Yeah they paved the road, but it's a surprise that it lead to many good destinations.
It feels like the whole magnificent seven thing and the the way they are holding up an overvalued stock market is driving some desperate decision-making. Like 12 more billion dollars for XAI to buy more Nvidia GPUs does XAI have any revenue at all?
- google ai-maxxed and wiping the floor after a slow start
- apple owning the smartphone space right as desktops are becoming genuinely irrelevant
- microsoft owning the corporate space right as local and on-site is becoming genuinely irrelevant
- nvidia building gigashovels for the gold rush
- meta... well, we'll see how the 'superintelligence' turns out. meta is the weakest bet of the bunch.
- aws... doing cloud stuff, i guess. also not a clear story.
if anyone got lucky, its zuck. between vr, metaverse, and now his thick-rimmed goggles he appears to be genuinely clueless, riding the waves of his facebook moonshot.
the mag7 are gonna be called the giga7 by 2030.
you think the stocks are overheated? you haven't seen nothing. what we call a 'bubble' today, will appear to have been a gentle ramp-up for the real bubble that's waiting for us in 2030.
the printing will continue, btw. and the debt will hit $100 trillion by 2030. and the US will be even more powerful than previously thought possible.
long pax americana, long orange fool, long whoever succeeds him, long the deep state.
But to be serious: Intel creates software too (compilers for example). Nvidia does provide software too. Its also nice to sell licenses.
It _is_ a hype bubble but it is also an S-curve. Intel has missed the AI boat so far, if they are trying to catch up, I would encourage them to try. Building marginally better x86 chips might not cut it anymore.
Maybe they mean the more vram needed for agentic AI? but then the sane thing to say would be that theyll offer more compute for AI.
its just an unhinged thing for a chip manufacturer to say.
1) Context memory requirements scale quadratically with length. 2) "Agentic" AI requires a shittonne of context IME. Like a horrifying amount. Tool definitions alone can add up to thousands upon thousands of tokens, plus schemas and a lot of 'back and forth' context use between tool(s). If you just import a moderately complicated OpenAPI/Swagger schema and use it "as is" you will probably run into the hundreds of thousands of tokens within a few tool calls. 3) Finally, compute actually isn't the bottleneck, its memory bandwidth.
There is a massive opportunity for someone to snipe nvidia for inference at least. Inference is becoming pretty 'standardized' at least with the current state of play. If someone can come along with a cheaper GPU with a lot of VRAM and a lot of memory bandwidth, NVidia's moat is far less software wise than it is for CUDA as a whole. I think AMD are very close to reaching that FWIW.
I suspect training and R&D will remain more in NVidias sphere but if Intel got its act together there is definitely room for competition here.
Is this just marketing?
software tools are essential to driving chip adoption; it's one reason why Nvidia got ahead (CUDA)
And besides I think you can probably guess that AI is probably the most hardware oriented the industry has been in decades
There's like 10 that pay alot, actually hiring, and have remote work available.
But I can (at least for now) wfh for the most part.
So, Amazon, Apple, ... are close to collapse?
As for Apple, I do love their hardware, but the software side has seen better days.
Unfortunately, you do have a point there. We let companies grow way, way too large - not only does any potential competition just about zero chance to rise against effectively infinite cash coffers, but it also removes any incentive to improve when the moat is so large that one doesn't have to care about anything...
Market reactions are typically neutral to RTO announcements, which confounds some analysts who imagine that RTO adds some kind of value. However, studies have repeatedly shown that while the short-term impact of RTO is neutral these companies typically fair worse than peer companies over longer timeframes. To make it worse for the analysts, similar studies have also shown that companies which do embrace remote first work have outsized returns. Some estimates show that fully WFH organizations bring in about 7.5% higher annual returns on average than peer organizations that RTO.
Leaders continue to ignore the ever growing piles of evidence in favor of those analysts "common sense", and forget that "common sense" is just a laymans term for what scientists refer to as "making shit up."
Those same executives are most tempted to fall into this trap during times of duress, because being perceived as "doing something" is more important than long term impact on share price.
Some companies don't see an appreciable difference in performance between those that can easily find work elsewhere and those who are otherwise unemployable. For those companies RTO is a great, though immoral, way to lower headcount without triggering the WARN act.
I’d also hoped that some major semiconductor company would NOT embrace AI, just so they could differentiate themselves: “Our shit may be too slow for the Terminator to use, but it was designed by and for humans to use as air-gapped spreadsheet running machines with USB-key sneakernet email.”
Given that there is a growing backlash towards LLMs by the general public (not just one writers’ guild), that might sell some stock.
As the excellent series Chernobyl put it (in the words crafted by a writer, not an actual scientist) "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth" and at some point someone is going to have to pay all of those debts.
1: Here I'm focusing on Anglosphere/largely US and UK societies, as a monolingual American that's all I can effectively comment on.
2: 'this will make you more productive/more efficient/more creative' whatever
- Allow industry to consolidate to a tiny group of winners, or just one winner
- Turn a blind eye to anticompetitive behavior in the marketplace
- Protect the uncompetitive winner from innovative global competitors
- Bail it out because national security depends on it
It's funny because we don't have socialism, government doesn't 'own' heavy industries, but at the same time the major firms will obviously never be allowed to fail on national security grounds.
Aren't layoffs a version of that? Are we seeing any evidence that folks who have been let go from Intel have resulted in spin-offs and startups?
I know at least one person who went to work at Nvidia from Intel but that is neither of those things.
> Return to office in September
So 15% reduction now and another stealth reduction in September
> we plan to end the year with a global workforce of about 75,000 employees as a result of workforce reductions and attrition
so it looks like the explicit reduction might be lower, but accounting for people leaving on their own, the final amount of employees should be ~75k
This is a company that declined to supply chips for the iPhone because they didn't think the margins would be good enough. Consider how much that one decision has favored competitors. And that's just one bad decision of countless.
Some mutterings were heard about the definition of insanity ...
So far as the firings concentrate on all the ancillary stuff that Intel shouldn't have gotten into in the first place, it's positive.
A colleague of mine said it felt like working for the mafia. I think that's a pretty apt description.
Extremely sad. What's the justification for ignoring ARM / RISC-V?
But the main reason to focus on x86 is that it has 47 years of existing software built for it, and with the high end mostly still on it, more gets made every day.
The answer for your question can be: because somebody didn't put enough effort / attention to make it work
Is it true? I dont know, but can be
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
In terms of implementations, obviously arch matters a lot in terms of the "established" software ecosystems, but if you're writing some software and need to hit a performance target no arch has a particular advantage solely because of its architectural implementation.
The only reason why I even still have an x86 PC is to play videogames. For all other purposes I’ve got ARM machines.
<1%? 1%? 2%?
Apple's M4 Max owns AMDs top consumer CPU (Ryzen 9 9900X3D) in both, single and multi-core workloads, while consuming a fraction of power that the AMD chip does.
The year-on-year performance improvements on Apple's ARM chips are just insane. If it really was so simple, then why haven't Intel and AMD pulled their heads out of their asses in the last 5 years and re-designed their cores from the ground up?
What they do notice is vastly improved performance, longer battery life, the fact that the CPU fan doesn't come on if you just move your mouse, etc. That's because there are some big differences at the hardware level that Intel has so far not addressed. Which is why ARM for Windows laptops is a thing multiple manufacturers are trying to get off the ground.
I have an M4 Max laptop. I don't think Intel currently ships something that comes even close to this thing. I don't think anybody does. And clearly they all want to. AMD comes decently close. Nvidia is of course king of GPUs and perpetually rumored to get into the (ARM based) system on a chip market. But their attempt to buy ARM failed and it seems they are more focused on AI. Either way, they haven't really launched much of interest yet. AMD actually cornered the market for game consoles. Steam Deck, XBox, and Playstation have in common that they get their chips from AMD (not Intel or Nvidia). But most Windows laptops continue to kind of suck in terms of energy usage and performance per watt.
RISC-V is inevitable.
Intel will simply miss the train, and go under.
Unlike Intel, AMD isn't clueless. After Zen6, it will likely release good RISC-V chips with some sort of x86 acceleration for unprivileged code as selling point, remaining relevant and securing themselves market share during the (inevitable) transition.
Granted, ISA is less crucial than it used to be, but there's still a lot of x86 binaries in the world.
Depends on what you do.
Gaming PC = x86
Work laptop = x86
So AMD or Intel. "Switch to Mac" means ripping out the whole MS management stack. Or keep/move to 365 and Intune but tune it to Mac. Or keep 365 but move management to Jamf. Can be done ofc, but it's a process.
That's how I still see it. Maybe I'm out of touch :)
Surely that's not the only advantage?
Not but really, yes it is doable but takes time and hiring new admins or re-train.
Yes if you are company of 20 people go buy Macs and GSuite.
[1] https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Very-poor-Linux-supp...
Disclaimer: I own a netbook and spent a very long time researching getting it to work with Linux
Did they end up getting any German/EU money to build that cutting edge foundry? EU's chip strategy seems to be in shambles, and they took their eyes off the ball since the end of the Covid chip crisis.
[0] https://www.gov.pl/web/cyfryzacja/inwestycja-intela-w-polsce...
1: https://www.threads.com/@masiosare/post/C-SoS6qJbU6?hl=en
That wasn't a prayer. It was a quote from Proverbs, a collection of pithy sayings and life advice. Other quotes from it include "above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it" and "pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall". It's literally a book of, well, proverbs. Many are religious, but plenty of others are general life advice.
Imagine doing what all your competitors are doing while being one of the least desirable big tech companies to work for.
What could possibly go wrong? /s
Good thing you have very few of them because your industry is way too capital intensive to start a competitor now.
I am generally curious what capitalisms proposed solution to this problem is.
Cutting this to four may give compound effect, but IMO this is focusing on the symptoms instead of the real causes like for example people being territorial or obsessed about their promo package. Convoluted managerial chain is often just a weapon to achieve your hidden agenda.
There are too many companies out there that started with a good product/service - and then bureaucrats took over. Smart companies minimize layers of management, and manager headcount. Bad companies don't - and they eventually are unable to grow/innovate. A shockingly high percentage of corporate America is parasitic management.
Intel happens to be in an industry that moves so fast that this doesn't work for long, relatively.
It seems like the author of this article requires another reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brimelow
I don't even know who my boss actually is now.
A small startup can just go bankrupt if it fails, but in a big company (like Intel) there can be more collateral damage
> Looking further ahead, we’re developing Intel 14A as a foundry node from the ground up in close partnership with large external customers. This is essential to designing a process that meets specific customer requirements and enables us to address a broader segment of the market. Going forward, our investment in Intel 14A will be based on confirmed customer commitments. There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense. We will build what our customers need, when they need it, and earn their trust through consistent execution.
are these large external customers in the room with us right now?
SMT, implemented well, can significantly increase execution unit usage in the face of memory latency.
Now, if it makes business sense to have cpus with such a major functionality that is only useful for render farms and other compute clusters is another question.
But instead let's discuss some turnaround suggestions, starting with:
(1) Acquiring at least one or two AI chip technology startups. (Lightmatter, Cerebrus, etc)
(2) Assembling an AI hardware research team focused on efficient AI + software compatibility with existing AI accelerator libraries.
(3) Investing heavily in the PyTorch team at Intel.
Intel spent $2B on Habana and it went nowhere. Too bad, the hardware seemed promising enough.
when did they get bailed out before? And don't say CHIPS because Intel only actually received $2B to build fabs - and that's only a tenth of the cost of building its new fab in Ohio. That's not a bailout.
There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."
Just keep smooth talking everyone into cost reductions and make arbitrary decisions to make it feel like you're actually in charge.
It is precisely because data comes out murkily, with a lag - and the effects of changes have a lag as well- that managing the Federal Reserve can't by reduced to a simple process. It is an art done by humans- one where 'general trust in the institution' is the single most important variable of the last 40 years.
Many economists point out that the Fed's policies serve the 1% above all.
Heck you can get a Nobel Prize based on your Fed chairmanship, then tank the economy.
One pundit observes that the Fed is an example of "burn the village to save the village" as (rarely) an underemployed firefighter-turned-arsonist will do. Extreme perspective for sure.
In the era of Big Data, can't real-time data and policy co-exist?
That’s not my assessment. Why do you say that?
The most important thing a CEO brings is relationships. LLMs can't do that (yet).
Post script: there's still a chance that LLMs replace CEOs due to LLMs being easier for the board to influence/control.
chatGPT always sounds confident, and it's not hard for it to calculate the lowest possible option and take it.
Yes given those are jobs where hallucination is a feature not a bug
The letter seemed contradictory: be a factory, but innovate on AI. Is AI actually smart? Human brains use the power of a dim incandescent light bulb, why does AI require so much power, that the processing chips overheat?
Sure, selected tasks can be done orders of magnitude faster, but do we, for example, really need that kind of output, like pi to a trillion digits? Or AI controlling stock market trading? How much liquidity is necessary for traders other than huge funds?
Skill issue. I can outpace your LLM if I get the same tolerances.
Yes an AI will come up with more insight than many management people as many people state in this thread that a LLM can do their job. Its a mistake to assume that's what they are paid for however.
It was do or die a decade or two ago to catch up in that market, but they didn’t bother paying sufficient salaries and focusing on the growing markets, so here they are.
> On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel's XScale PXA mobile processor assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell the XScale PXA business to Marvell Technology Group for an estimated $600 million in cash and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The move was intended to permit Intel to focus its resources on its core x86 and server businesses.
So they got out of the world’s biggest new market 1 year before iphone came out.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/rise-decline-intel-2024-1...
> 2007 - Apple launches the iPhone, helping kick off a mobile phone boom that Intel mostly missed. Under CEO Paul Otellini, Intel turned down a deal to make iPhone processors because it did not stand to profit enough from the arrangement. Instead, Apple used chips based on designs from Arm Holdings , whose tech now dominates the mobile market.
The leaders from 20 years ago made the bed that Intel now has to sleep in.
But speaking of combining forces, Microsoft will be more likely to pick them up in a fire sale now, which I think would be best for all involved. Then you’re a couple of M&As away with first Dell and then Oracle.
Then they will select a champion to fight the Pentavirate at The Meadows!!
Nice “So I Married an Axe Murderer” reference!
It appears that Lip-Bu used an LLM to help write this memo. Also: 15% of staff with an arbitrary 50% management? Boy, he must have been up all night working on that one! Maybe everyone can have an ice cream social when they return- bring your own.
Because they all studied the same MBA programs.
I thought about this a lot over the years.
I saw something that piqued my interest last year though, and kind've helped connect the dots. I was on a cruise, and most of the ship was available to guests. One day, one room was cordoned off to an invite-only meeting. The windows weren't blocked, but on the screen was a presentation about AI investments, number of jobs saved (reduced), and etc.
I found one of the attendants later during the voyage and chatted her up. She was head of HR in some big company, and the meeting was supposed to be private. But it contained a lot more than just spreadsheets about AI investments. There was homework and whatnot, but the attendees weren't all from a single company. It was "direction setting". I don't think it was Intel (topic under discussion) but certainly some loosely related tech industry.
I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
So, back to your question:
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time?
Because they're told to.
Wonder if it’s “not illegal” if it’s done in international waters.
I didn't ask. As I understand it, it's less about legality and more about plausible deniability; on a "party boat" with plenty of other public people to make it cheaper than renting a whole boat, plus the week for the cruise and time to relax -- seems plausible that these people "just happened" to book the same boat at the same time at peak tourist season and decide to throw a "private party". I should have asked more questions, but there were plenty of other people to chat up.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...
Doing more with less is warning sign like “curve ahead”.
And the agentic focus is not forward-thinking.
Our present is to a small degree agentic, and that will increase, but that won’t sustain because (1) latency and (2) technological evolution.
It’s more likely that everyone will have their own AI on-board which will have all of the data it needs in local storage that gets regular updates. Evolving to current agentic flows won’t help with that type of processing.
all the big tech companies used to have no-poach agreements to not hire from each other, such that they didnt have to compete on price
Best example is the rental market and the landlords all using the same price setting "algorithm"
Meanwhile, a lot of laborers in our profession have fallen for their propaganda of markets and so-called meritocracy, not realizing they have more in common with the fruit picker than their common exploiter.
Class warfare is real. It's time tech workers wake up to that fact and start fighting back instead of letting oligarchs walk over them.
More than half raised their hands immediately. It was a Philosophy 101 class.
Meanwhile most people in "rich" countries will have to reach mid-career status to even reach $100k.
Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
If you're a farmer in the market for a $200k combine harvester, sales guys will be happy to put you in a $200-a-night hotel so you can attend their invite-only presentation on how their latest models give you 10% more yield with 30% lower labour cost thanks to the new auto-steer mechanism and six-stage threshing mechanism. And they'll hand-hold you through all the calculations to write a business case.
It's possible!
Considering how much the sales division of many medium and large companies dictates the direction of the whole company, "sales meeting" and "business collusion" is often the same thing.
I've worked for FAR too many companies that have lost $60million in support and maintenance on a sub-par product that sales managed to sell for $30million gross... and then the sales division (and upper management) leave the company for something better. What a surprise.
You can rest assured that bribery in that way is extremely common in the West.
used to be a sales engineer at an ISP. one you've heard of. we had account execs straight up offer "referral agent fees" to the network managers we were selling to.
bandwith is mostly the same -- 10Gbps here is more or less 10Gbps elsewhere -- so you gotta set yourself apart. and it worked. constantly.
Or better yet: a "summit"
It's all the more reason why labor needs to start being more aggressive and properly work together.
That is, it's true that they tried to do it and the software exists. But it doesn't matter, because nobody is actually motivated to join the cartel (defecting is more profitable) and they have no enforcement for it.
That and if you don't rent out a property for long and leave it unused, it'll literally rot because nobody is there to notice squatters or water leaks or etc.
You must not have been renting apartments in any significant market during the 2010's
They all work with restructuring companies!! So, I hope that tells you how smart they are :-)
"When McKinsey Comes to Town" is an interesting read that covers a lot of this. It's worse than I thought.
Labor categorization can be thought of in a more useful framework -- Category 1: Builders who don't know it yet. These people have the cognitive capability, work ethic, and problem-solving skills to create value independently, but they've been socialized to believe employment is the only viable path, or have yet to take the leap of starting "their own thing". They're retained and developed because they're essentially entrepreneurs who haven't discovered their own agency yet. Category 2: Consumers masquerading as producers. They extract more value than they create - through entitlement, minimal effort, or misaligned incentives. They're often the loudest about "worker rights" precisely because they have the most to lose from merit-based evaluation.
The pattern you're seeing (layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus) targets Category 2 while trying to retain Category 1. The economy can no longer subsidize low-value labor.
The interesting dynamic: Category 2 workers are often most vocal about collective action because individual performance evaluation threatens their position. Category 1 workers are more likely to focus on skill development and value creation, and frankly are the most to benefit from the evolution of AI tooling.
"Labor solidarity" messaging often fails to resonate with the most effective and productive workers.
Every year we get wealthier and wealthier as a society, so that means we are capable of less and labor has to take the haircut while capital keeps on as is.
We could subsidize 10s of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people to do literally nothing and not be any worse off than we were 15 years ago
> "Labor solidarity" messaging often fails to resonate with the most effective and productive workers.
That's what the rentier class wants you to think. It's convenient if everyone is a temporarily embarrassed CEO, makes them much happier to act against their own class interests.
Low-performers extract value from high-performers at every organizational level. A developer carrying three mediocre teammates isn't being manipulated by "the rentier class" when they prefer merit-based evaluation.
Your argument requires believing that productive workers can't accurately assess their own interests.
No conspiracy theories are needed. Boards are incestious, most board members aren’t all that bright or forward looking, they have a lot of imposter syndrome about it, they worry about getting important trends wrong, and so they follow the herd. CEOs follow the board, companies follow the CEO, voila, everybody does the same thing at the same time.
And yes, I think there is an opportunity to zig while everyone else is zagging.
Also: major institutional investors (such as VCs) demand a seat on the board and then send their B team to actually sit through the board meetings of their less key investments. Those board members follow the investor company’s line, spreading it to lots of companies at once.
We then informed corporate of the numbers, and someone would quickly is how to price the gas that day.
I thought it was about keeping the price competitive. No, I was told, it’s the exact opposite.
We would gladly sell the gas at cost, if not less, because the real money came from coffee and other merch.
But the state had a minimum mark up law. We had to charge the customers more.
The idea was to protect small gas stations from corporate chains, but gas is a commodity. Everyone pays about the same.
I later found out that the reason I was reason I was recording the competitors prices was to make sure they were following the minimum markup laws, so we could sue them if they werent.
They made money by selling coffee, which costs less than a cent, for five bucks.
The incentives to collude are powerful.
> Because they're told to.
This is largely it.
Consultants rule the earth!
I’ve been involved on layoff planning. It can be very cloak and dagger. But you never involve competitors. Ever.
Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street.
But yes, together, the Big 3 are the single largest shareholder in 88% of SP500 companies.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politic...
Most of these businesses are feeling the same pressures and experiencing the same problems... in silence. Eventually one of their competitors breaks (because they are forced to due to economic realities, etc) and starts making necessary moves (layoffs, efficiency improvements, etc). The rest follow-suit, breathing a collective sigh of relief that they weren't the first to make all the headlines.
But there are CEOs who define an industry. Those are not easily swayed by big capital.
Simple. These companies need enough 'fitness' in order to survive and thrive. No one has the power to fight against the Nature’s Wille—survival of the fittest. They have to obey, especially when faced with the ruthless, life-and-death competition of the commercial world.
P.S. Hoping this comment doesn’t get downvoted too much and end up dead, not surviving.
By the way, standing as workers, I wish they wouldn't resort to layoffs as the usual route when facing challenges, but sadly, excel competence is required to make it happen, and not many have it.
Many other companies “Wall Street” trades shares in did not have a problem with setting long term goals for compensation, why did Intel?
Why would Wall St want Intel’s market cap graph to look like this:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/intel/marketcap/
Rather than this:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tsmc/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/nvidia/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/qualcomm/marketcap/
It makes no sense to scapegoat Wall Street, when the SP500 was a rocketship (does Wall Street not get the blame for that, if they are apparently responsible for Intel’s demise?)
People complain about lack of US manufacturing, and short term thinking and its all heavily tied to a couple fundamental truths about companies in the USA.
Corporate raiding and looting is a core part of the fiance sector. There are a half dozen methods of asset stripping used against literally all successful businesses here. Much of this 'short term thinking' is either the business trying to make itself look less appealing, or the actual act of handing the money over directly via stock buybacks or dividends (which are at least taxed) rather than investing in the company.
'Investors' in the USA have absolutely zero interest in the actual companies they are investing in, because it is to easy to divest of those investments or sell/merge the resulting companies. The goal largely seems to be to create the illusion of success at any cost. If that means destroying the company to get a 10% return next month, then that's fine, because they will then turn around and sell it before it collapses.
At least some of this could be solve via strong incentives against short term investing. Say an actual value tax (rather than a capital gains tax) that penalizes holdings less than a couple years. A 25% value tax applied for holdings less than a year that decreases to 0 over some longer time-frame, say 5 years. Yes this would completely destroy the business model of quite a number of wall street firms, and maybe even make it hard for businesses to raise capital. But, it would put a lot more focus on buying businesses that actually have long term prospects, allow those businesses to invest in capital intensive manufacturing operations and a laundry list of other things most people agree is a good idea. It would also likely return stock prices to realistic future return numbers because investing in companies with obviously inflated market caps would become a lot more risky.
American markets have largely consolidated into oligopolies, where just a handful of very large companies operate. It's extremely easy for them to wink at each other and then raise prices/layoff workers, etc.
This is also being accelerated by the unregulated software market that lets the corporations hide behind algorithms, as we recently saw with realty. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/nx-s1-5087586/realpage-rent-l...
The end of ZIRP was the bat signal to corporate America to begin layoffs.
Broadly speaking though, I think you’re experiencing confirmation bias to some degree. If you only look at companies that are on the struggle bus, then you only see a limited number of levers that management has (RIF, delay CapEx, etc). Other struggling companies that don’t take evasive maneuvers go out of business and we don’t hear the story.
I've pitched that a couple times in my career. The difficulty is that, in a lot of cases, your future business prospects are genuinely correlated with the future prospects of other businesses.
Intel is going to sell fewer CPUs in the next 3 years if other businesses aren't hiring and expanding as quickly as they did during COVID. And I think there's a pretty good reason to think that Intel's revenues will actually shrink as a result.
That limits how much zig they can do while others zag.
I think they should do what you say but shareholders are looking for the quickest, best returns now, not in a few years time.
You'll find the same names appearing over and over again.
The reason all companies seem to do the same thing at the same time is that their boards are all the same people giving the same order to all their companies' ceo's at the same time.
A sensible, sober CEO would still need a lot of political capital to push back against a boardroom that's hounding them to jump on the latest hype train. You certainly won't get that from a CEO who just took that position a few months ago.
A sensible, sober boardroom that doesn't push their execs to jump on the hype train would need to answer to angry shareholders. It's almost certain that >50% will support the latest fad and would vote out a board that they perceive as being behind the times.
That's where startups and privately owned companies get their natural advantage of being able to go against the grain.
Prior to this, they could just get low interest loans to do whatever financial engineering they wanted to demonstrate growth and get their bag. That is over, now the only way to get the bag is firing people.
So, it's not just that they're all in a capitalist polycule, but is is that they all just live in the same bubble of irrational short term reasoning.
I think there's a lot of "monkey see, monkey do" going on in the corporate world.
Also, shareholders and all that.
Intel doesn't have a meme-stock/vibe-stock thing going on at the moment (think Elon and getting to Mars by 2030, or robotaxis everywhere by the end of 2025 etc).
So I guess downsizing seems to be the only potential appeal for them right now.
Disclaimer: I know nothing
Eventually some companies will start scooping talent up, and everybody will zig :)
Historically Apple has done this - Steve Jobs noted at one point that the absolute last thing they were going to do during a recession was to cut R&D, because that was what was going to let them capitalize once the recession was over.
Left as an exercise for the reader is assessing Apple’s financial performance as relates to the rest of the industry, with extra credit for comparing that to the ongoing guidance from the finance industry set.
Looking at Andy Grove's wikpedia page it could be that the above reflects his focus on "strategic inflection points"
So Intel used to do it once, but now, not so much
Ah, see? Prosperity has not come to your business because you have not made the proper offerings to the new AI gods.
Most hired executives play not to lose rather than playing to win; the nature of their compensation packages incentivizes it, where big wins accrue largely to diffuse shareholders while big losses mean they lose their fat executive pay package. It takes a founder-CEO to play to win, but if the hired CEO had that skillset and that inclination, they'd be a founder rather than a CEO.
The problem is that multiple layoffs are terrible for morale and basically obliterate the motivation and mood of the remaining workers.
Reorgs are another common pattern of incompetent management that introduce chaos without bringing net positive value.
This is similar shit that happened in the '80's, '90's, and '00s and was captured culturally by Dilbert and Office Space.
Those who ignore the lessons of the past will make history rhyme once again.
imagine this approach fails and you have to go to your board? They’re going to flat you alive and call you an idiot who should’ve done what everyone else was doing since it was obvious
but if you do what everyone else is doing? Well the macro changed obviously!
EDIT: I’ve worked at big tech companies where this was a meme, where the execs would do whatever meta/google did but six months later
Now why all the countries start just warring and killing all at the same time... now that is weird. I guess the best bet is same people who own all the business, stop paying all the bribes at once or something and all the power people go nuts
Conspiracy theory: business leaders don't do as much as they should, so they imitate each others moves to justify their existence on the position. With a side effect of cluelessly influencing lives of thousands, but that's a repeated scheme in the overall history of civilization
It's the companies with no ideas who have to cut costs.
What would you do when you're bleeding money?
They're just trying to get the job done and copying your partner's homework can save time, even if your partner didn't get the right answer or also just copied their partner.
CEOs, on average, don't know what they're doing any more than anyone in most other professions. They just happen to be born part of the ruling class.
AI was a wonderful scapegoat. If it wasn't AI it'd be the economy or some other excuse. No one wants to admit mismanagement and overspending, but of course a business is going to take advantage of a discount. It's just a shame that wasn't a discount on property or hardware, it was on people.
Some other smaller companies are swept up in this because they follow moves from the larger companies. Everyone is trying to copy the leader, right? Everyone is asking "what's that big successful company do? That's what we need to do." So you have this absolutely horrible job hiring process in tech too as a result of that. You have excess and toxicity because people are trying to make something work that doesn't make sense for their business.
What do you think the whole $100 million bonuses for these AI people (which so far have been rumors) is going to do? It'll cause idiots elsewhere to go overpay and over hire because of FOMO...and once again more layoffs in the future.
And on and on we have these cycles.
So the "market" demands sacrifice basically and there is cover when everyone else is doing it. You can be contrarian but your stock may get punished. Intel may not have a good plan anyway. The reason the market demands sacrifice is likely because of predicted unfavorable economic headwinds (etc... so signs of recession or what not). These predictions could be wrong though. Companies do constantly realign though, product initiatives fail etc...
Particularly in tech and tech adjacent, there's a belief that doing what everyone else is doing is safe. It's the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" approach but for corporate decision making.
If other companies return to office, you return to office. They're successful, so they must have good reasons - no need to investigate or come up with your own reasons. If other companies eliminate QA, you eliminate QA.
Most tech companies are just following what the big dogs are doing, but worse and stupider. When it backfires, nobody cares.
Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
Just like any bubble bursting, that is the best time for any well-positioned company to invest in that market. The problem with Intel is that they are far from well positioned. AMD and nVidia each have about a quarter of the employees that Intel has and TSMC has about half. Intel over-invested in employment so the over-employment bubble bursting will hit them hard. Their best bet is to refocus their current employees, but they might not be the right mix, so they may need to have even larger layoffs, while simultaneously highering new employees in pertinent fields.
For Nvidia that isn't actually the case at all. It's not electricity per se which is important, it is heat. The new(er) GB200s require liquid cooling because they put out so much heat. Virtually 0 datacentres have liquid cooling to each rack, so rollout has been extremely slow (basically have to build new datacentres from scratch).
The problem Apple has got is they are far, far too reliant on TSMC. It may be worth Apple buying Intel just as an insurance policy. It would be less than 3% of their market cap.
If TSMC goes down/decides not to serve Apple in the future (eg NVidia buying up literally all of the capacity because their products are so much more valuable than Apples)/some other TSMC related black swan event, Apple is close to toast. They get 70-80% of revenue from hardware and could end up with no hardware to sell. Every device they have cannot work without TSMC.
A great book on this btw is Apple in China by Patrick McGee.
Nvidia on the other hand need the latest tech to squeeze the most performance out of their chips for AI companies.
So if TSMC went down tomorrow, you can't exactly phone Intel up and say "hi we need 1billion m-series chips a year, starting in a few weeks?"
If they owned it they could start doing that in the background.
I bought INTC to hold for 10-20 years based on the promise of long term investment in domestic manufacturing. I didn't care if they took a decade to battle back. Seeing them sell of the foundry business would be enough for me to cut my losses before the titanic hits the ocean floor. They'd be a walking corpse at that point IMO.
Honestly, good. AMD is amazing for laptop/desktop and server now, but may flop like Intel did. Always good with competition. But I need a new CPU and right now AMD is king.
Phone only plebs need not apply.
Not sure if you intentionally picked the all time high headcount, but you did.
Intel's headcount was relatively stable between 100-110k people between 2014 and 2021 [0]. So, getting down to 75k is definitely still a major reduction, but 2022 was also an outlier. A lot of companies overhired during Covid, and Intel particularly was the beneficiary of WFH pulling in a lot of corporate spending on laptops etc.
[0] https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/intel-2025-q1-financial...
It's just such a massive difference. You can tell Lip-Bu spends his weekends playing golf while Jensen is checking out the latest model from Huggingface.
You can't buy passion or genuine interest in what you're doing.
Intel is in trouble, it's not clear how or if they'll be able to get out of the hole they're in. Their only saving grace is natsec concerns and even that may not be enough to save them. I was hoping Gelsinger would be able to do it, but it was too late.
Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
I stopped playing video games after a stint at a popular video game company, where I realized that the purpose of the company was basically to trap teenagers in a box, like rats, and watch them try to get out.
Flight sims are about all I can be bothered to invest in, time-wise these days. Oh, and I love my retro- collection. I frequently find myself MAME'ing out, just for the nostalgia. Crazy Climber and Scramble and Juno First and Defender, in case you're wondering.
Synthesizers, on the other hand - I just can't get enough.
Not all nerds are gamers. Some of us are knob tweakers too.
I honestly wish I had more time to play different games.
I'm quite fascinated by the huge overlap of flight enthusiasts and computer nerds. Any discussion on HN even tangentially involving flight will have at least one thread discussing details of aviation. Why planes, and not cars or coffee machines or urban planning?
You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless.
It's not a "bizarre reference to agentic AI" - it's saying (as you point out) that Intel can't compete in the training (i.e. "compile time") race, but they can in the inference (i.e. "run time") race, which is likely where more spending is going to be anyway in the near/medium future as the scaling hype looks like a dead end.
For those of us who cannot tell, what are the clues?
1. "Q2 2025 revenue above guidance" - Start with fake good news about good Q2 results. Fake because it's baselining on "guidance", which is already low since Wall Street knows Intel is in deep trouble. MBA/Finance types often cherry-pick some (semi-cooked) top-level finance number for good news, even though the whole email is about admitting the company is in deep trouble, announcing layoffs, etc.
2. "We are making hard but necessary decisions to streamline the organization..." - not hard for him, but the people losing their jobs!
3. "We are also on track to implement our return-to-office policy in September" - contract this with later comments about improving culture and empowering engineers!
4. "drive organizational effectiveness and transform our culture" - large companies with ~100k employees don't change their culture, but CEOs love to pretend so. To CEOs, transforming culture usually means making some reporting line changes, directing HR to do do some surveys and "listening sessions", firing teams with low NPS scores and thus forcing people to up their scores on subsequent surveys, and then a few months later declaring victory.
5. "We will eliminate bureaucracy and empower engineers to innovate with greater speed and focus." - for example, by forcing them back to the office? Nothing in this emil indicates actual empowerment.
6. "Strategic Pillars of Growth" - typical MBA speak.
7. "We remain deeply committed to investing in the U.S." ... "To that end, we are further slowing construction in Ohio" - great example of executive double-speak.
8. If you actually parse what this is saying, it's essentially about layoffs, cost-cutting, stopping some investment projects, RTO, and "doubling down" on existing projects like 18A and 14A. No trace of innovation in organizational culture, product design, etc.
9. "I have instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me before tape-out. This discipline will improve our execution and reduce development costs." - we are improving culture by stating that only the MBA-speak CEO can make good decisions about chip designs, the other 74,999 people are idiots who slow down execution and improve costs!
10. If you look at the "Refine our AI Strategy", it's short and only has obvious things, like "will concentrate our efforts on areas we can disrupt and differentiate, like inference and agentic AI". There is no information here, because of course Intel already lost to Nvidia on training/GPUs, so training isn't a good focus area. But it's pretty shocking that in 2025 there is no actual ideas for what Intel could do in the AI space!
Even in this letter he says he's going to be reviewing major chip designs before tape out. JFC...
If they can't catch up, which seems somewhat likely at this point, they will have to sell their fab business (if anyone wants it) and focus on just designing CPUs, similar to AMD.
One would hope they would figure out if a design was a good fit for the company well before tapeout. Ideally before they were done with the rtl.
>I’ve directed our teams to define next-generation product families with clean and simple architectures
always make me skeptical. It's said as if teams were focusing on dirty & complicated architectures without a leader to push them in a different direction. It's a meaningless statement at the end of the day.
In theory this this sounds great. Based on the descriptions I've heard of how Intel works internally, my confidence in this happening is about 0.12%.
So for such a statement to be coming from the new Intel CEO could indicate a radical turnaround in Intel's approach to processor development. Or, alternatively, maybe he just hasn't met the company yet.
2022 saw a significant decline, with the market capitalization falling to approximately $100-110 billion, which when adjusted for inflation, is $104-114.5 billion in 2023 dollars.
In late 2023 and early 2024, Intel's market capitalization recovered and was generally in the range of $180 billion to $200 billion.
But since then it has gone down a lot, and today it is $98.7 billion, which is $93.2 billion in 2023 dollars.
My personal experience with working for such companies is that it leads to a death spiral, but I recognize my sample size is small.
I'm arguing that if you're on a downward trajectory and your primary strategy is layoffs and cutting expenses, rather than investing, you're not going to recover.
When will people see that technology and AI is not the solution to save the world, but one that is actively killing it? One that is actively driving us apart and radicalizing us?
As a kid, I grew up loving sci fi, games, and tech. It is a shame these same dreams drive so us to destroy our planet and civilization. Our curiosity is going to be our end
As the zen parable says, the man is flying by on a horse and is asked “where are you going?”, to which he replies, “i dont know, ask the horse!”
I hope people can self reflect and challenge themselves on if what they believe is really right. The only way is for us to open our views
(Removed comment about it being AI-generated since that might be unfair.)
To achieve that, business owners do as I mentioned and more. Not out of maliciousness or spite, but out of necessity
This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
The issues with MBAs and bean counters are that they rarely have intuition about which is which, and only investing in areas a company is already successful in is rarely a winning long term strategy.
“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.”
I’m watching this happen at my current company. It’s tragic, and so obvious.
Worth to compare xiaomi extensive product offering and apple. Even Amazon and Google trying to be more inventive.
Almost always exactly that number. Almost always dismissing any product in that period because they’re not normalized yet, and then once they’re normalized then they’re boring and not considered.
It is impossible for Apple to be considered innovative by their standards.
(Hell, sometimes it's the same product, just in different eras, like the Newton vs the iPad.)
A ground-breaking, industry-changing innovation like the iPhone is like lightning in a bottle. It would be insane to think Apple can capture lightning every 5 years like clockwork.
I'll also say one of the best things Apple did in recent years was in-house their CPUs.
The iWatch or iPad are probably better examples, as their technological prerequisites existed for quite a while before Apple packed them.
And I’d point out that they’re all fundamentally different physical interfacing methods.
Apple’s last non-physical major products were iTunes (more of a legal / licensing product than a technical one) and the App Store (basically driven by iPhone deployment and lock-in).
Has Apple ever released a groundbreaking non-physical/interface product? MacOS? Final Cut Pro?
The issue is that engineering leadership failed to execute on the process technology roadmap.
Agree with the first sentence, strongly disagree with the second.
Intel's problems over the past 15 or so years certainly wasn't that they had cut away all the "fat" and then into the "muscle and bone". It was they had gotten too fat and directionless. Indeed, one of the quotes from the letter regarding their foundry business is that they invested in the wrong things: "Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand. In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized. We must correct our course." If they had ruthlessly prioritized before (which may have included getting rid of ill-fated initiatives earlier) they would most likely be in a better position today.
This is a very tiring narrative. People keep complaining about Paul Ottelini missing the iPhone, but his performance at Intel was better than the next 3 CEOs, 2 of which were engineers with roots at Intel.
Google CEO is a McKinsey guy.
He bit off more than he could chew with X and trump but this is purely weak leadership and engineering being stuck in a local maximum.
Seems almost perfect for the way he likes to run companies.
Everyone under 30 reading this dreck on their iPhone with a 5G radio: What the fuck is a Wintel?
Mobile in general (SoCs, CPUs, etc) has been a major growth sector for a decade and a half. Between IoT and actual mobiles (smartphones) it's a tens of billions of units a year market. Intel has not only avoided this market but actively dropped out by selling off any offerings they had in it. They've retreated to their less than a billion units moved per year CPU market to the exclusion of nearly everything else. It's been insane to watch.
Intel is doomed. They're going to Motorola themselves. Hopefully any useful pieces end up with someone with a clue. Unfortunately the fire sale will mean a ton of negotiation for all of the long term licenses around stuff like x86. What a shit show of their own making.
Some of it is reacting to the general environment. Some of it also may be opportunism to do the thing you wanted to do anyway, like laying off people. It's easier to explain when everyone else is already doing it.
Apart from that, there is also the factor of career risk. If you are senior management and you do whatever everyone else is currently doing, and it doesn't work, then you can point to the fact that everyone else was wrong too, and you will probably be fine. But if you go against the herd, and you are wrong, you look like an idiot, and you are probably getting fired.
Of course, the truly great CEOs have the stomach to keep making bold moves. But the people who can do that - and be right most of the time - are truly rare. Those are the Jobs and Bezoses of the world, and they were able to make moves that no one else could even see at that moment.
He said only that they will attempt to squeeze more money from the existing Granite Rapids, which uses CPU cores that are obsolete in comparison with AMD Zen 5 and in comparison with Intel's own CPU cores from consumer products.
The emphasis for future products has shifted mainly on laptops (Panther Lake) and less importantly on desktops (Nova Lake).
It is true that lately the only profitable division of Intel has been the one selling "client" CPUs, mainly for laptops, but instead of making any attempt to revitalize the other divisions it seems that the new CEO only wants to abandon those markets.
I do not care much about Intel CPUs, because they did not show anything interesting on their public roadmap, but I would have been interested to see better GPUs. I have recently bought an Arc B580, for the reason that while all the other vendors have reduced their FP64 performance, Intel has increased it, matching or exceeding in performance per dollar the GPUs that could still be bought 5 years ago (like Radeon VII) for which no replacement has existed at other vendors.
> "If we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading-edge nodes on a go-forward basis," a statement by Intel in a 10Q filing with the SEC reads. "In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects."
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/in...
It's like Coinbase pointing out the customers may not be able to withdraw their cash. Public companies are required by law to make statements like these.
But for most tech companies, yeah -- when money isn't free (or cheaper) there is no business model.
Software companies are bloated with people who...don't make software.
Twitter was never an attractive business and isn't one now, unless the goal is to have control over the hype cycle.
That kind of hard work means we can get more work done with fewer people, so we're excited today to announce across-the-board layoffs to accelerate the 'fewer people' process.
We've always said that Craptech is like a family, so just think of yourself as that estranged uncle that nobody talks to anymor, and who doesn't have a job."
java-man•1d ago
viraptor•1d ago
> We will become a faster, more agile and more vibrant company. We will eliminate bureaucracy and empower engineers to innovate with greater speed and focus.
It really is a weird PR piece rather than serious communication.
samrus•1d ago
93po•23h ago
viraptor•22h ago
93po•8h ago
wmf•1d ago
I-M-S•1d ago
supportengineer•1d ago
It takes an overwhelmingly powerful personality to get anything done, despite the fact there are billions of capable people on this planet.
geodel•1d ago
8note•23h ago
scarface_74•1d ago
Compare that to Jobs who after he announced the iPhone and started using it, saw how much the screen scratched and went back to the drawing board and had then re-engineer it before it shipped six months later. He even announced they were doing it.
Better yet, the infamous “what does Mobile Me suppose to do?…Then why the f%%% doesn’t it do that?”.
You noticed that Cook didn’t wear the Vision Pro once during the introduction? Compare that to Jobs introductions of the iPhone and the iPad.
Rumors are, that Cook doesn’t even use a Mac day to day.
On the other hand, Jobs didn’t use a Mac after his return until OS X was released. He was also definitely not a fan of the Motorola phone with built in iTunes that he introduced on stage.
Can you imagine Cook writing an open letter on Apple.com like “Thoughts on Music” or “Thoughts on Flash”?
samrus•1d ago
This has to be false. Your telling me the CEO of apple is using windows 11? With ads in the start menu? Thatd be hilarious
wmf•1d ago
readthenotes1•1d ago
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/17/tim-cook-didnt-say-that...
scarface_74•1d ago
But the CEO of Google did use a BlackBerry years after Android was introduced.
samrus•1d ago
supportengineer•1d ago
cyberax•1d ago
_verandaguy•1d ago
wnevets•1d ago
jiggawatts•1d ago
There’s nothing more fun than a carefully thought out cohesive design that takes into account all business and technical constraints being randomly “improved” by a too-busy senior manager who’s been “off the tools” for decades.
“You should switch to NoSQL.” — a nearly verbatim quote from a meeting just last week. No justification or elaboration, just… abandon a relational database platform with two decades of built up business value on a whim.
“Rejoice! For you have been managed!”
mattkevan•1d ago
In the end, we’d build in ‘breakpoints’ - things that we knew they’d pick up on and want to change so they felt like they’d had some input without damaging anything important. This worked very well.
wnevets•1d ago
fsloth•1d ago
wmf•1d ago
sys_64738•23h ago
stefan_•1d ago
kgeist•1d ago
Each time, the CEO would give tons of small, random suggestions, then disappear for several days before reviewing again. He'd request more tweaks, then repeat the cycle. Because of all this back and forth, even simple tasks that should've taken a couple of days ended up dragging on for a month.
In the end, my friend got so frustrated with the whole process that he just quit.
anal_reactor•19h ago
0cf8612b2e1e•1d ago
Given the number of “major” chips Intel produces-weren’t they already being presented to the C-Suite? What stealth chips were being sold without high level involvement?
sys_64738•23h ago
knifie_spoonie•23h ago
So, he's going to wait until the tape out stage of a major new chip design before he reviews it? Bold move.
dboreham•19h ago