they did everything possible
| to cripple its development.
|
| He and his whole team were furious.
| tuatoru wrote:
| SOP.
|
| IBM crippled the AS/400 when it looked like it could eat into
| their mainframe business, for example.
|
| It's the innovator's dilemma.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
| spfzero wrote:
| If someone is going to eat your current business, it's better
| if it is you. Fear of cannibalization is basically, "our
| customers will find out we have an even better product for
| them than the one they are currently buying from us." It's a
| good thing for your customers, and it's good for the long-
| term competitiveness of your company.
| Sylamore wrote:
| I've always told my business partners when discussing
| future products that if you aren't afraid to cannibalize
| your own revenue streams, your competitor (or another
| internal team) will.
| jws wrote:
| Itanium was a bet that seemed the way forward at the time.
| Making an x86 instruction set processor that did on the fly
| analysis and conversion to a superscalar computation core
| sounded _really hard_ , so VLIW was the safe "we'll do the
| superscalar decomposition at compilation time and run that".
| Turned out to be a bad bet because a miracle1 occurred on the
| other side.
|
| I think of it as a peer to the 2005 proposition that electric
| cars didn't need to be golf carts and the technology was coming
| into place to make high performance, _real_ cars that were
| purely electric. Could have been true. As they say _" very
| dangerous, you go first."_ That one paid off.
|
| I wonder if there is a list of large dollar, novel, engineering
| expeditions and how they turned out.
|
|
| 1 Where "miracle" means some really smart people worked really
| hard at it for a long time.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Making an x86 instruction set processor that did on the fly
| analysis and conversion to a superscalar computation core
| sounded really hard, so VLIW was the safe "we'll do the
| superscalar decomposition at compilation time and run that".
|
| The first superscalar x86 processor was the Pentium, which
| came out in _checks notes_ 1993 (Wikipedia claims design work
| started in 1989, hit working simulation in 1990 and taped out
| in 1992). Intel didn 't start work on Itanium until 1994,
| _after_ Pentiums were already shipping to customers, and
| Itanium itself wouldn 't ship until 2001.
| klelatti wrote:
| I'm not sure the timeline really works for this argument.
| Pentium was the first x86 superscalar and that was 1993 so it
| predates Itanium.
|
| Rather Intel wanted to leave the baggage of x86 behind,
| segment the market for higher profits and hoped to get better
| performance than superscalar x86. But they never achieved the
| latter and most people just wanted 64 bit and software
| compatibility.
| bsder wrote:
| Itanium was a gigabuck and drove _everybody_ out of the high-
| end processor market except IBM leaving Xeon for Intel to
| monopolize for a decade+. I 'd qualify that as a business
| success even if Itanium was a technical failure.
|
| And, it may be paying off after all. Graphics cards are
| effectively giant VLIW machines. And while Intel's new cards
| get slaughtered on DirectX 11 or older games, they are quite
| competitive when used on the DirectX 12+ stuff which
| basically wants a giant multi-core parallel processor.
| dexwiz wrote:
| To add to the list their 5G modem chip also failed in recent
| years. They sold their mobile division to Apple who then
| indirectly laid off a ton of staff by making them reapply and
| interview for their existing positions.
| kimixa wrote:
| > 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.
|
| As someone who worked related to those projects (PowerVR, which
| supplied graphics IP for some of those devices, on Android so
| other OSs may have a different view), I am completely not
| surprised they didn't go anywhere.
|
| This was a good few years ago - I no longer work for PowerVR,
| and Intel seem to have completely given up on the market for
| some time. My memory isn't likely prefect, but I can give broad
| strokes.
|
| It always felt like "Having" to go to PowerVR was an
| embarrassment for the teams, they kept trying to replace us
| with their internal GPU architecture, presumably completely
| fail to hit any power/performance targets, then last second
| call us again and try to rush everything through. Then, it
| feels like most of the time they drop the entire project before
| it made release anyway.
|
| The teams that we worked with never felt high status - all the
| engineers we spoke to were either on that team because they
| couldn't move internally to something more prestigious due to
| some internal politics, or were actively in the process of
| changing teams. There were times where our internal engineering
| contacts changed monthly, if we had any engineering-level
| communication at all.
|
| There's also some weird public claims about things around this
| - like PowerVR not providing driver source or similar, but
| that's simply not true. As the person packaging up the
| releases, they were _only_ source releases, no obfuscation,
| with full documentation and build instructions.
|
| The PowerVR driver model generally meant releasing a
| "reference" driver as source, with hooks for customers to hook
| up to their specific SoC implementation (think stuff like
| setting clocks, power management, bus endpoints etc.). The
| supplied package only had a couple of example backends. While
| one of those may have been an Intel chip, it was only minimally
| setup in order to make the graphics work for PowerVR testing.
| It was simply not possible to release a binary-only driver. But
| I've seen this claimed on a number of tech forums - often from
| people claiming to have knowledge from the Intel side, and if
| that's true and not exaggeration, I can only assume it's due to
| lack of communication between teams internal to Intel. I can
| assure you, _someone_ in Intel had the full driver source.
|
| Though WRT the internal communications, I sometimes saw this
| from the other side - we dealt with 2 Intel teams with
| different SoCs they intended to build, and it felt like 2
| different companies. They never shared anything between them,
| almost as if they never spoke at all, and seemed resistant to
| changing that. I have no idea why, I guess it's just how their
| management structure is setup?
|
| If you go through all that and end up with an actually good
| product, I feel it'll be almost luck rather than anything else.
| chongli wrote:
| _Completely missed the boat on mobile_
|
| I think their main error was short-termism. They were addicted
| to high margin (workstation/server) devices. They had no
| interest in the low margins of mobile devices. They could not
| imagine how low-power devices would take over the world.
| zubiaur wrote:
| They missed the boat twice. Once with their sale of their ARM
| XScale branch, in 2006 for 600MM (such bad timing). Later
| with their blunders with Atom on mobile.
| nightski wrote:
| Apple gets incredibly high margins on their products probably
| leaving more play room.
|
| Is there any evidence that mobile chip makers who do not also
| create/own the device and are in a race to the bottom on
| price actually get decent returns?
| magicloop wrote:
| Actually that is the "Innovator's Dilemma" in action.
| Managers will always prefer to safeguard and enhance the high
| margin aspects of the business and discourage/under-invest in
| low margin disruptor aspects of the business due to
| cannibalization of profits and thus missing profit guidance
| for the quarter (thus losing compensation personally). They
| knew the tide was changing but organisation dynamics prevents
| a course correction.
|
| Only a few companies can buck the Innovator's Dilemma,
| usually only founder led enterprises with significant
| control.
| wahern wrote:
| > missing profit guidance for the quarter
|
| The Innovator's Dilemma isn't about missing quarterly
| guidance. The dilemma is that it's perfectly rational and
| profit maximizing to continue focusing on your cash cow
| _even_ when obsolescence is a foregone conclusion. It
| wouldn 't be a true dilemma, otherwise.
|
| The incumbent is the _only_ player that can maximally
| squeeze the very considerable remaining profits from old
| technology, and they should do so with gusto. Moreover,
| switching to new technologies comes with more risk, even
| when it seems obvious what the new market will look like
| because the _old_ market has almost zero risk--it 's
| completely proven.
|
| All the "solutions" to avoid the dilemma, like selling the
| old technology to take future profits and then pivoting to
| the new market, are just corporate branding shell games.
| They might even be in fact sub-optimal, but in any event
| the fundamental dynamics remain the same.
| piggybox wrote:
| It's reported Steve Jobs did ask Intel to provide CPU for the
| first gen of iPhone, but the offer price was too low so Intel
| would lose money. If you were the CEO of Intel, how would you
| explain it to the board that "we should make this deal with
| Apple even with loss, because I think iPhone will be the next
| big thing"?
| magicloop wrote:
| The proposal was unstable on both sides in fact. Jobs
| didn't fully appreciate the importance of power efficiency
| at the time - an internal team scrambled to demonstrate why
| Intel would have been a non-starter due to power budget.
| There were also ecosystem issues, since gearing up for an
| embedded device at that time mostly meant choosing ARM
| architecture for that complexity tier they were
| engineering.
|
| So a deal based on any price wasn't a realistic avenue for
| iPhone. The fact that Intel was actually considered was
| itself a radical move on behalf of Steve (absent the
| technical obstacles that emerged later).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Did Intel counter-offer? I mean, if someone offers you a
| bad deal, your options are not restricted to "yes" and
| "no".
| acchow wrote:
| Intel also doubled down on x86. Apple, in contrast, is
| creating the ARM future by designing their own chips, x86-to-
| Arm emulation layer, and compiler toolchains
| wvenable wrote:
| Which is ironic because it was their low margin desktop
| products that eventually took over the high margin
| workstation/server market in the 90's.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I applied to Intel's architecture group in 2015, and when I
| asked one interviewer "does Intel have a strategy if TSMC
| catches up on process tech?" I was left with a blank stare, as
| though nobody in the group had contemplated the possibility. I
| didn't end up working there...
|
| That said, Intel got exceptionally unlucky on which
| technologies they pursued and which they didn't, so I hope they
| can turn things around. They missed on through-silicon vias and
| chiplets, EUV, Cobalt wires, and several low-power transistor
| technologies.
| hedgehog wrote:
| The fab business is very sensitive to scale, with enough
| money and discipline you can mostly make your own luck. TSMC
| does way more volume than Intel and they have a very
| aggressive customer (Apple) that can help work out early
| quirks and guarantee orders on new nodes before they're
| economical for anyone else. I don't know what a turn around
| might look like but it's a tough problem.
| pedrocr wrote:
| > TSMC does way more volume than Intel
|
| Do you have a source for this? The only one I found says
| Intel is 2x TSMC:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/883715/microprocessor-
| ma...
| sct202 wrote:
| That is revenue based, and not based who makes the chips.
| In the chart Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm are all
| fabless (outsourced production) and their chips are made
| by TSMC, Samsung, or other foundries.
|
| By wafers produced (including memory), TSMC is 2nd and
| Intel is 6th. TSMC is 2x the 5th placed company on the
| table, so Intel is even smaller than that.
| https://www.eetimes.com/chipmakers-increase-share-of-
| global-...
| intrasight wrote:
| > unforced errors and mismanaged
|
| No. Managing innovation at the scale of Intel is a challenge.
| And their customer base (PCs and servers) is shrinking. Also,
| this is only like 15% of the workforce. Which is only 5% more
| than a typical culling.
| causi wrote:
| _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._
|
| I'm gonna add the caveat that the failure didn't happen out of
| the gate. Xscale was leagues ahead of anything else two decades
| ago. Atom stumbled at the start but Cherry Trail had a better
| price to performance ratio than _anything_ that followed it.
| Intel 's failure was nothing but pure avarice.
| bluGill wrote:
| In this market what counts is performance/watt ratio. Battery
| power is a big selling point for cell phones, and so you can
| charge a bit more for less watts. Though of course price does
| matter too. There are also embedded markets where you have to
| be passively cooled, again watts matter.
|
| My impression is Intel hit the price for embedded just fine,
| but at higher watts, and thus they can't compete.
| causi wrote:
| _In this market what counts is performance /watt ratio._
|
| That was also excellent for Cherry Trail, with an SDP of 2
| watts. When you have some time sit down and compare the
| benchmarks from a Cherry Trail tablet like the Surface 3
| and its successor chips like the 4415Y. The 4415Y like the
| one in the Surface Go is three years newer, has a 60%
| higher TDP, a Recommended Customer Price over _four times
| higher_ , and while its 3D chops are better it actually
| benchmarks _lower_ than the Cherry Trail chip in PCMark.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > It's bad for a company to go bad.
|
| Hard disagree, so I wonder what your basis for this bullet
| is.
|
| Agree on the other two though.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I can think of another aspect of the badness: It's bad
| for geographical regions that have become dependent on
| the company. Intel is Oregon's largest private employer,
| for example, and most of this employment is in the
| Portland metro area. If Intel were to go away next year
| this area would be hit very hard economically. That's not
| going to happen, of course, but one can imagine a long
| slow decline. Tektronix used to be a very large employer
| here - employed about as many at it's peak in the late
| 80s as Intel employs here now. Tek went into decline in
| the 90s, fortunately Intel's star was rising then. As
| Intel's star declines it's tough to see a new replacement
| for the area.
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| It's an example of the general problem, it would be
| better if Intel (and some "competitors" to keep prices
| low) could always perfectly adapt to new technologies
| etc, and retrain people.
|
| When they can't it's good companies come and go, or Kodak
| would still be blocking digital cameras
| (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kodak-bankruptcy-
| idUSTRE8...) but the price we pay is things like wasted
| effort on re-implementing everything that didn't need to
| change at the new place, good people can't always move to
| it as you mention, etc.
|
| Different countries at different times adopt different
| positions on the scale between inefficient (?) state-
| linked monopolies with jobs for life and letting the
| market do its thing. I'm not sure what factor means that
| sometimes we end up with Samsung and other times British
| Leyland.
|
| That itself is an example of capitalism as the least
| worst option... similarly how much effort goes into
| trading currencies or commodities or whatever just so
| people get a fair price and aren't screwed over by
| whoever is the only person selling at the moment they
| need something. But we're self-interested, biased, and
| this is the workaround (or the system that emerges from
| our nature - self-interest is turned into the energy
| behind it all and "greed is good").
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Not the op, but:
|
| 1. Tautological: from company's perspective, it's bad for
| the company (itself) to go bad.
|
| 2. More broadly, it's reasonably self-evident that it's
| bad for employees, and bad for shareholders of a company,
| for that company to go bad
|
| 3. Where we can have discussions, and probably for a long
| and fun if not necessarily fruitful time, is whether it's
| "good" or "bad" from market's, or consumer's perspective
| for companies to go bad. I personally think not.
|
| I think we'll likely mostly agree that it's good for
| market to filter out and punish bad companies or
| companies that go bad, _once they go bad_ , for whatever
| reason; but that doesn't necessarily imply or follow
| that's it's good for companies to go bad.
|
| In other words, what's your perspective/bias - why would
| it be GOOD for a company to go bad? Why would it not be
| absolutely fantastically wonderful if all companies
| perpetually stayed good and we lived in utopia of
| rainbows and unicorns? :>
|
| (all this without defining what "company going bad"
| means, left as an exercise for the student :)
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > Where we can have discussions, and probably for a long
| and fun if not necessarily fruitful time, is whether it's
| "good" or "bad" from market's, or consumer's perspective
| for companies to go bad. I personally think not.
|
| Generally where my head was at. The other two points were
| better scoped. I personally think it's good that
| companies go bad, as it moves control over productive
| assets from one group to another. This is good for
| society for a variety of reasons, not the least of which
| is enabling new ideas to be tried. Can a long lived
| company try new ideas? sure, but the degree to which they
| avoid risks (if they live a long time they necessarily
| avoid undo risk) puts on upper bound on how ambitious
| they are with new things.
| srinivgp wrote:
| Things going bad is bad. Dying is bad. Etc etc.
|
| Sometimes on net things are good because of other effects
| like "ah, promising new competitor gets a chance to
| shine!" but if you could have _both_, you absolutely
| _would_. A company going bad is a _cost paid_ for new
| blood, not an _added benefit_.
|
| It's not good that you have 100 fewer hours when you
| spend 100 hours creating something awesome. It's bad that
| you have 100 fewer hours. If you could create the same
| awesome thing and still have those 100 hours to do
| something else, that'd be fantastic.
|
| All other things being equal, I would far rather Intel be
| awesome than not. If it turns out the world is such that
| all other things can't be equal, it might be worth having
| Intel not be awesome in favor of other benefits, but I'm
| never going to be _happy_ about Intel not being awesome.
| jrockway wrote:
| > I think it's great that they are essentially "recycled"
| when new, better companies come along and eat their lunch.
|
| Don't you have on the order of tens of thousands of dollars
| invested in Intel through retirement savings, though? When
| S&P 500 companies fail, your retirement savings become
| worthless. (Apple is really the one you want to watch out
| for, though!)
| [deleted]
| twelve40 wrote:
| intel doesn't have to go up in flames, not sure why you
| view it as all or nothing. They can keep milking legacy
| stuff and even make money like IBM (what paul graham calls
| irrelevant), while someone else can keep inventing better
| chips.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Don 't you have on the order of tens of thousands of
| dollars invested in Intel through retirement savings,
| though?_
|
| Why is my fund in Intel but not in Apple? The whole point
| of choosing the index is so that you are diversified. You
| would only lose if Intel lost out to a foreign company,
| otherwise the demise of Intel is made palatable by the rise
| of Apple and AMD.
| bluGill wrote:
| Even if intel loses to a foreign company, odds are that
| foreign company has been invested in my a domestic
| company I own so I'm still okay.
| pantulis wrote:
| Not a US citizen, but aren't the retirement funds managed
| by someone who should be held responsible for not
| diversifying?
| fsckboy wrote:
| > the retirement funds managed by someone who should be
| held responsible for not diversifying?
|
| fund managers don't have "personal" or "corporate" assets
| that are anywhere near the scale of the (retirement)
| funds they manage; being held responsible for
| mismanagement would not lead to a source of capital to
| replace that which had been lost through mismanagement.
|
| All investment has risk.
| jrockway wrote:
| Retirement funds do pretty OK here. Early in your career
| you'll mostly hold something like an S&P 500 index fund
| or a total stock market fund, as you get closer to
| retirement they shift the allocation towards safer
| investments.
|
| I don't love this; the total stock market is a lot of
| tech companies, and I already have plenty of exposure to
| tech by working in the field. It's a good heuristic for
| most people, though. (And no, I don't do anything about
| this underlying fear of tech sector exposure. I just buy
| the Target Date 20XX funds like everyone else.)
|
| My only point is that the grandparent comment generally
| expects companies to die when they get into the S&P 500.
| If that's true, we're all screwed. If one S&P 500 is just
| stealing business from some other S&P 500 company,
| though, it's probably a net gain. But if it's some
| privately owned startup, then it's not as concrete a win,
| and let's be honest, startups are driving a lot of the
| innovation in tech.
| JamesianP wrote:
| Which retirement funds are doing ok this time around?
| They typically switch to bonds which thanks to inflation
| are down something like 20 percent in the last year (some
| more like 30), despite yielding far less than stocks in
| the best of times.
| katmannthree wrote:
| Whether or not they're ``held responsible'' to the degree
| anyone in such a position in the US is (i.e. lolno),
| grocery stores and retirement homes do not accept
| epicaricacy as payment.
| JamesianP wrote:
| Nope! They're rewarded for getting slightly higher
| returns than other funds during the bull market times,
| despite the disproportionate increase in risk they take
| on to do it. Everyone is looking at recent trends and
| almost no one looks tat fundamentals. It's a moral
| hazard.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| In the US usually the employee usually has a choice of
| several funds in their 401 (k) retirement account,
| including international funds.
|
| It seems the person upthread owns a target date fund and
| this means they probably are diversified. Their post
| doesn't make a lick of sense.
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| Isnt this only a concern if you plan to retire in the next
| 5 ish years? Even 5 years seems a while to correct itself
| unless there's a larger market implosion. The last 5 years
| has seen the tail end of a recession and a pandemic
| ISL wrote:
| If you're invested broadly in the S&P, so long as companies
| are "properly" valued, it is okay if INTC falls and AMD
| rises.
|
| If a major player is massively overvalued, though, then
| index funds, too, will feel some pain as the exuberance in
| a major player dissipates.
|
| I hold some INTC directly after having been extremely
| impressed with the company's dedication to rigorous process
| in engineering interviews in the mid-2010s. I'm sad to see
| such a great company go through hard times.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Over time, those funds are re-weighted. Unless you bought
| inte directly, the rewighting should handle it. Unless it
| fails quickly and spectacularly
| kgwgk wrote:
| S&P 500 trackers are not re-weighted.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| > I think that's a great thing. I don't want companies to
| stay giant in perpetuity...
|
| Except that semiconductors are a national security issue at
| the moment.
| twelve40 wrote:
| yeah but it's not a good reason to prop up or keep bloating
| non-competitive corporations. Bloating Intel is not likely
| to result in another tsmc.
| feanaro wrote:
| Luckily there are many, many countries in the world with no
| semiconductor industry of their own who benefit from no
| single company or country staying as the perpetual,
| unchallenged giant.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Except that semiconductors are a national security issue
| at the moment.
|
| Perhaps this is too much of a radical idea, but if a
| company is so critically important that it can't be allowed
| to falter without government support, then it should be
| nationalized.
|
| At the very least the government support should be made
| explicit, and large, critically important companies should
| be forced to pay much higher insurance, i.e. the equivalent
| of what banks need to pay for FDIC insurance. Sick of the
| whole "privatize the profits and socialize the losses"
| mindset.
| indymike wrote:
| > Except that semiconductors are a national security issue
| at the moment.
|
| Maybe too big is a national security issue, too.
|
| Too big to fail is a real problem for any part of our
| economy.
| icapybara wrote:
| Computer chips are a product that is only possible to
| produce at the largest scales. Everything, from the
| supply chain to design to manufacturing, is a globalized
| effort. You'll never have small mom and pop fabs.
| wongarsu wrote:
| If everyone realizes it's a national security issue, that
| might change. Sure, US, EU and China have players in the
| industry and can attract fabs with a bit of incentive,
| but what if Russia or India or Pakistan or Brazil or Iran
| want to ensure a steady supply even under sanctions? Some
| of them might open up smaller fabs that might not be
| economically viable but are of strategic importance.
| bluGill wrote:
| You could fab chips in your basement. However your costs
| per chip would be in the tens of thousands each for basic
| chips. Large scales allows making those same chips for
| less than a dime each.
| indymike wrote:
| > Computer chips are a product that is only possible to
| produce at the largest scales
|
| Perhaps, or perhaps we're dealing with monopolization.
| beebmam wrote:
| 100%. It's worth considering that some of these people laid
| off may consider working for authoritarian governments if
| they were well compensated (or are ideologically aligned),
| and that's a huge national security risk too. Hope they
| aren't dumb enough to lay off engineers with important
| knowledge. Please tell me that US representatives have
| already met with Intel on this.
| xwolfi wrote:
| I work in an authoritarian country (Hong Kong) and it s
| not what you think. You cant transplant a well paid
| foreigner expecting a breakthrough: his entire team will
| spend their time enforcing the red tape to teach him to
| adapt and by the time the money dries out they ll either
| have an obedient clone of the rest or a frustrated
| quitter.
|
| Plus, dictatorships arent against the US per se, they re
| against the US convincing the populace they too could act
| like americans, and are extremely dependent on that
| Schrodinger state where you re both the factory for the
| US and a public political opponent. Symbiotic parasite
| pretending to be the host's alternative.
|
| Plus the US might change heads at the top, but it s
| hardly a safe ally to have. Ukraine nearly went to
| complete disaster thanks to Trump and having morons
| elected there is a security risk for many too...
| collegeburner wrote:
| we have temporarily made peace with dictatorships before.
| the bigger concern is china wants the #1 spot in world
| power and we will oppose any nation that tries to beconme
| more powerful than us.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| Eh, I think they always were; we're just finally being
| forced to pay them better attention.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| There's no guarantee semiconductor fabs will be recycled. If
| TSMC shuts down due to political turmoil, Intel decides to
| halt all R&D and milk their new monopoly, then hardware
| progress could simply stall with no new competitor rising.
|
| An investor would need to front many billions of dollars for
| an uncertain payoff over a decade or two, and Intel could at
| any moment become competent again. And if no investor is
| willing to take that risk, there would be no new competitor.
|
| Adobe and Figma are software companies, so don't require
| capital investment. So if one shuts down, it's relatively
| easy to make a new UI modeling tool(or for an existing one to
| take over their customers).
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Itanium dates back to 2001. It was "discontinued" in 2020, but
| as we've learned it was only being continued because HP was
| footing the bill. It really doesn't have anything to do with
| Intel's current problems. Intel was basically past the Itanium
| debacle by 2010.
| excsn wrote:
| 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.
| superchroma wrote:
| Damn, that's a lot of people. Wow.
| dozgon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Harder to fire, harder to hire, without fail.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I might also have used the wrong terminology here.
| (English isn't my native language.)
|
| However, I know for sure that in Germany, it isn't that
| easy to hire and fire people on a whim. In the US this
| seems to be the case.
|
| Just in case, let me also clarify this:
|
| I don't care, if you think the American system is better
| than the German one. I simply made the statement that
| even if not all EU countries have rulings like Germany,
| it is surely harder to fire people on a whim.
|
| And also the article didn't mention where this will
| occur.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Yes, Germany has such a rule, Kurzarbeit basically does
| this through a state subsidy.
|
| And one particular aspect of Germany is that capacity is
| controlled on the way up. The reason why the US has these
| huge swings is because capacity isn't controlled. It
| isn't possible to have the upside without the downside.
| Germany's political economy is totally different because
| the US has a far higher level of competition and
| innovation, this isn't possible with Germany's labour
| market.
| dozgon wrote:
| My mistake was to assume such rules in other EU
| countries.
|
| In Germany, there is a thing called
| "Kundigungsschutz"[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/kuend
| igungs...
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| cardosof wrote:
| And the effect gets multiplied - all of them have a family, buy
| products, hire services etc.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| machinekob wrote:
| Amd revenue 2021 -> $16.4 billion Intel 2021 -> $79.024
| billion
|
| But 2be fair amd is/was growing and intel is stagnant and
| lose market share right now but with a massive investments
| and going back on track with fabs process i would assume
| Intel soon start 2grow again (ofc after the end of the
| recession)
|
| We have to remember AMD is making money out of TSMC advantage
| over Intel node which I assume won't last forever and if TSMC
| blunder even one node it can be catastrophic for AMD.
| Considering USA shift and focus on tech war with China Intel
| fabs can only grow faster or everything can crash.
| maldev wrote:
| AMD also had alot of those major bugs, but it wasn't reported
| as much since the original papers all targeted intel CPU's
| since they are the "standard", and then a couple months later
| someone would do it for AMD but it was old news.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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-...
| CameronNemo wrote:
| IIRC GCP is using AMD EPYC.
|
| Not sure about Azure.
| m_mueller wrote:
| ARM is increasingly being a factor there afaik.
| tehnub wrote:
| I don't have any data, but from word of mouth and variously
| seeing posts and videos online, 12th gen Intel CPUs seem
| pretty popular for gaming builds. They're winning in
| benchmarks against 50 series AMD (as they should, being
| newer), but are also cheaper. I'll be curious to see how 13th
| gen Intel vs. 70 series AMD plays out. There are always
| complicating factors, such as motherboards for 70 series AMD
| being quite pricey for now.
| smolder wrote:
| Of the last gen stuff, the 5800x3D is arguably among the
| best bang for buck, including for use in gaming builds. The
| applications where Intel's 12900K/12700K hold a significant
| advantage against the other chip with its 96MB of L3 cache
| typically aren't applications desperately in need of cpu
| power. IME it's poorly-optimized or hard-to-optimize
| software with bad cache coherency that most demands speed,
| and it's in those cases that the X3D delivers.
| pojzon wrote:
| Gamers prefer anything that has better performance for
| cheaper price.
|
| Tho overall having a more stable PC that consumes less
| electricity is better in long term and ppl really see that.
|
| It shows in sale numbers.
| coryfklein wrote:
| > everything I've heard over the last couple of years
| indicated that AMD was absolutely crushing Intel.
|
| AMD market cap: $93B
|
| Intel market cap: $104B
|
| And now you will no longer be able to say that _everything_
| you 've heard indicates that AMD is "absolutely crushing
| Intel".
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| px1999 wrote:
| Given their respective revenue, AMD's market cap does
| indicate they're crushing it.
|
| Their multiplier means that the market thinks highly of
| their ability to continue to grow.
| brewdad wrote:
| Given that AMD shares are down more than 61% YTD (vs 52%
| for INTC), I'd say neither company is setting positive
| expectations for the future.
|
| *edit added YTD for clarity
| colinmhayes wrote:
| AMD chips had the same branch prediction side channel
| vulnerabilities that intel did. At this point their offerings
| are pretty similar with intel being a bit cheaper but using
| more electricity.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| With the new releases, it seems that 5800x3D takes the
| crown for single threaded tasks and video games even in
| intel's 13xxx benchmarks. The 7950x is closely trailed by
| the 5800x3D.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Anecdata; a friend at Dresden has been interviewing people from
| Xilinx all week.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| If you look at Intel's history, they do this consistently and
| at predictable cadence regardless of the state of the broader
| economy.
| petra wrote:
| I've read that currently the semi industry is in the negative
| part of a cycle.
| briandear wrote:
| Oracle is/was laying off thousands as of August.
|
| Within the past 12 months:
|
| Peloton laid off over 4000. Snap 1280 (which is 20% of the
| company,) Shopify 1000 (10%.) Groupon laid off 15%. Salesforce,
| 1000. Microsoft 1800. Carvana (while not "big established" it's
| still a lot of people) laid off 2500. Tencent laying off 5500.
| Alibaba: 9500, ByteDance: 1000, Zillow 2300.
|
| This definitely isn't really the first major layoff
| announcement.
|
| Outside of big tech: Credit Suisse laying off 5000, Ford 8000,
| Telefonica 2700. Societe General 3700
|
| A bunch more, but these are the one measured in thousands or
| otherwise a significant percentage of a company's workforce.
|
| (By the way, not arguing with you, my point is that this isn't
| surprising, the writing has been on the wall for the past year,
| so an Intel layoff isn't a bellwether for things getting bad --
| it's a lagging indicator of things already being bad.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, understood it's a lagging indicator, but most of those
| US companies you mention (Peloton, Snap, Shopify, Carvana)
| are in the "unprofitable VC-funded camp". Salesforce and
| Microsoft obviously aren't, but their numbers are also much,
| much smaller and the amounts are a really teeny percentage of
| their overall workforce. Zillow is a bit of a special case
| because of their complete f'up with flipping houses. Oracle
| feels like the only one really comparable to me, but perhaps
| I'm just showing my personal bias that I'd really wish Oracle
| would lay off everyone and go under, but I digress...
|
| I guess my main point was that, even with recent layoffs,
| feels like most of those folks wouldn't have had much
| difficulty getting snapped up by other companies, especially
| in engineering (not saying it wasn't disruptive to those
| involved). But once you start laying off 20,000 here and
| 10,000 there, you get to the musical chairs point where some
| folks are going to be left without a chair for some time.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| aprdm wrote:
| Where you saw microsoft / alibaba?
| brewdad wrote:
| Here's 200 plus the article references the earlier
| announcement of about 1800.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/10/23299499/microsoft-
| layoff...
| yalogin wrote:
| I am not sure if Intel counts though. They have had challenges
| for the last several years during the bull market, which they
| failed to address, now they are taking advantage of the bear
| market to cull numbers. If we see someone who did not have
| these very visible weaknesses cutting numbers that would be a
| sign, not Intel. Though I agree Intel is huge and them laying
| off people still is a big deal.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reports elsewhere ( 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"?
| foobarian wrote:
| Tangential, but what are the consequences of upcoming layoffs
| cutting across the industry and impacting mostly these "soft"
| non-technical roles? Will this create a large disgruntled
| segment enough to start upheaval the like of the French or the
| October revolution?
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| That kind of doomer prediction would be more interesting if
| we did not live in time period with historically high
| employment rates.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >historically high employment rates
|
| People will believe any statistic that aligns with their
| mindset.
|
| Unemployment rates are at historical _lows_ within a small
| margin, it 's been 50 years since unemployment has been
| lower (i.e. something like 60% of Americans have not seen
| lower unemployment in their whole lives), and since the
| WWII war economy that they've been significantly lower
| (i.e. almost nobody alive).
| unwind wrote:
| Historically high employment rates == historically low
| unemployment rates, right?
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| Not necessarily: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dis
| couraged_worker.asp
|
| In the UK people sometimes make the claim that the
| unemployment rate the government is quoting is so low
| because people have given up even looking
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| What's the difference between historically high
| employment rates and historically low unemployment rates?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| (employment rate) = (employed people) / (total people)
|
| (unemployment rate) = (people not currently working, but
| actively looking) / (total people)
|
| The first includes all people, the second excludes those
| not working, but also not looking.
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| Havent the calculations changed ?
| foobiekr wrote:
| Their GPU group seems to have some minimal success. The CPUs
| are still great but obviously process issues dominate.
|
| The rest of intel is a shambles. The networking group in
| particular is an industry joke.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Seems normal that the number of employees in Sales would follow
| the rate of product sales.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Perhaps. Though I'd be a bit slower to react to the market
| here. Depending how sales are handled, removing staff can
| remove the relationships that they have developed. It's a
| pretty bad sign to be doing this.
|
| Might be different for Intel though, everyone has to drink at
| the same oasis.
| dangus wrote:
| Yes, sales are at the front of the pipeline. If there aren't
| prospects and customers to talk to, salespeople sit idle.
|
| If you're at a company and you look at your engineer to sales
| ratio you might think to yourself "gee, we have so many sales
| people!"
|
| That's because there's not much multiplying factor to sales
| roles. There isn't a lot of potential to automate like
| engineers can do. A salesperson only has so many hours in the
| day and they're fitting maximum one or two customers into a
| one hour slot of their time.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| There is indeed a lot you can do to avoid overcrowded sales
| departments, e.g. define minimum order volumes your
| prospects need to hit to let your salespeople interact with
| them (and refer them to an external reseller otherwise).
| Invest in online sales tools like product configurators to
| let you customer do the sales job etc.
| mirker wrote:
| Ads companies like Google/Meta are good examples. Any
| small account gets a webpage and that's it. Still, it
| must be harder to sell semi-commodities like CPUs.
| dang wrote:
| (This comment was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180313, but we merged
| the thread hither since that article was a misleadingly titled
| ripoff.)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| FWIW, Ars are citing the same Bloomberg piece the submitted
| blogspam is, so I'd not take that as an independent validation
| or clarification on the magnitude of the sackings.
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Intel Inside" worked..
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| it absolutely worked.
|
| the pentiums were a huge leap from the amd 386/486 and
| cyrix options. 'Intel Inside' was basically a premium-
| product differentiator for those that could afford it,
| and that was well understood by consumers at the time.
|
| Ferrari/Gucci/Armani/Rolex/Louis Roederer labels also
| help to push product. Same phenomenon, people didn't buy
| Intel strictly because it was needed for specific
| workloads, they bought it because of the fancy sticker
| that differentiated their product from cheaper
| alternatives; even if the person didn't know thing-one
| about computers or CPUs.
|
| It sounds corny, but having lived through it I can vouch
| that things are really that stupid.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| I always bought Intel CPU laptops. Could never figure out
| the AMD naming scheme (and still can't but that goes for
| Intel now too). Also back then it seemed the AMD laptops
| were of poorer quality than the Intel ones.
| whymauri wrote:
| Before Ryzen, I strongly preferred Intel CPUs and Intel-
| compatible motherboards for building PCs.
| bombcar wrote:
| Intel marketing is NOT aimed at customers. It's aimed at
| Dell and HP et al.
| brewdad wrote:
| Then why did they (used to) run ads during prime time TV
| shows? Was that the only chance to get product buys from
| Michael Dell?
| kqr wrote:
| For what it's worth, the laptop I currently use for work
| I requested a few years ago specifically because it had
| an Intel CPU - not necessarily because of performance
| (though that was a factor) but also I know how to get
| important performance counters out of it for diagnosing
| performance issues. I don't know if I'd make the same
| judgment today, though.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU?
|
| If you're a Linux user, Intel integrated graphics have
| always been the most compatible and most well-supported
| option.
| indymike wrote:
| > If you're a Linux user, Intel integrated graphics have
| always been the most compatible and most well-supported
| option.
|
| You forgot to add, "worst performing by a mile" to the
| feature list.
| LtWorf wrote:
| A slow functioning video card is still better than a fast
| video card that doesn't work.
| serf wrote:
| nothing much slower than when an nvidia dkms process
| fails silently and you're left without video options at
| next boot -- something that generally can't happen with
| intel-video/linux.
|
| I get your point, but intel video options perform on par
| or better with regards to the most common consumer video
| rendering demands at this point. Video acceleration and
| high resolutions and multiple displays are well covered
| -- not everyone needs to process GPGPU workloads and play
| the newest games at 90FPS.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Compared to other integrated graphics?
| opan wrote:
| In my experience nvidia with nouveau is slower than Intel
| with its free driver.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| That was a long time ago. AMD has shipped
| iGPUs/integrated platforms and dGPUs with fully mainlined
| drivers for ages now. Only recently has Intel gained
| credibility with Iris iGPUs beating AMD's, whereas for
| the longest time you had to pair Intel platforms with
| Nvidia GPUs to get any kind of graphics performance,
| spelling trouble due to Nvidia's insistence on closed
| drivers and binary blobs.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > graphics performance
|
| For the Linux users I was referring to, the most
| graphically intensive thing many of them run is a desktop
| compositor.
|
| But yes, today, AMD iGPUs are a great choice for mobile,
| and AMD dGPUs are a great choice for desktop or for
| i-don't-care-about-battery gaming laptops.
| truncate wrote:
| Back when I was not on Mac, I always preferred laptops
| with Intel integrated graphics, regardless of
| performance. It was just better drivers, less battery
| drain and boards didn't fail either. My first laptop had
| NVIDIA graphics, and it was whole combination of bad
| drivers and motherboard frying because of overheating.
| Things have probably changed, but I'd just get one with
| Intel graphics -- just because I trust Intel to keep
| pushing better drivers based on their history.
|
| Speaking on AMD, 10 years ago at-least, there were very
| few premium AMD laptops, and they used to overheat quite
| a bit, has that changed?
| posguy wrote:
| Yes, AMD's APUs have filled the market vertical with good
| integrated graphics and CPUs starting about a decade ago
| with the AMD A4 through A10 lineup, and continuing today
| with the Ryzen processors with Radeon Graphics.
|
| GPUs of the era your thinking of had high failure rates
| from issues with lead free solder, though the Nvidia GPUs
| on Macs and Laptops would outright fail from other
| issues, requiring a full chip replacement.
|
| https://eclecticlight.co/2015/12/20/lead-free-graphics-
| cards...
| warner25 wrote:
| I've seen this come up a few different ways over the past
| year, and I think I've also read that Intel contributes
| more to kernel development than any other company. One
| thing I'm wondering is: how dependent on Intel have
| desktop Linux distros become?
| philistine wrote:
| Was this marketing to Linux perverts worth all this money
| that Intel poured? For the vast majority of normies,
| Intel Inside was useless noise.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I don't know, for a good while before Ryzen came out
| Intel CPUs were widely regarded as the best choice, so
| the marketing may very well have helped move machines.
|
| On an unrelated note, "perverts" doesn't seem to me like
| a particularly kind appellation.
| blackoil wrote:
| It was one of the most successful branding campaigns. It
| allowed Intel to become the primary brand over the
| laptop/pc vendors. You can buy Acer/HP/Dell/... Because
| they are all Intel. Even non tech people understood that
| and this gave great bargaining power to Intel.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > It was one of the most successful branding campaigns.
| It allowed Intel to become the primary brand over the
| laptop/pc vendors.
|
| I mean, it coincided with that. It's not clear how much
| was caused by branding/marketing and how much was caused
| by Intel being better (at least in laptops) from the Core
| Duo days until now[1] plus-or-minus a few years?
|
| ---
|
| 1. Honestly, I haven't kept up with laptop hardware
| performance during the AMD chiplet era.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Should have pitched their mobile strategy as "Intel
| Outside"
| londons_explore wrote:
| By the time mobile got big, Intel was no longer an ideas
| company. There is no way they could have come up with a
| tagline this good.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It was the bunny suit dancers...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMCNILzZsWk
| Zigurd wrote:
| "Intel Inside" worked to build awareness of the Intel
| brand. The campaign validated the idea that, for a certain
| amount of ad spending, one can build brand awareness, even
| for a CPU chip. But, compared to Qualcomm, for example, do
| people need to be aware of a brand in order for that brand
| to be dominant?
|
| With the rise of mobile gaming, the fact that people don't
| know what chip is in their phone casts even more doubt on
| the value of brand awareness. Intel got dominant by always
| having a design and/or fab dominance over rivals. A "one-
| two punch." Who among PC buyers understood that?
|
| On top of that, if Gelsinger is serious about building a
| contract fab business, that has sales and marketing needs
| way outside of anything Intel does today.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Did it? Or was there no other option for a long time?
| keeptrying wrote:
| 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.
| arroz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| arroz wrote:
| a company that has low profit and employees a lot of people
| as a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite
| arroz wrote:
| is *
| arroz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Those are people. Each one could have a family with kids.
| Don't be so callous.
| metadat wrote:
| https://archive.ph/P2gjN
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| 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?
| sgjohnson wrote:
| They don't really need Intel's general purpose CPUs.
| structural wrote:
| 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.
| LegitShady wrote:
| 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/2022-10-1...
| keepquestioning wrote:
| This is insane. Surely they can't ALL be sales and marketing
| people.
| [deleted]
| aitchnyu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| synthetigram wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Sell rumors, buy facts :)
| uptownfunk wrote:
| 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.
| Entinel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Seems like Pat Gelsinger has at least a couple of ideas what to
| do. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/4/23385652/pat-gelsinger-
| in...
| mandeepj wrote:
| PC slowdown or Apple is taking food off of your plate? They
| caused few ripples in Meta's world as well.
| mrkramer wrote:
| 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...
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How does this work with the recent passing of the CHIPS Act?
| Aren't they supposed to be expanding their workforce?
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/e6672
| rvz wrote:
| Much larger than the Meta layoffs if true, given that this layoff
| is 20% of Intel's staff getting the cut.
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