News Intel allegedly plans imminent lay off of thousands of employees: Report

[Admin]

According to sources familiar with Intel's plans for the future, the tech giant could be preparing to lay off thousands of its employees.

Intel allegedly plans imminent lay off of thousands of employees: Report : Read more

 

[bit_user]

My condolences to all affected by this move. Unless the layoffs come from cancelled projects, it doesn't make much sense to me, since it seems to me that most of Intel's major problems have stemmed from execution failures:

• the 10 nm fiasco
• Sapphire Rapids' years of delay
• Ponte Vecchio's delay & yield problems
• Alchemist dGPU's delay and underperformance
• cancellation of Meteor Lake-S
• now this Raptor Lake degradation debacle

I hoped Gelsinger would right the ship and get the problems sorted out that have been hampering Intel's ability to execute, but I think Wall St. is more of a "Mr Right Now" than "Mr Right", when it comes to Intel's long term best interests. With profits sagging, investors probably demanded something be done. Let's hope it doesn't come at too high a cost, long-term.

I wonder if the biggest competitive advantage AMD has over Intel is merely the fact that they haven't paid out dividends. IMO, dividends attract the wrong kind of investor, when you have a high tech business that requires substantial reinvestment in R&D, with long lead times.

 

[rm12]

maybe the savings can be used for the rma program that is coming up ... such a big layoff will certainly cloud some of the issues concerning the quality of their products

 

[-Fran-]

Papa needs a pay cut.

Regards

 

[watzupken]

I think Intel sat on its own success for way too long, not expecting competitors to hit them back fast and furious. In my opinion, Intel have been tripping over themselves over time and again in recent years as they scramble to course correct. Their products are generally delayed for too long, and not competitive. I am a user of Intel CPUs and also using an Arc A770. The latter for example was delayed way too long and no surprises, by the time they launch it, they are 1 generation behind their competitors to be truly competitive. Recent events don't help Intel as well, such as the way they are handling the Raptor Lake issue, and also the use of TSMC 3nm for their Lunar Lake CPUs. On the surface, they may look harmless, but in reality, I feel it is damaging to their CPU and fab business given that Intel don't think their fab is good enough to use and produce their CPU tile. I think they are starting to see the drawback of tripling down fab business, but may be too late to back down given the commitment and investment that they have put in.

 

[Reality_checker]

My condolences to all affected by this move. Unless the layoffs come from cancelled projects, it doesn't make much sense to me, since it seems to me that most of Intel's major problems have stemmed from execution failures:

• the 10 nm fiasco
• Sapphire Rapids' years of delay
• Ponte Vecchio's delay & yield problems
• Alchemist dGPU's delay and underperformance
• cancellation of Meteor Lake-S
• now this Raptor Lake degradation debacle

I hoped Gelsinger would right the ship and get the problems sorted out that have been hampering Intel's ability to execute, but I think Wall St. is more of a "Mr Right Now" than "Mr Right", when it comes to Intel's long term best interests. With profits sagging, investors probably demanded something be done. Let's hope it doesn't come at too high a cost, long-term.

I wonder if the biggest competitive advantage AMD has over Intel is merely the fact that they haven't paid out dividends. IMO, dividends attract the wrong kind of investor, when you have a high tech business that requires substantial reinvestment in R&D, with long lead times.

Yes, it's executive mistakes... from before Pat become CEO.

Things take time.

 

[ezst036]

Free money from the CHIPS act wasn't enough.

 

[bit_user]

I think they are starting to see the drawback of tripling down fab business, but may be too late to back down given the commitment and investment that they have put in.

They have no choice. Fab costs are increasing too fast. Their own products will not be able to continue funding the needed fab developments. The only way to sustain their fab business is to open it to outside customers. Even spinning it off isn't an option, until they achieve a substantial revenue ramp.

Free money from the CHIPS act wasn't enough.

It's not really free money. It's meant as an inducement to increase fab buildouts beyond what they'd have done without it. Also, unless you know otherwise, I think they probably have yet to actually receive any payouts.

 

[waltc3]

Intel's largest problem for many, many years has been upper management. They pulled Gelsinger out of retirement to head up the company because the board has no tech savvy--they looked at the numbers during Gelsinger's time, the Halcyon days of Intel of yore, back when Intel was "competing" by throwing money around to bankrupt its would-be competitors, subsidizing Dell to sell nothing but Intel products, refusing spare parts orders to companies making and selling AMD products, etc. But nobody will allow Intel to do that anymore. Those days are gone for good. I've advised Intel for years to spin off the CPU division and make it a separate company, and bad management continues to refuse to do that. Intel, year after year after year, was spending far more money for R&D than AMD, and here you can see their problem clearly. Gelsinger wants to throw more money into R&D because that's the way he did it way back when, when Gelsinger should know perfectly well that's not a productive strategy. AMD ran past Intel as if it was sitting still, on a fraction of the R&D expenditures @ Intel.

The layoffs are needed, of course, but that won't be nearly enough. The company needs reorganization from top to bottom. The reason is a simple one. Intel is still very much organized as it was when it was a high-end x86 monopoly CPU supplier. They still throw a lot of money into idiot marketing as top management thinks people don't buy hardware, they buy dumb marketing, instead...😉 The old guard at Intel simply knows next to nothing about how to create and run a very competitive tech company in today's savvy marketplace. The name of the game? Products. Period. If you don't have competitive products today, you lose. AMD has always understood that, and Lisa Su understands it better than anyone. "Build a better mousetrap, and they will come," has never been more true than it is today. I don't see Intel willing to make the necessary internal changes to become competitive again. I would think that at some point in the last nine years these things might've taken root in the company. It's too big, too cumbersome, too clumsy, and it needs to do more than one spin-off to become manageable again.

 

[bit_user]

Intel, year after year after year, was spending far more money for R&D than AMD,

They're not comparable. Intel has fabs, while AMD doesn't. To make them comparable, you should add together the R&D budget of both AMD and TSMC.

Also, Intel traditionally played in more markets than AMD. So, that's another reason it's a mismatched comparison.

I've advised Intel for years to spin off the CPU division and make it a separate company

Too bad they don't read the comments on these websites, eh?
; )

I think spinning it off right now could be disastrous. The CPU division is carrying the rest of the company, just as Habana is trying to get its legs under it and their foundry business is trying to build a customer base. Even the CPU division faces some headwinds from alternative ISAs like ARM and RISC-V, leading to some uncertainty around how Intel will navigate that increased potential for competition.

I don't see Intel willing to make the necessary internal changes to become competitive again. I would think that at some point in the last nine years these things might've taken root in the company. It's too big, too cumbersome, too clumsy, and it needs to do more than one spin-off to become manageable again.

They killed Optane, sold off the SSD business, spun out Altera, spun out MobilEye, and killed off lots of other products and projects. Before that, they got out of the datacenter networking business, not long before Nvidia went in the opposite direction. I think Gelsinger has done a lot to try and make the business leaner and more focused. I don't know how much more fat they can cut, before hitting muscle and bone.

 

[Silas Sanchez]

Intel were great back in the days of Pentium 4 and the first Dual cores and Quad cores, before the rise of imperialism.
Going from my Pentium 4 3.8GHz to the first quad core 3GHz was incredible, they were like a super computer, never before had i seen such multitasking on a desktop pc. Crysis ran so well on the dual cores and quad cores while allowing music in the background, web browsing etc. Do that on an OCd P4 and the game frame rate was a stuttery mess.
Sadly after that Intel went down hill making the same boring stuff over and over and was replaced by AMD, to this day it boggles my mind people actually buy Intel desktop cpus. Intel are anti consumer with their sockets-no future proofing at all like AMD. Just look at how bad they have gotten, the 14th gen was a tiny bit more perf over 13th but at the cost of alot more power draw. AMD are just smashing it.
But i got to admit Intels mobile cpus are fantastic, how i can get 5hours of web browsing full brightness on my Thinkpad P72, ill never know.

Times have changed, made in Taiwan and China is the future. Cheaper and better in a world where everything is now getting a 1year warranty. Mil-spec made in USA military flashlight? Yeah, 1 year warranty.

 

[Neilbob]

Speaking as a peon...

As always, I expect the innocent peons who are the ones who will suffer, while upper management continue to probably gorge on inflated salaries and undeserved bonuses (though I expect that money still amounts to a rounding error, and that's obviously the only thing most shareholders care about).

Also, not even 8 months ago: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...-totalling-700-layoffs-in-the-state-this-year

 

[punkncat]

The writing has been on the wall for some time in regard to this. They laid back on their laurels for over a decade, didn't feel the need to innovate since they ruled the space so long. They released three generations right in a row that weren't worth moving to. They went backwards between 10th and 11th gen using a smaller core count binned i7 as the flagship product i9. And the cherry on top is trying to hide the well reported incidents with 13th and 14th.

They are still, powerful, and well funded to a degree that I expect they will have a comeback, but the overall of these incidents, decisions, and situations could not have been a better gift or more well timed for AMD to take it to them.

 

[Taslios]

I hoped Gelsinger would right the ship and get the problems sorted out that have been hampering Intel's ability to execute, but I think Wall St. is more of a "Mr Right Now" than "Mr Right", when it comes to Intel's long term best interests. With profits sagging, investors probably demanded something be done. Let's hope it doesn't come at too high a cost, long-term.

I wonder if the biggest competitive advantage AMD has over Intel is merely the fact that they haven't paid out dividends. IMO, dividends attract the wrong kind of investor, when you have a high tech business that requires substantial reinvestment in R&D, with long lead times.

I suspect you are right and Pat will not be given the time needed to right the ship. That said, he might also have caused some of the issues.... Intel Foundry is a huge loss at the moment and may never pay off if issues with their chips and fear of IP theft keep would be customer/competitors away.

Either way mass layoffs from Intel will only strengthen AMD and Nvidia as they hoover up all anyone worth adding to their teams. We need competition, so I hope Intel can right the ship.

Also.. Amd HAS paid dividends... in last time in 1995, so they are better than say Amazon which has literally never paid a dividend... **Splits hairs**

 

[Giroro]

Laying off employees will never solve a problem with executive leadership, because executives can't get laid off.

Somebody at Intel thought it made sense for Raja "his work at AMD Radeon is likely the reason Nvidia is an uncontested monopoly" Kudori to lead a bleeding edge development team. Whoever made that decision is probably still at the company, making a lot of other obviously bad decisions. They've probably made other "worst possible person on Earth for the job" hiring decisions. Maybe it was the last CEO, maybe its somebody on the board of executives. But until they've re-vetted and weeded out everybody who was put into the wrong position by that same person/process, then the business is going to continue having top-down leadership and decision making problems that will never be solved by layoffs.

That said, Intel is a huge company and they probably have plenty of employees in non technical roles who are in non-essential jobs. Intel probably also has plenty of technical employees who are not very good at their jobs, or are in the wrong jobs.
But a bad leader who makes bad decisions can't be trusted to hire the right people, and similarly they can't be trusted to fire the right people. Change has to happen from the top down.

The next step would then be to fire anybody who thinks that the definition of "Agile" is "A strict and inflexible business management structure that should cost a company millions of dollars a year in certification and consultation fees". Those kinds of people are basically the schoolyard bullies doing the cliché "Stop hitting yourself" bit. They're the last people you want around if you need your organization to be lean, responsive, and ironically agile.

 

[bit_user]

Intel were great back in the days of Pentium 4 and the first Dual cores ...

LOL, wut?? The Pentium 4 was like their Rocket Lake of the 2000's decade, except worse. The rise of AMD's Opteron was accentuated by how hot and inefficient particularly the Prescott P4's ran! I also had one, BTW.

I think the second generation Pentium 4, Northwood, was alright. It had a 20-stage pipeline and was more modestly clocked. Prescott went for the 3+ GHz clocks and 64-bit support that was fused off, at the expense of a 31-stage pipeline. It was widely derided as PressHot.

Core 2 was like their Alder Lake moment, where they regained their dignity and stemmed the bleeding.

Do that on an OCd P4 and the game frame rate was a stuttery mess.

Uh, right. So, why'd you say they were great back then?

Sadly after that Intel went down hill making the same boring stuff over and over

Stagnating core counts and lackluster IPC growth? I think they took their foot off the gas on IPC increases around the time of Haswell. That's probably also around the time we should've started getting more cores on the desktop. Maybe Ivy Bridge or Broadwell would've been a good time for them to go 6-core, and when they'd have planned to do it if they were under any real competitive pressure.

Just look at how bad they have gotten, the 14th gen was a tiny bit more perf over 13th

That's because their plan A was to release Meteor Lake on the desktop. They discovered too late that it would be DoA, which is when they decided to rebadge and re-bin Raptor Lake as their Gen 14 S-class CPU.

But i got to admit Intels mobile cpus are fantastic, how i can get 5hours of web browsing full brightness on my Thinkpad P72, ill never know.

Sure, Meteor Lake has low idle power, but you sure picked a weird time to sing its praises. AMD's new Strix Point CPUs are basically matching Meteor Lake on both single & multirtheaded efficiency, but at significantly higher single- & multi- threaded performance.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Z...and-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite.868641.0.html
​

Intel needs Lunar Lake ASAP, but it's not launching until the beginning of September.

 

[Taslios]

Intel needs Lunar Lake ASAP, but it's not launching until the beginning of September.

Intel needs Lunar Lake Now.. and Lunar Lake needs to be everything Intel has promised it is.

 

[waltc3]

They're not comparable. Intel has fabs, while AMD doesn't. To make them comparable, you should add together the R&D budget of both AMD and TSMC.

[/QUOTE]

Yes, wisely AMD sold its FABs to Global Foundries many years back. Foundries that are not running at max capacities are huge drains.

Also, Intel traditionally played in more markets than AMD. So, that's another reason it's a mismatched comparison.


Too bad they don't read the comments on these websites, eh?
; )

Too bad?...😉 You think I'm the only one with this advice? Investors feel similarly, which is why AMD stock commands a big premium over Intel today. Trust me, my opinion here is far from unique. You know where the money is in CPUs, right? Servers, servers, and servers. Increasingly, the AI hype train is driving the markets. I'd say it's a direct comparison...😉

I think spinning it off right now could be disastrous. The CPU division is carrying the rest of the company, just as Habana is trying to get its legs under it and their foundry business is trying to build a customer base. Even the CPU division faces some headwinds from alternative ISAs like ARM and RISC-V, leading to some uncertainty around how Intel will navigate that increased potential for competition.

It's a free country, I'm glad you have an opinion. My opinion still stands. I think they need to get competitive again. I don't think they can do it with existing management. I think they need some radical changes in their basic structure.

They killed Optane, sold off the SSD business, spun out Altera, spun out MobilEye, and killed off lots of other products and projects. Before that, they got out of the datacenter networking business, not long before Nvidia went in the opposite direction. I think Gelsinger has done a lot to try and make the business leaner and more focused. I don't know how much more fat they can cut, before hitting muscle and bone.

Yes, and they are getting ready to cut thousands more jobs. Intel is a company that had to go begging to the US government, complaining that if they weren't given money by the taxpayer that they probably wouldn't survive. I didn't say that, Gelsinger did, IIRC.

Good, I'm glad you have a lot of faith in Intel's future! To that end, I'll just say what all stock prospectus says, "Past performance is no guarantee of future profitability." I think that is an intelligent statement. Sorry we disagree, but, you know, that's life...😉 People disagree...😉

 

[thestryker]

Yes, wisely AMD sold its FABs to Global Foundries many years back. Foundries that are not running at max capacities are huge drains.

AMD literally had no choice in the matter due to their financials it was the only thing they could do.

Intel hasn't historically had any problem with running foundries at capacity they have a problem of the ever increasing cost along with the benefits of keeping older nodes around. If you look at their manufacturing until 22nm they retired nodes usually every 2-3 nodes which would be akin to TSMC retiring N7/6 today. This allowed them to maximize capacity as they brought new nodes online, but it turns out fabrication nodes can be hard (until 14nm Intel didn't really have any struggles pushing the entire industry, and even then 14nm still launched way ahead of anything that could compete).

If Intel had spun off the fabs like wall street bros have wanted for around a decade now the world would be looking at only having TSMC and Samsung for leading edge. Global Foundries had the deal for 7nm in hand and were developing it, but the fund that took over the fabs looked at the cost and dumped it. There's nothing to suggest the exact same thing wouldn't have happened to Intel's fabs (doubly so when you consider the mess of 10nm). Sure if you're looking at short term monetary gain then it's the right move, but unless the fabrication industry collapses the long term gains are there.

 

[thestryker]

I suspect you are right and Pat will not be given the time needed to right the ship. That said, he might also have caused some of the issues.... Intel Foundry is a huge loss at the moment and may never pay off if issues with their chips and fear of IP theft keep would be customer/competitors away.

Will he be given enough time I think is the real question here. I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't a driving factor for how quickly he got rid of things that weren't making enough money (or were money losers) and the aggressive foundry moves. I don't think we'll know until at least 2026 if that has paid off though due to how much time it takes to develop nodes and get third party products in the wild.

fear of IP theft

I just want to note that this part is a non issue. Intel is trying to build an external foundry and stealing from customers is the best way to kill your entire business. Especially when you consider any benefit they could possibly get from it would be years away. While I don't think there's necessarily any evidence to link the two I firmly believe Samsung being accused by Apple cost them enough business that it impacted future node developments and has kept them a step behind TSMC.

 

[bit_user]

Intel is a company that had to go begging to the US government, complaining that if they weren't given money by the taxpayer that they probably wouldn't survive. I didn't say that, Gelsinger did, IIRC.

I don't recall reading anything like that. Source?

 

[bit_user]

I just want to note that this part is a non issue. Intel is trying to build an external foundry and stealing from customers is the best way to kill your entire business.

I think the most legit-sounding customer concerns I've heard about Intel's foundry business isn't IP theft, per se (which is actually harder for a fab to do than you might expect), but revealing competitive intelligence (i.e. product details, production volumes, launch schedules, etc.). I think it's fair to imagine that plenty of people inside Intel's foundry business still have contacts and communication with people in other parts of the company and things surely do get whispered between them. If I were AMD, I sure wouldn't trust IFS not to leak such details.

 

[Zerk2012]

Companies have layoffs all the time not sure why this is such big news.
Depending on the structure very little could change except saving some money.

Investors need to make money again nothing new.

I worked for a cold storage company in maintenance we had 264 locations all owned by a investment group they demanded 25% profit of the total investment each year. 24 was not acceptable heads would roll.

Where I work now we could cut 5% of our workforce (mid level management) and never miss anything because the company structure is very management heavy. It's a world wide company and that would be thousands of jobs.

 

[thestryker]

I think the most legit-sounding customer concerns I've heard about Intel's foundry business isn't IP theft, per se (which is actually harder for a fab to do than you might expect), but revealing competitive intelligence (i.e. product details, production volumes, launch schedules, etc.). I think it's fair to imagine that plenty of people inside Intel's foundry business still have contacts and communication with people in other parts of the company and things surely do get whispered between them. If I were AMD, I sure wouldn't trust IFS not to leak such details.

While I find that far more plausible I find it equally unlikely to be a real concern. This should all be information that the companies undoubtedly already have about one another (or could get). Not that there couldn't be some advantage there, but that it's not worth spiking a deal over if the deal is good. I'm basing this on how things are today when you compare the companies because while they compete it's two different scales. If AMD keeps closing the gap your point becomes much more of a concern if they're fighting for every scrap.

That being said I highly doubt AMD would jump ship from TSMC to anyone right now for primary production as they're very entrenched with advanced technologies and packaging. I could see supplemental fabrication being diversified though somewhat like how Intel uses TSMC for various products. I've been somewhat surprised Samsung hasn't gone after this type of business, but it's possible they keep what leading edge capacity they have busy with in house.

 

[Reality_checker]

They still throw a lot of money into idiot marketing as top management thinks people don't buy hardware, they buy dumb marketing, instead...

Disagreed.

AMD is the company that is almost all marketing and barely any substance (apart from EPYC).

Intel is trying to get back to having the most advanced manufacturing nodes, which will not only allow them to have the best products -- it will also "steal" a lot of revenue from TSMC and bring it to Intel.

Pat is right on the money with this.