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Intel Confirms Major Layoff: 12,000 Worldwide, 11 Percent of Workforce (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes: It's all about the cloud and the Internet of Things, says Intel explaining the planned layoffs, which will affect some 12,000 employees. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich promises in an email today to employees, that the "transition" will be handled with the "utmost dignity and respect." According to IEEE Spectrum, "Intel Corp. today announced that it would cut some 12,000 jobs -- that's 11 percent of its total workforce -- by mid-2017, with the majority of those affected getting the bad news within the next two months. In a press release, the company said the 'restructuring initiative' would 'accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and the billions of smart, connected computing devices,' and that the company would be increasing its investments in 'data center, IoT memory, and connectivity businesses.'"
I never really understood what it is, but I knew it was up to no good.
We can't say we weren't warned.
It's odd that as Intel and AMD have shed workers -- they put the "Silicon" in Valley after all -- absolutely useless companies like LinkedIn are sprawling all over Sunnyvale. I understand why a company needs a large workforce to make microprocessors with nanometer thick wires, but I have no idea why you need thousands of people to run a website.
Maybe investors are just dumb....?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Cloud = Their core market (desktop+server CPUs) is in a deep consolidation phase where future purchases will be made by a relatively few number of large cloud players and total unit volumes will be drastically lower.
Internet of Things = Intel is being forced to chase razor-thin margins just to have a new market to soak up their excess semiconductor production capacity.
$300 Million because Diversity(TM) http://fortune.com/2015/01/12/...
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Intel has to restructure. It's too bad that they couldn't move some of those employees over to the growing parts of the business. Intel's business is kind of a niche one. Where will those laid off employees go? AMD? Motorola? And that's assuming that they need people.
And when Yahoo! starts their fire sale, there will be re-orgs there as well as layoffs and it will flood the market with even more tech people.
There are some bad times coming to Silicon Valley.
ARM Holdings plc
I know we want to blame somebody. Anybody. Who is responsible?
Third order responsibility goes to the sales people, that apparently can't land enough contracts to keep all their fabs running 24/7.
Second order responsibility goes to the director of sales, who either hasnt replaced the bad eggs or hasn't provided enough staff to land contracts fast enough.
First order responsibility goes to the executives, who havent replaced the director that has failed to maintain contractual demand for the companies existing capacity.
There. That wasn't so hard. Its only hard when you complicate it unnecessarily with pretensive irrelevant hand waving bullshit.
"His name was James Damore."
It's not that we want people to lose their jobs, but maybe what Silicon Valley really needs is another DotCom-type crash.
I mean, what positive things have Silicon Valley as a whole really accomplished over the past 10 years?
Well, they've managed to make advertising and the collection of personal data far more invasive and pervasive than it was before.
They've given us "social media", which is really just another way of delivering targeted, inane advertising, and harvesting personal info.
Anything new showing some potential, like virtual reality, is quickly being hijacked as yet another method to, you guessed it, deliver advertisements and collect personal data!
The programming languages they've created, like Go and especially Rust, are nothing impressive. We're still using C and/or C++ for any and all real work, and will be for some time.
Databases have taken a big step backward with all of the NoSQL hype they generated in Silicon Valley.
Web browsers today are worse than they were a decade ago. Just look at how badly Firefox has regressed. Its UI went from being really usable to being awkward to use thanks to Australis, lots of good functionality was removed, lots of dumb functionality was added in, and its performance still causes problems for lots of people. Chrome isn't impressive either.
The price of everything, and especially of housing and rent, has been distorted beyond belief in San Francisco and the surrounding areas, causing untold headaches for long-time residents.
Silicon Valley has a lot of potential, but so much of it has been wasted these past 10 to 15 years. Maybe another economic reset is just what that region, and the technology industry in general, needs.
The companies that compete with Intel are Global Foundries, TSMC, Toshiba, Micron, Samsung, Texas Instruments, etc..
..and we havent even gotten to RAM chips yet.
Intel is a manufacturer. ARM is not.
The manufacture of flash chips alone dwarfs any impact that ARM could possibly have.
Inside my desktop:
1 CPU
1 GPU
16 flash chips
Inside a smart phone:
1 CPU
1 GPU
1 ASIC
4 or more flash chips.
Picking up the pattern here?
If Intel is laying off so many, its because some of their fabs arent running 24/7. Intel has 16 fabs and maybe 3 of those (the most advanced) actually make CPU's. The rest bang out flash, ram, etc. Eventually the current "advanced" fabs wont be so advanced and will be making flash, ram, etc..
Intel can also manufacturer ARM designs (and has so in the past) so that cannot be it. The fact that they are not producing ARM designs while simultaneously they are laying off workers.. that doesnt tell a 'beaten by ARM' story like you imagine. It instead tells a 'beaten by the other foundries' story.
"His name was James Damore."
You're missing the forest for the trees. While it's true that ARM couldn't have become the success it has without contract foundries like TSMC, the core reason for ARM's success is because they've been the performance-per-watt leader for embedded solutions for a very long time, including the early days when Intel even licensed ARM's technology for their StrongARM chip.
While ARM is a tiny company compared to Intel and likely always will be, they've had an enormous impact on Intel's inability to leverage their manufacturing and design prowess for the desktop->mobile inflection point that's been occurring for the past 7 years.
How much you want to bet that when they hire for cloud and IoT stuff, they hire
overseas workers or H1B people.
No, the opposite: kill 10% of the soldiers to set an example for the rest.
RISC already won, long ago. X86 has been RISC for a while. Legacy x86 instructions are translated into core RISC instruction and the later is (re)scheduled and run. No direct access to the RISC core is available,
Not surprising, as it's not guaranteed to remain the same from processor to processor, and probably doesn't remain the same from processor to processor.
Not only that, but they are lobbying for more H1B's while hiring ~2000/year
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Yep. I just love to confound compiler optimization enthusiasts by demonstrating a benchmark for my "inefficient" x86 code that runs rings around their "more efficient" compiler code. My dumb compiler and/or hand written assembly code is simpler and nowhere near as "clever" as GCC or Clang output, but it somehow runs faster?! It's because I know x86 opcode is getting translated by microcode into RISC instructions, and so I use a small subset of instructions with low translation overhead rather than try to be clever and do a bunch of optimizations to produce tricky "efficient" oppcode. What's more efficient isn't reduced number of instructions but easier to translate instructions. Even with no optimizations enabled, a compiler will do peep-hole optimizations and reorder instructions to save a register access, ignoring that the more complex instruction actually gets processed by a bunch more register moves in microcode. Yep, that LEA (load effective address) which most compilers use to squeeze an add and multiply into one instruction? It can be slower than issuing the individual operation opcodes and takes up about the same number of bytes.
You're speaking as if the foundries provide Intel a unique competitive market position. In terms of the x86 market they certainly do (at least they used to) - the mobile market is another story. Those vertically-integrated foundries can be a capital nightmare. The arrangement works well when growth is strong but become a multi-billion dollar albatross when it doesn't. This is why nearly every company has become fabless; the contract fab model works better for all market participants, for the fabless companies because they avoid the capital investment and the fabs who get better utilization of their resources when the semiconductor product mix changes.
As for the forest, you pointed out in your previous message how many more chips get put into a computer vs a mobile device. That's fine except for the fact that PC shipments for 2016 will probably be around 270 million, compared to a projected 1.5 billion smartphones. Add to that tablets, internet of things, microwaves, automobiles, etc.. etc.. etc..
Decimation was the ancient Roman method of putting down a revolt.
If a city-state rose up in a revolt against the regional governor or broke out in a riot or even just had persistent legal and judicial problems, and the Roman central government heard about it, they would "decimate" the population.
They would first send a legion or two to quell the unrest.
They would line up every man, woman, and child. Rich, poor, old, young, everyone. The soldiers would go down the line and count to ten. They would kill that person and start over at 1.
Then the legions would leave, having killed one-in-ten residents. The latin for ten is "decem" (pronounced "day-kehm"). Hence, decimation.
1 in 10 is equal to 10 in 100. The English word "percent" comes from the latin "per centum". "per" means "by", "through", or "from". "centum" means 100. So 10% is literally an English/Latin mashup meaning "ten from a hundred". So decimation is exactly 10%. Always.
it's because companies like LinkedIn need very few employees relative to the amount of paying users. That's what scale really means. It means the investors can make a shitload of money without all those pesky employees ruining it for them. Investors have been living high off the massive productivity gains they've squeezed out of the work force, but they're kinda hitting the limits of that until automation kicks in. They're a little nervous about full blown automation because if they're not careful they'll end up with socialism when people notice there aren't any jobs anymore. So they're moving at a snails pace and using companies like LinkedIn to realize the profits they demand.
Once companies like that dry up be afraid. These folks run the economy and have a boundless desire for wealth. I'm not sure what they're going to do but if you're a member of the working class instead of the ruling one it's not going to be pretty...
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not after we repealed Glass-Steagall and let the investment bankers get buddy buddy with the Mortgage bankers. See, we used to keep the risky wallstreet stuff separate from the stable Mortgage, car and Student Loan stuff. We don't do that anymore. So a Stock market crash doesn't just devalue the paper money of the 1%ers, it wrecks the whole economy. That's sorta why we separated them in the first place...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Just an observation from the peanut gallery.
In my view, PC sales are in decline because prices have been going up, not staying the same or getting cheaper.
Years ago, I bought a new PC with an i7 920 in it, along with a monitor, and they threw in a netbook for free. Factoring out the other items, I paid less than $600 for the PC - a price/performance ratio that I could not touch when it came time to upgrade. (I tried every avenue to actually upgrade my old machine, but every time it added up to more than buying a new PC). The new PC is only about 30% faster than the old - a far cry from my usual 100% increase.
I have kept my eye on the market as people have been talking about the decline of the PC, and the situation has not changed. We are not, and cannot get our money's worth out of new PCs, so we are not buying them. Ergo, fewer PCs are being sold. Increase the value proposition, and watch PC sales skyrocket - we still need our gaming fix, and we will still buy fast PCs - if we can get a deal.
Oh, and one more thing... Microsoft hasn't helped with their Windows offerings - the braindead stupid interface changes in 8 and up, and now being strongarmed into upgrading to the data-stealing Windows 10. You can't sell me a PC with that OS on it. So yeah, PCs are in decline. Give us a decent deal, and get Microsoft to stick to the better side of it's nature, and maybe that will change.
No reason to make it more gruesome. This punishment was for deserters, it was handed down to Roman soldiers, not civilians as you imply.
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