So they got all that money from Uncle Sam’s CHIPS Act only to lay off 10,000 employees and make themselves “lean”. Govt funded unemployment.
Prepping for all those spicy class action lawsuits coming their way.
You’re probably right, the generation 13&14 will be riddled with lawsuits.
Two generations of bad cpu’s and their solution is get rid of the workers so they can keep their bonuses.
MBA brain rot
Two words, bean counters.
Part of the lackluster CPU problem is that Intel was pissing away their money on other adventures. CPUs were “in the bag”, so they kept spending money on other stuff to try to “create new markets”. Any casual observer knew their fundamental problem was simple: they got screwed on fabrication tech. Then they got screwed again as a lot of heavy lifting went to the ‘GPU’ half of the world and they were the only ones with zero high performance GPU product/credibility. But they instead went very different directions with their investments…
For example they did a lot to try to make Optane DIMMs happen, up to and including funding a bunch of evangelism to tell people they’ll need to rewrite their software to use entirely new methods of accessing data to make Optane DIMMs actually do any better than NAND+RAM. They had a problem where if it were treated like a disk, it was a little faster, but not really, and if it were used like RAM it was WAY slower, so they had this vision of a whole new third set of data access APIs… The instant they realized they needed the entire software industry to fundamentally change data access from how they’ve been doing it for decades for a product to work should have been the signal to kill it off, but they persisted.
See also adventures in weird PCIe interconnects no one asked for (notably they liked to show a single NVME drive being moved between servers, which costed way more than just giving each server another NVME and moving data over a traditional fabric). Embedding FPGA into CPUs when they didn’t have the thermal budget to do so and no advantages over a discrete FPGA. Just a whole bunch of random ass hardware and software projects with no connection to business results, regardless of how good or bad they were. Intel is bad for “build it, and they will come”.
You know they pocket those subsidies when this happens.
Right to the pockets of the least useful in the company - the executives.
And here’s where I say - what does an executive actually do? And someone will inevitably say something asinine about “risk” and “game changing decisions” and “meeting with investors.”
I’d rather they try and put a random janitor in the CEO seat for a year and see what happens.
Couldn’t be any worse than the current shit stain.
what does an executive actually do?
According to conservatives, they trickle all over the rest of us. Isn’t that nice of them?
I’m still waiting - mouth wide open, head and hands towards heaven (where it comes from), for the trickle of capitalism to run down my face and enter my mouth.
If you watch these companies they all want to be tech giants when they have no reason to do so. They hire tech execs from the giants thinking they’ll make some great business hybrid withithe help of the tech execs,but you know what? Sometimes a brick is just a brick.
Two things happen, the tech execs lead them on a wild goose chase since they have no idea how to function in a different industry and people get fired, or the CEO is scared and ignores the suggestions to follow the same thing every other company does and people get fired
They only made 50 billion dollars of profit last year. Won’t anybody think of the shareholders
What’s crazy to me is that they are laying off more employees than the total number of full time employees I’ve worked at for most companies.
They are laying off 12% of their work force.
That’s what happens when companies are too fucking big, and intel was essentially a monopoly for a while.
I have interned at AT&T while at University, laying off a 1000 people would be less than 1 % for them.
After seeing this article I went down a rabbit hole and IBM isn’t even in the top 10 US of most employees. Here’s some of the popular ones from the top 30.
- Walmart - 2.3 Million
- Amazon - 1.61 Million
- DHL - 594,000
- FedEx - 547,000
- UPS - 536,000
- Home Depot - 456,000
- Target - 415,000
- Kroger - 414,000
- Marriott - 411,000
- Starbucks - 381,000
- Walgreens - 333,000
- Pepsi - 318,000
- Costco - 316,000
- Chase - 309,000
- Lowes - 300,000
- IBM - 282,000
- CVS - 219,000
- Bank of America - 212,000
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_States–based_employers_globally
… the 12 percent that actually does something too…
While Intel has absolutely been losing money on its chipmaking Foundry business as it invests in new factories and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, to the tune of $7 billion in operating losses in 2023 and another $2.8 billion this quarter, the company’s products themselves aren’t unprofitable.
So what I’m getting here is that the CEO and or the board decided to invest in something that is losing a ton of money and so now 15% or more of the people who have been working diligently to actually make the company money are going to pay for it by losing their job.
So what I’m getting here is that the CEO and or the board decided to invest in something that is losing a ton of money
Intel has an enormous technical debt that they’re finally struggling to pay back after they hit a brick wall with their 7nm Titanium chipset.
It isn’t that this is wasteful spending so much as it is big upfront costs for future productive development.
That said, the fact that this work has to be government subsidized in order to be done raises the question of why this business is private at all.
I’m not sure I want the gov and huge amounts of my tax dollars going to operate federal gov chip fab plants. On the other hand I get your point that it is so heavily subsidized it is practically a de facto situation anyway.
I’m not sure I want the gov and huge amounts of my tax dollars going to operate federal gov chip fab plants.
That is ultimately what the subsidies amount to.
On the other hand I get your point that it is so heavily subsidized it is practically a de facto situation anyway.
I think the question isn’t “Do I want my tax dollars going to X?” (because they’re going there whether you want it to or not - semiconductors are an essential industry in a modern post-industrial nation). The question is how you want the business to operate. As a for-profit venture focused on returning the maximum profit to shareholders over the smallest time frame? Or as a public utility, focused on generating a sufficient quota of useful products for a fixed unit cost?
Part of the problem with the Western/Americanized economic system is that the second kind of enterprise is increasingly difficult to find. And where it does exist (the USPS, the state university system, the federal reserve, the SEC/FAA/EPA) there’s been so much privatization and regulatory capture that these institutions appear incapable of fulfilling their mandates.
But constantly diverting responsibility for fixing the problem by saying “I don’t want my tax dollars involved in this failed thing” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution. At some point, the public (and by extension the state bureaucracy) has to engage with our corrupt and failing economic cornerstones. Otherwise, we just become beholden to the nations we import from.
“Let Saudi-ARAMCO handle it” isn’t a solution I find particularly appetizing, either.
Doesn’t the US have semiconductor chip sanctions in place on China, specifically because it’s a national security concern? If semiconductors are that big of a deal that we need to sanction China over them… maybe they should be nationalized.
Doesn’t the US have semiconductor chip sanctions in place on China
Taiwanese Semiconductor is the global industry leader, and half of their output is sold to China. Korea and Japan are also major exporters. The Chinese manufacturers don’t care about losing access to Intel chips, when they’re a generation behind the curve anyway.
maybe they should be nationalized.
Wall Street would flip its lid if the US tried to nationalize Intel.
That’s definitely a huge issue but they’re going to have a hell of a time on the overcooked processors on the market right now. They’ve sold a hell of a lot of defective product over the past couple of years. Consumers and third parties are going to come after them for refunds. Consumer confidence is way down. They’re going to have a hell of a time trying to sell 15th gen to people. Everyone I know who knows what in the hell is going on is going to AMD.
Consumer confidence is way down. They’re going to have a hell of a time trying to sell 15th gen to people. Everyone I know who knows what in the hell is going on is going to AMD.
I’ve been in the industry since back when AMD actually was making the processors for Intel. And people have been saying this exact thing every time there’s a fluctuation in the processor market. Yet Intel still basically owns the market anyway.
The failure in Intel isn’t their processors, it’s their management.
I mean you can’t blame the rocks, of course it’s the management :)
You have a hell of a love for that phrase!
That’s exactly what happened, and that’s how layoffs always work.
The losses of the horrible decisions of the board/owners/management/etc are paid for by the blood of the workers. It’s so wonderful and very fair.
I think it’s even more absurd than that. The CEO/board decided to make a long-term investment which wasn’t going to pay off for several years. To what should be the surprise of no one, that meant short term losses.
Framing an investment in a massive amount of new infrastructure as a loss because it didn’t immediately start operating in the black is beyond unreasonable, but that’s the demand when all that matters is quarterly gains and year-over-year growth.
Several tech companies have really stopped giving a shit lately. Intuit laid off a ton of people and referred to them as “not meeting expectations”, and Intel’s laid-off folks are now all apparently working on non-essential stuff.
Imagine losing your job and being told second-hand after you’d been shown the door that you were shit.
Fuck these companies.
I do a moderate amount of work with Intel, and I’d say the problem is not that the people are “shit”, it’s that their bureaucracy is so messed up. You have the people that actually engaged with their customers (support and sales), who marketing largely ignores, and marketing makes up stuff that isn’t in sync with the field guys, but that’s hardly a problem because the development executives then go off on their own “cool” ideas, without any buy in or anything from support, sales, or marketing. This has real impact, but then you have some middle managers spooling up side projects with like a dozen dedicated people each, adding another indirection of effort totally disconnected from any business capability.
So end result is you have an admittedly qualified team toiling away on a project that there’s just no way a potential customer will even hear about, working on problems that someone “imagined” that a customer never had, or is trivially solved in the industry already, but they don’t have the experience to know that. Even when the work is good and people might want it, it’s still doomed to obscurity because there’s such a disconnect between the engineers and any actual communication with potential customers.
Stagnation, baby.
I wonder how many of the over 1000 VPs will get canned. You read that right. I worked there at the beginning of my career. I know a lot of people who are now VPs. Only one of them was actually any good. One guy couldn’t even manage his own staff meetings when he was a first line manager. Nice guy, not dumb or anything, but not brilliant, and a terrible organizer.
Ah yes, the ol’ “promoted to the level of their incompetence”. SOP. Or SNAFU, take your pick.
I hope this never happens to me but based on the Peter Principle I won’t know when it happens.
Oh shit maybe it’s already happened…
over 1000 VPs
I used to work for Comcast and it was astonishing how many vice presidents there were. It might be the most meaningless corporate title ever. Even if they had real work to do they never had time to do it - VPs there turned over faster than beignets at Cafe du Monde.
It’s a good thing we gave them BILLIONS of Taxpayer Dollars! Otherwise they would have Laid Off Employees! Anyways we don’t have enough money in the Budget to Feed Starving American Children!
There’s a dude in wallstreetbets who dumped a $700k inheritance into Intel stocks. lol
Dude, what the heck is wrong with people. Wealth is wasted on the stupid.
its mainly that our modern culture worships money and things whoever has more of it is inherently better.
So rich people make bad decisions because they think that being rich means they are always right, and that their ideas are special and magical and come from a mystical realm of refined thought only people with stacks of cash possess.
And when they fail, they blame everything except their greed focused short sightedness.
What’s the problem? They put the money back into circulation. That’s a good thing, no?
The wealthy hoard their gold. They don’t circulate it.
The problem is that it is just poor money management. He could’ve been set for life. Put that into an index or S&P500 and get 10% every year. That’s 70k and he wouldn’t even have to work. If you took that 70k and invested back into the fund, you can double your money in about 7 years, assuming 10% returns.
Yeah I agree. That’s what I would’ve done. You saying that wealth is wasted just made it sound like the money dissapeared somehow. He wasted his chance on financial independence, sure, but that’s not away from the rest of us.
I had a friend in the '90s who took a $40K inheritance and “invested” it all on $75 Fossil watches, the kind with Popeye and other cartoon characters on them. At least she was able to show them off at parties and get all the guests to go home.
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So they’re only keeping marketing?
I just sat through a “town hall” at a former GSK now Haleon site and a site director assured people that volume was coming back through nothing but the power of marketing alone. Apparently 8 dollar tubes of toothpaste are non sellers in a tight market. Who knew.
Didn’t expect CHIPS to backfire this fast lol.
Chips Act, Take 1: Hey Intel here’s 8 Billion dollars to make us more chips in the US. Intel: I gotta let 15,000 of you go, there’s just not enough money…
I thought they would be more tacit about it. This is too obvious and too soon after taking taxpayers’ money. But they probably don’t care anyways. Who is going to stop them or hold them accountable?
I don’t think it backfired…I truly don’t believe the Chips act is a jobs act. It is to address manufacturing gaps in semiconductors within the US. The US government wants semiconductor manufacturers to update foundries and gave them money to do so. The jobs that have been added within the industry have been icing on the cake but not the original intent imho.
It got us a TSMC fab, soon ish maybe lol
Is this really a backfire? My read is that they’re actually focusing on their core business (plus cutting down marketing). It sounds like the right move, but maybe I’m too optimistic?
Probably just keeping the staff needed to replace all the 13th and 14th gen CPUs.
I really hope they plan on fixing the problems with those generations. 🤞
They aren’t fixing shit since the problem is unfixable
I suppose I should’ve phrased it as, compensating. Seeing as they are still being sold.
American companies don’t compensate unless legally obligated.
I guess Intel needed that QA team, after all.
Non essential work, oh dear Product and Project managers, where are you gonna stand in the way of good products next?
Executives will be “essential”, QA, sys admins, etc will be non essential.
Eliminating QA is a huge value. We all know it reduces costs relating to employing people, but that’s just the start. It eliminates the number of bugs found and reduces the amount of work that comes with it. All in all it helps projects to release on time. There could be no problem with this, clearly.
All my KPIs are saying this is a win.
If you don’t check it, it never fails a check!
What’s there not to like?!
What the actual fuck
