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.
I’m rather OOTL with intel. Mind giving me a short summary? What’d they do this time?
Not sure a short summary will cut it.
They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.
AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.
Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.
Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.
The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU’s resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU’s to crash and sometimes fail altogether.
What is it with accountants being chosen as CEO? Like if you were a competent accountant, you should be CFO, and the CEO is someone who knows what the fuck the company sells and how it profits, which I can guarantee you has never been a competent accountant.
A bug or whatever in their 13’th and 14’th gen CPU’s makes them slowly but permanently degrade and cause crashes. Intel have not been handling the issue as you would hope since the discovery. Denying, downplaying, refusing a recall, refusing extended warranties, the lot. Now the lawsuits are cooking.
They sold fairy high end processors. They took like 3 months to fix the issue. Processors that were damaged will remain damaged. I think Intel will replace them though.
This saga has moved fast so I don’t blame you, just an FYI Intel has issued a statement saying the microcode update “will” fix all affected CPUs (it won’t, because the damage is physical) and will not be issuing a recall.
Two generations of bad cpu’s and their solution is get rid of the workers so they can keep their bonuses.
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.”
It’s always the boot lickers saying they. CEO used to be THE guy in charge. It used to be someone who knew the company and worked their way up. McDonnell Douglas/Boeing used to have engineers in charge. Same with GE. Then Jack Welch came along and destroyed that entire ideology.
He was the one that opened the door to late stage capitalism, at least in the USA. It’s hilarious how these companies piece meal themselves off acting like they did something for short term gain. Meanwhile, the Japanese, Chinese, and European companies are happy to buy all this knowledge as they are still playing the long game rather than the MBA clown show.
The risk bit is self-evidently bullshit. Executives are the last to suffer when things go wrong. They can tank the whole company through greed and incompetence, and still collect their salaries of millions plus even bigger bonuses, before walking into a similar position somewhere else. It’s the employees that shoulder the risk.
what does an executive actually do?
According to conservatives, they trickle all over the rest of us. Isn’t that nice of them?
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
I’ll have you know they deserve that money for doing a job no one else wants! Talking to other executives! /s
That’s…wait. That’s actually a decent point. Imagine being around the scummiest, fakest people in the world 24/7. I couldn’t deal with it.
stop ‘non-essential’ work
So those jobs they’re cutting start with everyone with “Chief” in their title, right?
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
…i’m surprised to see DHL rank so highly in that list: what’s their domestic market focus, business-to-business freight logistics?..i seldom see DHL packages and when i do they’re almost exclusively of international origin…
