It’s called the CHIPS act, not the JOBS act, for a reason. Intel has a lot of employees that are not working on chip manufacturing. I was hired to work on flashy things that the previous previous CEO could point to while avoiding talking about why 10nm didn’t work. They were right to lay me off. They also gave a great severance and plenty of time to find a different job internally.
Intel’s and the US’s main priority is for Intel to survive as a business over the coming decades and become competitive again. They’re going to do whatever they have to.
How does reducing the amount of work they are capable of help this though? especially now when they are going to be dealing with the fallout of this chip oxidation issue?
I don't understand the logic of it.
When someone is sick they need more support , not less.
Intel is floundering. Do you presume all of these people were adding value at the front lines of chip manufacturing? They have to lean out and figure it out.
A lot of people provide negative value. Not net negative, in their work is less valuable than their salary, but actually negative value in that they just slow things down, waste resources, or prevent innovation for their own job security
It depends on whether or not those employees were producing more than they cost. It could be that Intel is shuttering unprofitable projects the way Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple. He killed almost everything Apple was doing and got the company to focus on a handful of products, one of which was the iPod.
Intel has more employees than AMD, TSMC, and NVIDIA combined. When AMD leapfrogged them they had less employees than the number just laid off. They need capital to build out new fabs and that has to come from somewhere.
CHIPS act was to build foundries in the US. How many people did they cut from this division? Cuts came from R&D and marketing according to the earnings call.
The point of the CHIPS Act is to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. Whether it will be a success or not is another discussion. GlobalFoundries, TSMC, Samsung, and others also received money from the CHIPS Act.
They cut the dividend to zero and execs are paid in stock grants which have been haircut in value by 60% ytd. So both of those parties are doing badly.
Well if you see [0] and [1] it says that "all other" business units went down 46% and 32%. One might speculate where these 15K employees work... Not saying at all they are not working or doing good work, far from it, but if you don't make revenues, you have 2-3 quarters...
I am not an industry insider or analyst, but IMO, the proper time to take a hard look at the business, and make cuts like this, was probably right around when Apple's silicon got released to glowing reviews. If Apple could get better performance & better battery life than anything Intel could offer with a fraction of the resources (devoted to processors, anyway), that was a damning wakeup call. Now, Dell, Samsung, and and Asus are all debuting ARM-based laptops as well, also to glowing reviews. Meanwhile, Intel's 13th and 14th generation chips are having serious issues [0], and the marginal costs of their next-gen chips are forecasted to be unusually high [1].
It's been rehearsed to death that Intel missed the boat on mobile, AI, and datacenters. But if they can't even compete in CPUs for laptops, where they could and should be absolutely dominant, bankruptcy is a serious possibility in the not too distant future.
The thing that strikes me as truly bizarre about Intel's downfall is that their rivals often make big, obvious mistakes. The one that comes to mind is: what was AMD thinking with their 8600G and 8700G releases? Their pricing made no sense [2], and the laptop-based parts with the same GPUs are, evidently, perfectly fine for mini-pcs where a discrete GPU isn't possible [3]. So there was no obvious market need there (except may be for home-builders, but even there, a lot of cheap CPU/GPU combos made more sense for most use cases). Now we have Zen 5 parts coming out in the same year that blow the previous generation out of the water [4]. This is not a coherent strategy. This is not an unbeatable adversary.
I hope Intel pulls it together for competition's sake, because right now, a lot of things about the consumer PC market could stand to be improved.
