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).

  • jj4211@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    Also they did that netburst stuff that was a bad idea, and let AMD beat them to the punch on integrated memory controller… So many scenarios where Intel flubbed the “big change”.

    However they have frequently been good on the little stuff. For a long time they had a fab advantage (and have messed that up for a decade now). There are decent at dotting the "I"s and crossing the ts, including broader software and firmware enablement.

    Nowadays the only software people care about is CUDA and AMD actually has cash to take care of a lot of little things. Intel kept trying to make side efforts happen, like having a rack of memory and processors freely associated in ways no one ever asked for, phase change memory which while cool, was an awkward in-between NAND and SDRAM, various FPGA efforts which they never really figured out the actual point, putting an infiniband variant in the processor package in an awkward way that just made things worse, and a ton of weird accelerator architectures they abandoned within a couple years each time…

    • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 days ago

      There are decent at dotting the "I"s and crossing the ts, including broader software and firmware enablement.

      Yes, and that really puts the Raptor Lake failures in perspective. It undermined this whole argument that Intel stuff is rock solid even if it’s not the best in other ways. Xeon stuff was affected, too, and given how lucrative the server market is, that may have been the biggest mistake Intel has made.