On Thursday, Intel announced the layoff of 15,000 workers. It's quarterly report was "dissappointing." Intel revenue is not growing anywhere near what the company needs or projected. "We must fundamentally change the way we operate," said Gelsinger, the company's CEO. The company needs to cut $10 Billion (with a "B") from its bottom line just to make the quarter rational. Instead of a profit, the company posted a $1.6 Billion (yep) dollar loss. The company plans to simplify its portfolio and suspend its stock dividend. I'm sure that will have the stockholders flocking to buy Intel. Those of us who have watched the company cede markets that were once its bread and butter are not surprised.
Is it cooked? Well, its big and big things are usually hard to kill. But, it has happened before.
Having been part of the PC business - granted only from the consumer side - more or less since its inception I find it interesting how they have all more or less followed the model for how businesses are born, grow, become stagnant and then decrepit. But in this case it is in such a compressed time frame. I really wish some business historian/economist would take on the challenge of writing the Rise and Fall of the PC/Chip business. I think e are ready to face the music.
Step One: Intel is spinning off the foundry business to an independent subsidiary - maybe they can make Qualcomm's chips for them...
Yesterday's Windows Weekly focused a lot on the future of Intel - will it go under; will it be split between design amd manufacture (foundry services); etc. What was disconcerting is the discussion of the future of Qualcomm and WOA given the Lunar Lake announcement. Thurrott believes that Lunar Lake may be :good enough" to unseat Snapdragon and its inherent incompatabilities. Why suffer software/driver/accessory incompatabilities for maybe 15-20% better battery life?
So, if you are looking at buying a Snapdragon 5g, are you buying into a dead end? ☹️
I wonder if the government will step in for domestic chip production reasons and take over the company -- similar to GM a few years back.
I've been following early time on Lunar Lake and my gut tells me the press may be falling for Intel's hype machine. Here's the headline at WCCFTECH:
Now, read the article, and here are the "Fantastic" battery results:
"The best part about Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is its battery life. In testing by the renowned YouTuber Dave2D, the laptop managed to provide over eight hours in medium workloads and up to 11 hours and 31 minutes in light ones, showing that the 70 Whr battery is indeed doing its part in bringing in battery timings that are superior to Apple's MacBook Air M3 and even AMD's Hawk Point laptops such as ASUS's Zenbook S16."
Let that sink in for a minute - lowest end Lunar Lake spec, 70 Whr battery, and 8 hours "medium load" and 11:31 "Light load." According to Tom Warren at tomsguide.com the higher spec Snapdragon Elite, with OLED and a 53Whr battery, did the light load at 12:10, and Ed Bott's' tests on the lower spec (48Whr) Snapdragon Plu averaged 10 hours per day on his regualr workload, and Rubino confirmed that 10 hour average in his "real world" usage tests.
So, with 40% more battery Lunar Lake is delivering 2 hours less battery life...hmmmmm...
This commentary at thurrott.com was a real eye-opener:
This coming month may be a real watershed for Intel. Will the board seriously consider spinning off the foundary buisness? Will Lunar Lake come to the rescue (vis a vis Qualcomm) or will the specter of Nvidia, AMD, and others joining the ARM freight train swamp Intel?
The Pentium 4 was terrible. The Core 2 duo rocked. All they have to do is halt the train and focus. They'll soon release an awesome cpu. Sometimes companies get lazy.
Buying AMD right now.
And here's the news article:
Intel’s massive job cuts come after it received $8.5 billion in taxpayer money (msn.com)
Turns out that they are swimming in dough...
My question is where does the CHIPS and Science Act ('22) figure into this. IIRC, Intel was one of.. or the... biggest beneficiary of the $50B (was it?) allocated. They should be swimming in dough and new hires...
Wow. I wonder what's going to happen with that Intel fabrication plant they were going to build out here in my neck of the woods.
Ed Bott wrote a follow up to his earlier review of the lowest SKU Surface Pro 11 Plus which is his daily driver, again positing that Intel is on the ropes, and that was BEFORE Intel announced the 15,000 employee layoff :
Gotta love the Intel CEO's memo that it hurts him to tell them but not as much as it will hurt them - PS - his annual salary is $16.9m - ONLY a 46% increase from 2022 to 2023 (latest numbers):
https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2024/03/28/intel-ceo-gelsinger-2023-compensation.html
It definitely is in the short term. I can't imagine buying their desktop processors at this point--given the, uh, recent issues.
Maybe when they are able to get their foundries within the US up and running?