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).
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.