To set the stage: I’ve heard the recent news about layoffs with Intel. Before that I read from their new CEO “On training, I think it is too late for us”. Lastly there has been some offhand comments (from LTT) that they’re preparing to sell the company.
Yet while I have no doubt that they are behind; their revenue is about 55 billion since 2023, down from the high of 78-80ish Billion during the pandemic, but about the same as the plateau leading up to the pandemic 2015-2019.
Maybe i’m naive about the way businesses work; but if your still profitable, and you know you need to “catch up” why lay off people and close sites? Maybe that works for a consumer goods company; if your overhead is too high and your not making a profit: slim down.
However for a company where RND is really where the value is, like Intel, it just doesn’t seem to make sense; your not going to get better designs and processes by reducing your experienced staff and letting them go work for the competition. Maybe some restructuring, (in the engineering sense not the euphemism for layoffs).
From videos I watched, the big issue is them losing their market position. They took a big hit when Apple ditched them and made their own chips. Now they’re losing to AMD and Nvidia in the server space. Their newest desktop chips are under-performing. The consumer market is getting more competitive with Qualcomm joining the space and Nvidia/AMD preparing ARM chips. They made a lot of factories for producing chips but it sounds like they’re struggling to lock in a major buyer. Now they’re ejecting tens of thousands of employees in the next few months because they’re hemorrhaging money.
TL;DR they’re getting screwed from every front and either it will take them a long time to recover or they’re going to be left behind.
I hope they cling on and make somewhat of a comeback, or carve out a niche market, but I don’t feel sorry for them at all. The are guilty of shade monopolistic tactics.
As a nerdy consumer, I wouldn’t count Intel out. I remember when their Pentium 4’s ran hot and AMD started eating their lunch, then they launched the Core line up and were back on top. They get lazy when they’re not challenged.
That being said, historically, they haven’t done very well pivoting from their main business. Their GPU line up seems kind of ok but them trying to make mobile chips went nowhere.
Companies seem to have realized there’s real benefit to using ARM processors in laptops for the performance and battery life which is a direct threat to intel’s business.
So it’s intel’s ability to create when pressure is applied vs their inability to create products outside of their comfort zone.
I don’t count them out but it’s a steep climb.
I’ve got my eye on their stock just in case this looks like it might turn into something like Apple in the 90s.
It’s going to take a long while for them to come back especially since they plan on laying off a huge amount of their engineers.
From what I’ve heard, the main thing modern Intel really excels at is hardware video encoding.
Sounds about right. I was a die hard fan of Intel for years. I upgraded my PC this year and I picked AMD for the first time in my life. Looking at the scathing reviews and performance tables, it is an insane choice to pick Intel.
Apple probably didn’t move the needle, at least in any market Intel was actually in.
Intel’s deep woes began around 2016, when TSMC got ahead of them fab-wise and Intel stuck with in-house. Not a little ahead, years ahead and mostly a branding exercise to assert equivalence (“Intel 7” was just 10nm rebranded, and on the current 3nm front, TSMCs 3nm is over 50% more dense than Intel’s claimed “Intel 3”.).
At roughly the same time AMD did Zen, coming out of a long bad microarchitectural design.
Intel basically invested on trying to branch out in unproven directions rather than focusing on actually salvaging their core business. Intel partners were given huge budgets to try Intel’s wacky ideas no one asked for and burdened Intel CPUs with trying to have a built in FPGA or HPC fabric or phase change memory sticks. They thought if they could make a rack of cpu sockets, memory, and I/O that could be freely reassociated they would have a gold mine, despite no one really wanting that (software does fine with traditional setup).
Then to just utterly drive things home, NVIDIA comes and every IT budget is busy throwing every last dollar they have at GPUs with as little as possible spared for enabling components, like CPUs.
The hit wasn’t Apple leaving them. That was a small part of their business. The failure was getting in on mobile when they had the chance. They could have diversified and they didn’t, so when AMD came to eat their lunch, they had no fallback and now way to catch up.