> Through our voluntary early retirement and separation offerings, we are more than halfway to our workforce reduction target of approximately 15,000 by the end of the year. We still have difficult decisions to make and will notify impacted employees in the middle of October.
Gonna be the finest engine you've seen since the industrial revolution. Grease those gears, guys, we're shedding a head count of no less than 15,000 to keep this baby going. And that's just this year.
Man this is sad. My read is that they’re throwing in the towel and they’re going to milk their x86 duopoly and government subsidies through a steady, managed decline into irrelevance.
IBM may not be the world leader any more in a number of ways, but that doesn't mean they're not relevant to all of their customers. So maybe the x86 will just limp along, but it's still doing pretty well. By the end of the 80s, the RISC guys were going to dethrone the CISC monsters. It's taken them decades to get this far.
> A key priority for Intel Foundry is to increase our capital efficiency. <...> Now that we have completed our transition to EUV, it’s time to shift from a period of accelerated investment to a more normalized cadence of node development and a more flexible and efficient capital plan.
That is, they no longer see a way and will no longer try to turn money into real innovation, at least as far as chip manufacturing is concerned.
After a few nails in its coffin, a Chinese co. will acquire it, and then the West will wonder how they could let such foundational tech be lost to a competitor nation.
And, if this, in fact, is the strategy, perhaps the government should decline to provide the subsidies and instead reallocate the money to younger hungrier companies. The subsidies are supposed to be to maintain long-term American competitiveness, but to me it's fairly clear that Intel is not going to provide that even with the government money.
They have 125,000 employees and 13B in revenue. TSMC, Nvidia, and AMD combined (fab, GPU, CPU) have around 88,000 employees on 710B in revenue. Intel may honestly have far more headcount than they need.
Intel also have or had a wide variety of side businesses - compute sticks and NUCs, NICs (WiFi, Ethernet, optics), datacenter SSDs, and probably other things I'm forgetting.
Their strategy is to focus on 18A by H1 of next year, which will achieve parity with TSMC on process again. Then they figure the fab business will work itself out since everyone buying chips wants an alternative to TSMC that is competitive. Even if 18A slipped to H2 of next year that is when TSMC 2nm is expected to enter volume manufacturing so they would still achieve parity.
18A was already rolling down the tracks. Either it'll be great or it won't. But if it is, Intel needs to be poised and willing to make the investments to capitalize on it.
Instead what we're getting with this message is "we want to save 10 billion and everything that isn't 18A go-to-production is on the chopping block".
Maybe instead of cutting to hit arbitrary financial performance numbers that they set for themselves in the hopes of impressing investors, they could explain to the investors why 18A is such a game changer and how Intel will capitalize on it to regain their crown.
Intel is a dog. It needs to be burnt and rebuilt from the ashes at this point. Too much legacy bloat in the org. Would be nice if my local police force went through this sort of thing every once in a while.
I have a lot of hope for Intel getting back in the x86 ring with real contendors. Lunar Lake is looking incredible (the MSI Claw with it looks like a stunning system), Arrow Lake ought to be solid.
I am a little curious to see where Intel goes with data-center chips. They have been expensive and hot, and the many-small-core offerings at least finds efficiency again. Otherwise it's less clear to me what coming up has promise, and gee, it sure seems like Nvidia and AMD both are super focused on that massive data center market.
One thing that was super interesting in this message was what Amazon want's Intel's 18A for. It's not a CPU, they want it for AI fabric? Interesting seeing the switches be the highest demand. Switch chips are normally quite big, yes? Given how much likelier defects are as size increases, that's going to be a hard test - where-as AMD for example has lots of small CCD's it can stack on a interposer. But also Intel has some fantastic advanced packaging that maybe makes them an ideal partner here - maybe EIMB bridges to PHY or on-package optics stuff, what's grown up from integrated Omni-Path (although not Omni-Path itself, that got sold off already). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...
Altera has been known but its so sad. They bought them less than a decade ago for $13B and did nothing with it. They really got themselves into a great position for Heterogeneous computing and then just did nothing.
It's depressing. This should be an age of new hardware, with near-memory computing and flexible architecture. Instead it's GPUs for the foreseeable future, Nvidia has a near monopoly, AMD seems uninterested (despite also owning Xilinx), and Intel's throwing in the towel.
I wanted to prototype a systolic array coupled with a DRAM slice to hold the weight matrix, but there's not even DRAM blocks distributed on any of the FPGAs I saw. I guess Xilinx has HBM but still not quite what I wanted.
They tried a lot of things with Altera and failed. The real problem is the price they paid (it was more than $13B). At the time they bought it, Altera had net revenues of $0.5B. They simply paid too much to ever recoup the expense.
> Our AI investments—including continued leadership of the AI PC category, our strong position with AI in data center
I had a lot of hope that Pat Gelsinger being an engineer would lead Intel to a revival. But this is total delusion. Intel isn't even a remote player in AI.
If they can't admit the dire situation that Intel is in, having missed the AI boat almost entirely and even managed to fall behind Apple somehow, they aren't going to find a way back.
They have nothing to offer over Nvidia for AI. They have nothing to offer over TSMC when it comes to their fab aside from being a US based alternative (and taking billions from taxpayers). x86 has nothing new to offer; their insane moves with AVX have fragmented the platform terribly. It's not even easy to ship high performance x86 code these days.
Looks like all this is, is an announcement that they're going to fire a lot of people soon to make their financials look good while the ship continues to sink.
Readit News
Cool, new strategy?!
> Through our voluntary early retirement and separation offerings, we are more than halfway to our workforce reduction target of approximately 15,000 by the end of the year. We still have difficult decisions to make and will notify impacted employees in the middle of October.
Oh right.
What other expectations do you have of Intel?
The amount of engine metaphors I could toss into this discussion are endless.
But we'll still want everyone back in office in Q1 25
Deleted Comment
> A key priority for Intel Foundry is to increase our capital efficiency. <...> Now that we have completed our transition to EUV, it’s time to shift from a period of accelerated investment to a more normalized cadence of node development and a more flexible and efficient capital plan.
That is, they no longer see a way and will no longer try to turn money into real innovation, at least as far as chip manufacturing is concerned.
That would be outright blocked under any number (other than 0) of "national security interests" type of thing.
When did our corporate leadership become so dumb and predictable?
it seems you're a 0 off.
Instead what we're getting with this message is "we want to save 10 billion and everything that isn't 18A go-to-production is on the chopping block".
Maybe instead of cutting to hit arbitrary financial performance numbers that they set for themselves in the hopes of impressing investors, they could explain to the investors why 18A is such a game changer and how Intel will capitalize on it to regain their crown.
I am a little curious to see where Intel goes with data-center chips. They have been expensive and hot, and the many-small-core offerings at least finds efficiency again. Otherwise it's less clear to me what coming up has promise, and gee, it sure seems like Nvidia and AMD both are super focused on that massive data center market.
One thing that was super interesting in this message was what Amazon want's Intel's 18A for. It's not a CPU, they want it for AI fabric? Interesting seeing the switches be the highest demand. Switch chips are normally quite big, yes? Given how much likelier defects are as size increases, that's going to be a hard test - where-as AMD for example has lots of small CCD's it can stack on a interposer. But also Intel has some fantastic advanced packaging that maybe makes them an ideal partner here - maybe EIMB bridges to PHY or on-package optics stuff, what's grown up from integrated Omni-Path (although not Omni-Path itself, that got sold off already). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...
- Intel’s divesting from Altera;
- Intel seems to be eschewing the consumer device/computer market for more B2B custom collaborations, e.g. with AWS and hinted later on.
A lot of retrenchment from Intel. Once Foundry’s no longer embarrassing to Intel, though, what’s their plan for anticipating the future?
I wanted to prototype a systolic array coupled with a DRAM slice to hold the weight matrix, but there's not even DRAM blocks distributed on any of the FPGAs I saw. I guess Xilinx has HBM but still not quite what I wanted.
That's been in the works since last year.
https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fp...
Deleted Comment
I had a lot of hope that Pat Gelsinger being an engineer would lead Intel to a revival. But this is total delusion. Intel isn't even a remote player in AI.
If they can't admit the dire situation that Intel is in, having missed the AI boat almost entirely and even managed to fall behind Apple somehow, they aren't going to find a way back.
They have nothing to offer over Nvidia for AI. They have nothing to offer over TSMC when it comes to their fab aside from being a US based alternative (and taking billions from taxpayers). x86 has nothing new to offer; their insane moves with AVX have fragmented the platform terribly. It's not even easy to ship high performance x86 code these days.
Looks like all this is, is an announcement that they're going to fire a lot of people soon to make their financials look good while the ship continues to sink.