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Intel To Cut IoT Jobs (electronicsweekly.com)

Posted by msmash on from the re-evaluation dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel is laying off people in its IoT group following its recent cuts to three of its IoT products -- the Joule, Edison and Galileo boards. 97 jobs are to be lost in Santa Clara and up to 40 more in Leixlip, Ireland. IoT accounts for less than 5% of Intel's sales.

5 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. So.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...the IoT bubble exploded before being fully inflated ?

    1. Re:So.... by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      More like Intel was playing too much catchup to ARM, AVR, ESP8266, MIPS, PPC and the other embedded chipsets.

      Turns out "But it's x86!" isn't as much of a selling point as they thought it was.

  2. whoda thunk it? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Promoting hopelessly overpriced boards in an area where x86 has no benefit in addition to having insufficient documentation wasn't the gamechanger they expected! If only someone knew why. -_-

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  3. Core Competency by AlanObject · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I learned my lesson long ago with Intel back in the i960 days or maybe before that. With them it is all about the CPU chips. No matter what they say. The one exception are their Network Interface chips

    Here is the pattern: They use their unlimited money+market position+PR machine to fund some kind of tech, pump up a bunch of customers, trade groups, get projects started with generous relationships ("partnerships"), make lots of press.

    A year or two down the road it gets de-funded, spun-out, quietly quashed. The numbers weren't what they wanted so the inevitable corporate-level decision is to return to our "core competency" and that of course is selling CPU chips.

    Anyone who was sucked into designing something with their switch chip product line knows what I am talking about. Remember SSI? If you didn't you dodged a bullet. Infiniband? Network Processors? FPGAs? Then Over 2+ decades (starting with the i186) every 3-4 years they would venture into the embedded controller market just to pull back out of it again. Not Intel Core? Not committed.

    However their current product lineup for embedded is actually pretty damn good. Not only are their designs better thought out but market and ecosystem conditions are fortuitous for them. Most of all, it is now all about selling Intel i3/i5/i7-family CPUs. That alone will keep that line it alive.

  4. CPU choices by unixisc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sadly, ARM is becoming a monoculture in many areas of computing, as x86(-64) is in desktop/laptop space. I'd like to see more architecture choices (MIPS and POWER) in some markets.

    Unfortunately, a lot of the semiconductor companies out there have reduced: just like Freescale & NXP have been digested by Qualcomm. Hardly looks like there's much out there. If a company chooses MIPS or Power, they have to make a business case for it to embedded customers on why it should be preferred over ARM, that has all the momentum. And if they choose ARM, they run up against goliaths like Qualcomm, Apple & Samsung.

    Maybe there could be some companies running it on RISC V, where one USP is that since it's a FOSH (Free Open-Source Hardware) architecture, there may be less to pay in terms of patents to ARM or MIPS or IBM. In fact, RISC V could be something that some fabs could decide to do themselves whenever they need to fill capacity: they do have to have designs-in, though