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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.'"
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.
Four reasons
1)Scale. Scale is hard. Its not a solved problem. It takes a lot of people to make things run at scale.
2)You only see the tip of the iceberg. The algorithms for advertising, selecting what stories get shown, etc are 10x the size of code you see on the website.
3)Non-engineering. Want to monetize that website? You need salesmen, marketers, and the support staff to provide software, HR services, etc for all of them.
4)Speed. While you can't speed up small projects by adding more people, you can work on two projects at once by adding more. That's what they're trying to do. A team of one could write everything, given a few centuries. If you want it all delivered in a year, that takes people.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's because the prospect of exponential revenue growth, no matter how illusory or profitless, holds much more sway with investors than an established behemoth that prints money but whose best growth days are behind it.
I blame AMD. And hip-hop.
ARM Holdings plc
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.
So you can buy a cheaper PC and get more overall processing done.
Unless you need that processing done locally for one reason or another, or else the prices being charged by "the cloud" were exorbitant or required subscriptions that essentially cause you to pay for unused cycles.
I'm not yet convinced this is actually the reasoning behind this trend. I suspect PCs are "fast enough" for the majority of the market, and the minority that requires faster PCs is going to end up paying more or possibly be starved.
I can't believe this is an earnest comparison to one of the world's biggest chip makers. Please tell me you're trolling.
Not only PC's but Servers as well.
I have a set of 5 year old IBM servers that run dual Xeon 2.9ghz processors with 4 cores each and there is ZERO reason to replace them. In fact I just picked up a pair of identical barely used units for parts for under $190 each off of ebay and replaced the SAS drives with cheap SATA SSD drives on the backup unit for testing to dramatically increase disk access speeds. (Yes my SAS raid controller happily manages SATA SSD drives)
I could spend another $10K to replace the two or simply spend $2000 and keep them going for another 5 years just fine. the 10,000Base T network interface is faster than we will need, and the SAN works just fine.
Intel has not made a processor worth upgrading to for over 5 years and the current gen stuff is less than 20% better than the older so there is no reason at all to even toy with upgrading. My new lenovo laptop is actually SLOWER than the old one it replaced, the 6th gen intel i7 processors are complete crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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...
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