The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
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."
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
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?
> I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
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.
>Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
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.
Now I'm trying to remember what that tech company (I think pretty small, startup-sized ish but large enough that they would normally have at least one person in sales) that just straight up decided not to have a sales department was
A "sales meeting", intended in a loose sense, can cause involuntary and/or uncoordinated pseudo-collusion because it aligns various parties: a level playing field of information (e.g. convincing important managers of many companies that their strategy needs more AI and less actual experts) leads to similar forecasts and similar decisions.
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.
It is, but cui bono. I know that local software companies in my city had meetings coordinating the local software dev wage level. There's no reason to assume something like this isn't going on at a larger scale too.
Nonsense. There's nothing generally illegal about vendor sponsored junkets for private industry attendees. Some companies have policies against their own employees attending such events but that's not a legal issue.
Here's an alternative take, but along similar lines. Many high level business leaders in large established companies loathe taking risks and sticking their necks out. Instead, they hire a management consulting company (think McKinsey) who do a study and make recommendations that said executive can take to the other execs, or to the board. If it works, executive takes credit. If not, it was those darn consultants. The thing is, the consultants are giving companies the same advice. In fact, it is even stronger when "competitor A and B" are already doing "strategy C" and they are ahead of you. I've seen this movie many times...
The Capital Order lays out an argument that austerity measures are ultimately labor suppression, not necessary. Of course, that’s true of many pieces of policy wisdom: they start from an assumed good. In this case, the assumed good is the current winners should remain the winners despite, well, losing.
I agree that this definitely is labor suppression, but it has a real cause: the end of low interest rates and inflation. They can no longer "grow" their way into their 6 month bonuses, so they basically have to trim fat and if they all collude on doing it, it _can_ work. If they dont all collude, someone gets cheap engine for growth.
That real world activity is my underlying belief, but we shouldnt ignore that the free money era ended quickly and for these execs do continue to earn their ungainly bonuses, they have to cut costs. Modern texhnology/capitalism allows them to make the same choices without directing collusion.
Best example is the rental market and the landlords all using the same price setting "algorithm"
Either the tax treatment has an effect or it doesn't. If the market doesn't get better we can at the very least say that the whole tax thing was overstated.
High interest rates benefit creditors and hurt debtors. These companies hold a lot of cash equivalent assets (think bonds, etc). Their balance sheets only grew. High interest rates haven't hurt these companies, but instead fattened them up. They are hoarding cash! Imagine earning high interest on that cash.
I can’t imagine anyone colluding with LBT, unless they told him it was collusion to fool him, and he fell for it.
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.
Management consulting is a big one. It's illegal for companies to all tell each other their prices and costs. What isn't illegal? Apparently each firm hiring McKinsey who will tell you what your competitors costs and prices are because they have "industry knowledge". They'll then share your information too and then everyone can largely figure out how they can set prices above their marginal costs with some nice padding. It's probably still illegal, but it's what these firms do.
> 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.
No, because jurisdiction of the competition authority will still be based on the market activity (or place of registration etc.) of the companies colluding, not on the physical location of the colluding/anti-competitive activity itself.
While such conspirative theatre may decrease the risks of discovery, collusions usually come to light by one participant notifying the authority in exchange for immunity or decreased fines.
Given the whole Realpage stuff for price fixing, it would not surprise me if there are similar things going on at the csuite layer with various business consultants and backroom discussions. They're all rich assholes, and naturally gravitate to the same venues.
It's all the more reason why labor needs to start being more aggressive and properly work together.
There is no "Realpage stuff for price fixing" that resulted in any price fixing.
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.
im not sure what context youre replying in, but plenty of building managers joined the real page cartel, and successfully raise prices across the board.
That's demand going up with fixed supply because the US made it illegal to build anything. In a market where supply goes up instead (Austin or Minneapolis) their algorithm is going to tell them to lower prices instead.
The claim is that by not renting out some of your properties you can raise rent on the rest. But the way you make money from properties is by renting them, so if everyone else is refusing to do it then you get the rents from anyone who shows up.
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 never have to let any properties rot, you intentionally delay filling them to achieve the desired number of vacancies at any given time. And yes in principle competition is king but in practice it's for suckers.
As someone else said, it was probably a sales meeting or other corporate training. You’re off in conspiracy theory land.
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.
Yes, it's most likely they saw some kind of sales meeting, but collusion also happens often. I watched a documentary not long ago about how smart they are about it now. For groceries the major chains just all report each product's price to the same company which then tells them how much they can mark up their products without being undercut. Is it illegal, almost assuredly yes. Is there anybody enforcing this anymore? No.
Lol. When I was a kid I worked at a gas station. My job was to arrive before the station opemed, drive around the neighborhood, and make a note of the gas price at our competitors.
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 were probably having you do this so that they could price the gas as high as possible while still in line with the neighborhood going price. Why sell at 200 while the best next price nearby is 260? Sell at 250.
Or at least save such remark for when somebody actually makes the statement. Don't just assume that people on this forum are too stupid to understand the difference.
The capitalist class has always conspired to keep labor down.
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.
Unions are counterweight for HR. You want coops to get at least some pooled capital. Otherwise you need investors or debt and end up in the same place you started.
I’d say this applies to a far broader group; I’ll never forget when a professor asked for a show of hands on the first day of class: “how many of you will have more than 10 million?”
More than half raised their hands immediately. It was a Philosophy 101 class.
$10 million sounds like peanuts in an information environment where discussion is dominated by talk of billionnaires. When I was growing up, I remember Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's wealth being touted as a measly $40 billion or something. Today the numbers tossed around for Bezos, Musk etc are minds numbingly massive, 200 to 300 billion.
Meanwhile most people in "rich" countries will have to reach mid-career status to even reach $100k.
Business leaders operate in overlapping networks. Conferences, advisory boards, private equity connections, etc. When McKinsey or Bain gives similar advice to 50 companies, you get synchronized behavior that looks coordinated.
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.
> 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.
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.
The "rentier class" framing assumes all value extraction happens at the top, but /r/overemployed will demonstrate that is false.
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.
> The economy can no longer subsidize low-value labor
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
Intel’s situation in 2025 is not comparable to the rest of big tech. They have lost technical leadership, bled market share, and started losing a ton of money in a hugely capital-intensive business. They are actually in need of major triage to survive, not just hopping on a belt-tightening trend among still-massively-profitable software companies.
One would hope HN commenters would be able to comprehend a microchip seller not having compelling products to sell means it needs to shrink its business, rather than jump to childish “CEO bad guy” sentiments.
Shrinking the business is a hard decision to reverse, and one should definitely read into the word "needs" from "needs to shrink" before doing it. People tend to take any claim that a gigantic company "needs" to downsize with a gigantic grain of salt, because we were born with pattern recognition.
The business had already shrunk 10+ years ago when it was evident mobile devices were the future and Intel had no product offering for them.
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.
> 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.
It's almost as if CEOs aren't really that smart or creative, got to their position through mostly politics, and look externally for clues about what to do.
CEOs like to brag about how AI is going to replace skilled workers. Yet, it should be obvious to anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.
Just keep smooth talking everyone into cost reductions and make arbitrary decisions to make it feel like you're actually in charge.
They make that claim because what CEOs write down could easily be written by a Markov Model, nevermind an LLM. If that was the primary value a CEO brought to the company they'd be right.
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.
because 95% of the time it's "follow the herd" BS + always defer to the lowest cost. the rest is schmoozing, making people feel comfortable, sounding confident, and working the soft skills.
chatGPT always sounds confident, and it's not hard for it to calculate the lowest possible option and take it.
Wouldn't that be funny to see an AI bot replace the CEO of something like Boeing, and then see the company turn around in positive moves? Feed an LLM all of the business data that a CEO would have and then ask it to make the same decisions the CEO would be expected to make. Since layoffs would be the trend online for LLMs to train on, would they come up with slop that looks like they too follow the trends? If companies are willing to replace dev with AI, why are boards not looking at all of the C-suite offices with the same mindset?
Because the agonizing is part of their job. That's called "animal spirits" / managing expectations. The expectation of future interest rates is nearly as important as what they actually are.
Interest rates work with different lags in different parts of the economy. The current hiking cycle basically only just has taken its full effect (think when people refinance debt and when they delay this.)
If data was reliable, instant, and comprehensive, this might work. Of course, under those circumstances socialism or communism would probably work out even better.
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.
Wallstreet would be screwed by this. You can't take away the gambling aspect and big wins because then you are left with a pre-80s style market where dividends and steady income matter over 'line goes up next quarter'. The current market would HATE that.
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?
It seems to me that a large percentage of jobs exist just to exist, and that they use their continued existence to justify their continued existence. I wonder how much the world would keep spinning if 90% of people were laid off. Maybe we'll find out if AI is adopted widely enough...
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?
it helps to be able to type at 70wpm. My high school typing class in the 70s actually did wonders for my career as keyboards and screens took over. As far as processors go- that's a subject best discussed offline with a beer in hand.
That's what AI does. Makes power and politics have even more of a premium vs say learning, intelligence and hard work. Connections, wealth and power. It is almost ironic that our industry is inventing the thing that empowers the people that techies often find useless (as per the above comments) and dis-empowering themselves often shutting the door behind them.
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.
Its merely a personality contest, a sociological phenomenon. Humans band around (and more easily listen to) individuals bearing certain personality traits. These traits have very little to do with actual problem solving, and finding the most ideal path forward for an organization. Alot of times they go hand and hand but I'd wager, from the CEOs ive personally met, there are alot of them with just the charismatic set.
I don't think this is entirely fair. One analogy I like is boat racing. In boat races if you follow someone you're almost always going to do just as well as them. Take a dfferent path and you could get lucky, but just as likley you're going to hit a bad current and throw the whole race. So you follow the crowd and wait for oppritunities to take the lead instead of rolling dices. I don't think they're nessesarily doing anything wrong just because they don't want to do something super aggresive.
Because it's driven by investor/market sentiment. That's literally all. If your investors have ask you why you've not laid off 10% of your workforce due to AI efficiencies, when that's the prevailing sentiment, then you look incompetent. If in the middle of COVID the sentiment is remote work will drive more tech adoption/usage and money is very cheap then you have to start hiring as many engineers as possible otherwise you look like you're not a growth company or lack confidence. It doesn't matter if it doesn't increase your development cadence, that is not the point. The point is that "the market" is largely vibe based. Right now the vibe is AI companies are hot so as say the meta CEO you start burning a trillion dollars on GPUs, without anyone stopping to question why Facebook needs any more AI, or how it will make it ROI.
Remember that executives answer to the board of directors. The board's job is to make sure execs do things that make the company money, or in practical terms, "things the board thinks will make the company money".
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.
> 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."
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.
> There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag.
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.
You only need to look at board membership overlap between all companies (all companies, not just tech)
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.
There are CEOs and there are CEOs. My hunch is, most of them are just managers pushed out by investors, who have interests in multiple companies, maybe even multiple industries. That’s why they coordinated so easily.
But there are CEOs who define an industry. Those are not easily swayed by big capital.
Competition. If all your competitors are doing something that you want to do but know will piss off your employees, you can safely do it too and know that they don't have anywhere else to go. Most of these big tech companies operate in markets with huge barriers to entry and very differentiated skillsets; a new competitor isn't going to spring up overnight without some form of warning.
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.
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.
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time
It's like fashion, humans follow trends, almost always, and in the case of big companies, the CEOs are quite wealthy and that means the people they hangout with, the parties they attend, and the general circles they are part of, is pretty small (not that many people at that level of wealth), and so they're all mostly part of the same "clicks" that talk about and share the same ideas.
Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
Look at it like an economist, who sees everything as market, and the answer to both is: Yes. Fads are just market bubbles. Excess employees are sometimes an asset, regardless of their effectiveness. It gives value to the team manager and sometimes the company itself, and it prevents other companies from having access to those employees. It's not a very efficient tactic, so even a small amount of overemployment can be a bubble that quickly turns from an asset to a liability. What you end up with is employment bubbles at the trailing end of economic rises. They can collapse while the economy is still growing, just because the growth slowed down.
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.
All the layoffs and such have been going on for a bit and there's been more and more leading up to the end of the R&D tax credit. Their headcount has been planned for years.
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.
A video went viral a few years ago that showed that the majority of outstanding stock market shares are owned by big equity firms. And those firms, in turn, own large chunks of each other. And if you carry this recursion out a few iterations, the largest equity firm essentially owns everything.
The reason is always a secret coalition with a cool hand sign like the Illuminati.
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!!
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.
One theory that I saw earlier was that the industry is bloated, big tech companies executives knew that but they continued to hire anyway to make sure that the people they don't hire don't start competitors when there was funding, there is less funding now so that risk is no longer there so companies can reduce their size to their actual needs, but maybe that does not apply to intel since they seem to be really in a bad situation now.
It sounds cliche at this point. It is the focus on the next quarter, next year at best that drives a lot of this due to appeasing the great god of the shareholders.
I think they should do what you say but shareholders are looking for the quickest, best returns now, not in a few years time.
I have a recollection that Intel used to do this when Andy Grove was in charge. There was a fair amount of noise about them 'spending through the recession': building FABs and other plant so that when the recession ended they'd be in a great place to take advantage of the increased demand. Sadly, I can't recall exactly which depression this was about.
Looking at Andy Grove's wikpedia page it could be that the above reflects his focus on "strategic inflection points"
My personal theory is that it is ultimately the same reason you see things like software engineers blindly using the same tech stacks, because most people, most of the time, aren't working off first principles.
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.
For counter argument sake, if a highly regarded company says: “we’re going in a hiring spree”, all of that available talent adds 50% to their comp ask.
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 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.
I think if it's not a collusion then it's concentration of wealth. CEOs are basically employees to the board, and the board is or is representing pretty much the same people in most major companies.
Cliché corporate leader herd mentality. In absence of leadership direction, do what everyone else is doing (and what the consultants recommend) including many rounds of layoffs and reorgs to simulate progress and achievement.
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.
While we often praise leadership for their decision making ability, the reality is most leaders aren't leaders, they're followers.
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.
Why does everyone hire McKinsey? So they keep their job. If you are CEO and go the board with a cost savings plan and layoffs you keep your job. You may not if you say we are going where the puck is. Lifestyle creep probably makes it very hard to envision taking this kind or risk.
eh it’s bc you’re never fired for making the same mistakes as everyone else
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
I tend to think all these business leaders are actually business larpers. They dress up as what they see other business people dressing up in, they lay off loads of people because they see other companies doing that, they send stupid letters like this out because they think that's what they're supposed to do while dressed up as a business leader. You get business larpers at every company, sometimes they happen to be good enough at the larping that people put them into actual leadership roles and then this sort of thing happens.
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 a herd mentality for both. AI may be the next big thing. And the old things need realignment.
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...
Most CEOs follow trends so as to not get criticized and fired. It’s the same in American football. The “book” says you do certain things under certain circumstances- 4th down and 5, you punt. Everyone drafting linemen, you do too. If you zig and others zag you get criticized on ESPN (CNBC For CEOs) and if it doesn’t work you get fired. Better to have a few years of 8-8 performance than risk it for a 14-2 season.
It’s not just the same things - they do the same things to similar degrees. They are reading from the same playbook (and have, mostly, the same investors).
These companies are members of WEF and owned by major investment funds. That's the likely source of these shenanigans. The rich just want to be richer and to hell with normal folks.
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.
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.
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?)
Various shareholders, or fund managers on behalf of shareholders. What difference does it make? It is still inconsistent to blame “Wall Street” for one company when the SP500 has plenty of examples of success.
Wall Street has more examples of failure than success. It's just that the returns from the successes outweigh the losses from the failures. They could be making decisions that are good for the SP500 but bad for Intel.
Its just capitalism, only 10 people are the top pyramid of owning everything.
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
As far as I can tell, the flow of cheap money stopped when inflation started. This means all their portfolios of free stocks inflating the market stopped. These people all live in a world of 6 months to profit, and thus the market forces at work mean for them to demonstrate anything for their next fleecing of shareholder value, they need to trim budgets.
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.
> why do all these business leaders all do the same
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.
These companies include the most valuable companies making record profits. They aren't struggling to survive. They are bowing to institutional investor demands to eek out another penny because the alternative is they get replaced by the board.
Fitness is a relative thing, especially when competing for limited resources, like institutional investor money. Everyone has to be prepared before it’s too late.
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.
Intel missed GPUs, missed ARM, missed ASICs, missed everything right under their nose for the last 15 years. This from Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" company, a company that in it's own past pivoted from commoditized RAM production to become the one that won the CPU race, a company perfectly positioned to win the next big cycle as the dominant leader in the industry.
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.
> 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.
It's happening at Apple right now. The hand picked successor to Steve was the one who could keep the ship running smoothly, not the one who pushed back with new radical product directions.
I don't disagree with you, but I'd argue the Apple Vision is (was) in that vein (and predictably unsuccessful). I'm also glad they're not charging ahead with AI at the rate everyone else seems to be.
I'll also say one of the best things Apple did in recent years was in-house their CPUs.
The iPhone was essentially enabled by (a) broadly deployed cellular networks, (b) touchscreens, (c) power efficient mobile chips, (d) battery technology.
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?
It's probably happening to ape right now as well. They haven't released interesting new hardware product like in more than 5 years. Apple vision is interesting but market validated not worth the money they asking.
Worth to compare xiaomi extensive product offering and apple. Even Amazon and Google trying to be more inventive.
You can go to any point in Apple’s history and you’ll find people saying the exact same sentence: they haven’t innovated anything in 5 years.
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.
Another innovation is their line of M-series chips. I'm typing this on an M1 Max and this is by far the best combination of industrial design and physical hardware that I have used over the past 20 years. I've had it for four years, three new generations of chips have come out since then and this thing chews through anything I throw at it.
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.
It's also easy to point to the failures as evidence, but both innovative and boring companies have failures...it's just that innovative cos have the occasional success that makes up for the rest.
(Hell, sometimes it's the same product, just in different eras, like the Newton vs the iPad.)
> 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.
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.
Heavily paraphrasing but I believe I remember Ed Catmul saying in his Pixar book having slogans like this are dangerous because you just say the thing and don’t actually do it.
> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over.
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.
You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless. Compare this to someone like Jensen, a nerd's nerd who gets up on stage with the latest GPU, can talk about new CUDA API's and goes deep on specs like memory bandwidth. He knows exactly who his customer is, and what kinds of workloads they run for AI.
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.
It's one reason why founders matter so much and why founder led companies often have better outcomes.
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.
Agree and I really appreciate your comment, as it wasn't immediately clear to me from reading the letter.
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.
As somebody who works at a large company that routinely uses McKinsey to "set strategy" and "operating model", phrases and actual ideas overlap 100%, even though we are in a completely different business, in a completely different geography.
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!
The heck would you know? LBT studied physics and did a masters in nuclear engineering at MIT, he then started but left a PhD in that subject at MIT. He's not some clueless management scrub.
Even in this letter he says he's going to be reviewing major chip designs before tape out. JFC...
If Jensen was that much of a nerd, he wouldn't be into AI grifting, but would be excited about games. He's into AI because he's a businessman, not a nerd.
If there's one thing I've learned in my 48 years of nerding out, it's that all of us are into games. If you're not into games, you're not a nerd. Seems simple.
I dunno. I can build a CPU from a bucket of transistors, design an ISA for it, microcode it, and write an OS for it in assembler. But games bore the shit out of me.
Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
The older I got, the more games just seemed like pointless wastes of time. Makes me sad to think back on how much time I wasted. I still fire up an old game or emulator out of nostalgia occasionally, but the time before I turn it off gets shorter and shorter.
I'm in my mid 50s and don't agree. Maybe they were for you, but I have many fond memories of games and gaming. There is a balance, of course, and maybe you spent way more time than I did, but even now I think they can be a great thing to do. All the fantasy/sci-fi reading I did? I kind of regret that time though. Definitely regret most of the time I spent just channel surfacing back in the "corded" TV days.
I honestly wish I had more time to play different games.
You ten years ago were not you today. I’ve played a ton of games when I was younger and I firmly believe at least some of them were helpful in life and it was passion for games that got me into IT and software engineering in the first place.
Same. I grew up with computers. I wrote games on my Oric like my life depended on it (well, it was because that was the only way to get any games on the Oric..)
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.
> Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
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?
Funnily enough there are multiple games where you do logic design now. Though if I had to recommend one game for you to try, it would have to be Factorio.
As a gamer, I'm really looking forward to how devs will integrate AI into future games. I want immersive NPCs that don't repeat the same lines over and over.
Another flipflop. Canceling the Germany fab, bringing SMT back.
> 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?
Sean! Hah, small world. It's great seeing you! If you're going to be in Vegas in a couple weeks, drop me an email (in my profile here) and let's say hi.
Intel was ~20k when I started in 1988. When we started to flirt with 100k in 1999~2004 there were so many senior people complaining what it would do to bonuses and raises and revenue… everyone started getting the executive bonus and stock options around this time, too, not just grade 7+, which added to the fear and greed. People were claiming Intel only had “5 years left” and more than a few smart people left. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I really think it was 20 years of stagnation and failure to take risks that landed them in such a fragile position to respond to disruption. Just weird looking back on the new-hire-a-phobia from 25 years ago.
Intel headcount in 2022 was 131,900. Intel’s projected headcount for 2025 is 75,000. Intel fired 43% of its staff over the course of 3 years (when approximating natural retirements at zero and assuming a stop in new employments).
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.
INTC was clearly inflated in 2022 - it rose up with all the COVID hype, so yes, it is misleading. It's like looking at Gamestop stock right when it was artificially boosted by Wallstreetbets, and saying "Look at its decline!"
And who did they fire? Everyone with longevity and experience. Makes sense from an accountant’s perspective. Those would be the people with the highest salaries. Doesn’t make sense from a technical perspective.
Intel is/was a Bureaucratic hell hole. The people with longevity and experience definitely needed to be on the chopping block. Time for some creative destruction over there, the longest tenured are the ones who set the culture and the culture was crap.
It's honestly impressive. Even during the major tech cuts of 2022-2023, I think many companies ended up about the same size or a even little larger over the course of a year, due to all the other hiring happening and the fact that the cuts may have partially overlapped with existing performance management anyway. 43% an incredible shrinkage for any company in such a short timescale.
Depending on how well AMD execute, this may be all too late. And if I am reading in between the line, I dont think Intel or specifically Lip-Bu understand much about Foundry business, and that is despite him being CEO of Cadence.
I am guessing Intel will give up on GPU as well.
Their Foundry is 3 - 4 years behind in terms of technical, volume and capacity. TSMC is aiming to do N2 next year in US, accelerating from previously expecting US Fabs to be 2 years behind Taiwan. Not only has TSMC be able to execute well, they manage to execute at speed beyond anyone thought was possible.
Somewhat along the line Server CPU market is finally cracked by AMD. In between 2022 - 2024 Intel's sales people managed to pull off some magic along with heavy discount, Intel managed to maintained 60 - 70% market share, at a cost of significant reduction of profits and revenue from Server sector. Current Zen 5 suggest AMD just broke the 50% market share and the trend will continue to increase. Zen 6 and Zen 6c is about to arrive. One of Intel's cash cow is no longer there. Just when they need cash flow to rejuvenate their Foundry side of business.
GPU burning cash, x86 losing business to ARM on PCs, Server market not competing well and nothing much on roadmap, foundry does not have any competitive advantage.
May be a chance for AMD to buy Intel in a few years time. There isn't any thing left with Intel.
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.
You're missing the point. Sure, they're going to just keep doing what they've always done, but this time they're going to do it HARDER and with 15% fewer people!
Admittedly, just because something hasn’t bourn fruit doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad plan. All they need is a major stumble by TSMC or AMD or some tailwinds themselves and they could start looking much better.
It wasn't a total collapse like some were expecting, they haven't really done much new however. Cutting some of the fat was a good idea but they might have gone a little too lean in places.
They didn't go down, but the lack of staff is starting to show in some areas. For example, clicking on certain links in their developer docs leads nowhere. There are also API issues, such as disappearing likes. Everything has its consequences.
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.
If they spin off the foundry it's very possible stockholders will end up having stock in both companies. If they sell it for cash that's another story.
If I were Nvidia, the last thing I’d want is a foundry. Much better to have multiple capital-intensive suitors—and governments!—bending over backwards for my business.
Apple aims to design its own modems and retain ownership of the intellectual property. Apple is not in the business of manufacturing. its not the same reason
Apple is mostly selling mobile devices, so power efficiency is very important. Which means they need cutting edge TSMC nodes. For Nvidia, being server based, power efficiency (electricity cost) is less a concern I believe.
That was definitely true when the iPhone first came out. I don't know if it's true now. Given the average age of an iPhone/iPad keeps going up and up I don't think 90% of consumers are particularly bothered about it. I certainly would doubt that they would lose market share over it if their power efficiency stagnated for a couple of years, at least on an 'iPhone 16e' style chip.
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.
I think you have it backwards. Because iOS/macOS can run fine on what Intel fabs can make right now, Apple is not totally dependent on TSMC. In the worst case scenario, they will simply buy all the capacity from Intel, they have enough cash to do so.
Nvidia on the other hand need the latest tech to squeeze the most performance out of their chips for AI companies.
But Intel don't manufacture any ARM mobile SoCs that would be suitable for iPhones and iPads? It's not just a case of "upload A18 design, press print". It is at least a year or two of getting the processes up and running and validated.
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.
> Across client and data center, I’ve directed our teams to define next-generation product families with clean and simple architectures, better cost structures and simplified SKU stacks. In addition, 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.
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.
That letter really does not inspire investor or employee confidence. Seems to be written to falsely bolster a sense of we-have-it-together-folks, but nothing seems to be a concrete plan to generate capital. So far, they announced lay-offs and discontinuation of several plants to save capital, rather than precisely pointing where are they signing new customers. Interesting times. We are seeing a new Kodak in the falling.
Intel is absolutely in a death spiral. Not much else to say. They are cutting cost with no real plan on growth if they are saying they won't invest in the foundry anymore. Foundry was a solid play by Pat, really their only play. Instead Intel seems set to lose whatever remaining relevance they have to their Arm, TSM, Nvidia, and AMD competitors which have a lead in both design and manufacturing a decade in the making.
Most big companies has done that at some point, why would it lead to a death spiral? Death spiral happens when you cut too late, so you are forced to cut but you are still running a deficit and just has to cut and cut and cut without thinking.
I'm not arguing that layoffs lead to a death spiral.
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.
Having been on board meetings - most people just follow the trends - honestly musk triggered this way back when he laid of twitter and nothing happened
I mean they also have a large number of people producing investment goods vs doing operations. If you cut the former it's gunna take quite a few years to see the effect.
Twitter was never an attractive business and isn't one now, unless the goal is to have control over the hype cycle.
No real mention of GPUs, instead they're "revitalizing the x86". Reading between the lines, my guess is that Arc is getting cancelled soon. (Don't spend it all in one place, NVDA shareholders.)
Besides no mention about GPUs, there was no mention about their future server CPUs.
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.
I almost get the feeling the only thing Intel thinks it has left in terms of value is the brand name itself; a blue sticker to put on consumer/business devices, nothing more. I also would have liked to see Intel continue to pursue its own GPU technology but the engineering culture required to keep that going might have died a long time ago, and the MBA vultures running Intel are only just now burying it for good.
>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.
But Intel got big on its dirty&complicated architecture, didn't they? There's a reason why their processors support more than 2000 different instructions. The only relatively "clean" parts of the architecture are the base 64-bit extensions, which came from AMD, and AES-NI, where the operations were already well-defined before Intel implemented them in hardware.
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.
Hypothetically what this means is that teams will now be able to design products that are designed for tomorrows markets, rather than continuing to design products that are fundamentally designed to be sold to existing customers in profitable segments. In other words, product teams don't have to satisfy existing requirements of existing customers. No more legacy consideration
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%.
What competitive advantage does Intel have with either of those? ARM winning would be a catastrophe for Intel, and RISC-V would only be slightly better.
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.
There's no fundamental difference between risc, arm and x86. It looks like when all else is equal (fab, die size) the chips tend to have about the same performance characteristics - so why mess with what's working?
As Apple and MS have shown, from a software point of view the difference is not that important. They both have ARM and x86 products. In Apple's case, the same software actually supports both. They literally just stuff two binaries in their executables. Their OS runs on both X86 and ARM (for now). That's how they seamlessly transitioned to their own chips over the course of the last five years. Users barely notice the difference.
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.
Fundamental difference when it comes to performance.
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.
That article is nonsense, even if it's up to the implementation, not ISA.
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?
AMD is making money on x86 servers.
Is anyone making money doing commodity (i.e. not captive) ARM / R5 server chips for sale? Ampere is losing money and hoping for acquisition.
They’re not hoping anymore. They already got acquired by SoftBank (well technically the deal hasn’t closed yet but I don’t think anyone doubts it’ll close.)
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.
Intel's market capitalization was approximately $150 billion in 2015, which translates to about $193 billion in 2023 dollars.
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.
> Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
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.
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.
Either way, Intel needs to get their new fabs sorted out and improve their products. There will be money to be made if Intel can get back the energy efficiency crown.
The GPU division are starting to actually enter the lower market segment, but drivers leave a lot to be desired. Reducing work force even more just tells me they have no clue how to fix these issues and are grasping hard.
It's not just drivers. I'd line up to buy a a couple 24GB B580s to play around with local AI, but they're only going to be available in workstation systems. When it gets to the point where you're losing, but still won't sell people things they want, I think it's a good indicator that management is just plain dumb.
It is not the layers of management that is the problem, it is the quality of management. While great engineers mind their own business and deliver great products, the people that are not great engineers manage their way into management. They are more and more incompetent and corrupt and this is killing the companies, slowly or not that slow. So it is incompetent and corrupt management, not too much management.
If they are moving into management and causing more harm than benefit, then isn't that by definition too much management? Said another way, not having that manager would make things better, all else being equal.
When will people wake up and see that venture capital is driving execs to show growth, overhire, then RIFF to consolidate wealth and drive profit metrics?
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
Replace VC with shareholders - the point is the same. Someone wants more money out than in. That same someone doesn’t have long-term incentive to care about our future, or even the customer
To achieve that, business owners do as I mentioned and more. Not out of maliciousness or spite, but out of necessity
Plenty of computing uses don't run third party potentially malicious code.
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.
Not sure if there are true heterogeneous server CPUs or not, but with Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) you can mimic some similar features. SST allows you to set some cores to be higher base frequency, turbo frequency, etc, in return for other cores having corresponding lower frequencies. Naturally, the cores are not inherently different here, it's just distributing the power/thermal loads differently, so it's not a true heterogeneous system.
These big companies are run as inefficiently as the government. They can’t fire anyone so they have to do the dance of making things unpleasant - but it backfires because only talented people leave (because they can get a job elsewhere) and all the dead weight stays because they have no alternative so they will just do their commute and sit unproductive hours in their seats and complain. It takes a real leader to turn something like Intel around - not sure if they have that
Yeah it's interesting that a RTO is included, as if remote work was somehow part of the problem. Intel's spiral started at least 10 years before remote work was normalized, and you can make a pretty good argument that they stopped innovating in the early 2000's.
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.
I feel like one of the under-appreciated problems with modern society (1) is the sheer quantity of lies we are surrounded with. RTO is just the current most blatant example (2) in the American economy of people saying lies knowing that they will never be held to account for those lies. All of these lies together are corrupting and destroying civil society, destroying the sense of trust necessary for people to work together, to respect and trust institutions, and to build a better world.
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
You hear a lot about how toxic the hierarchical Japanese workplace is, but the fact that people are willing to openly admit things like "product B is better than product A, but we're going with product A because our CEO is friends with their CEO" ends up being surprisingly refreshing.
I find this difficult to navigate sometimes because I find myself looking around the room and wondering "we don't really believe this, right?" but I can never quite be sure
It is a complete lie unless of course it is backed by firing people who aren’t good enough. But 99% of the execs who force RTO are really just trying to get people to quit - unfortunately this gets good people to quit and crappy people stay
The other day I came to the office to join a Google Meet meeting. Another person near me was also in it, with their laptop speaker on. I'm hearing my headphones and their speaker, plus also them acoustically when it's their turn to speak. So I picked up my laptop and buggered off to a small meeting room where I closed the door and sat alone.
My favorite part about working hybrid is that no matter what, nobody meets in person, except the managers once a week, everything else is a Teams meeting at your desk.
it's called collaboration, and thanks to those sets of complementary off brand noise canceling headphones that welcomed you back to a desk, it's clearly increasing!
I find it such a darn waste. I spend anywhere from one to two hours commuting on what some consider one of the deadliest highways here, not sure how I-4 fares against the rest of the country though. Accidents every single day it feels like.
I know a place doing RTO where most teams are at least 50% contractors from Central and South America. You can imagine how productive the office might be for those people, given that everyone is on zoom all day, and there's a whole 4 meeting rooms in a floor with 50 people.
I’ve not ever had to experience that particular management style, but I think it’s the one where they don’t give a rat’s ass about their employees or unique thought.
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.
I was being hyerbolic. I should have made that clearer. That said, there is a nugget of literal truth to my statement.
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.
I can mostly agree with that, with an exception for giant corporations like the mentioned Apple and Amazon. Their runway for making wrong decisions (like RTO) is exceedingly long, due to their money and their moat.
You have a solid point. I also ignore the fact that RTO actually does improve the bottom line in some narrow scenarios, such as when it's used as a backdoor layoff in companies that don't mind losing the best and brightest.
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.
Creatively? Yes, definitely, at least for Amazon. IMHO, for that company there is an internal battle what they want to be: a webshop filled with garbage or a cloud hyperscaler? The way the web shop is degrading, I strongly assume that Amazon will attempt to exit that business sooner or later.
As for Apple, I do love their hardware, but the software side has seen better days.
See my other reply in this subthread - the money and the moat they have prevents a financial collapse for many years to come, even if they do not improve. So, I doubt RTO is a good indicator for (financial) collapse.
> the money and the moat they have prevents a financial collapse for many years to come, even if they do not improve.
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...
A friend of mine recently quit his job because the CEO insisted on personally reviewing and approving designs. The thing is, as a CEO, he was super busy with other CEO stuff, so my friend could only get small time slots, like 5 to 15 minutes every few days.
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.
> 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.
Nothing says fast and agile like asking your employees to spend 2 hours a day getting ready for work, going to work, and getting home from work. 2 hours sometimes means someone is going to have 0% free time in their evenings. I don't see how this is empowering engineers or giving them speed and focus.
Is that something a CEO of a massive company like Intel actually has the time to do in an impactful way? I'm no chip designer but a major chip design sounds incredibly complex and would require a tremendous amount of time & effort to review meaningfully.
I consult for large bureaucracies where this kind of thing is occasionally enforced.
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.
I used to work for a chief exec like that. They’d see something on someone’s screen and demand changes, destroying months of carefully planned work with a single comment.
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.
Apple worked that way; maybe it still does. If a product wasn't important enough for Steve Jobs to review it then they simply didn't develop that product.
This is what I wonder about Elon Musk. In retrospect, of course humans could build sexy electric cars, reusable rocket boosters, and ubiquitous satellite data services. But humans, or perhaps more accurately, corporations and governments, DID NOT do those things.
It takes an overwhelmingly powerful personality to get anything done, despite the fact there are billions of capable people on this planet.
I can assure you that Tim Cook doesn’t review every product. I seriously doubt he even knows what’s going on with half of them. There is absolutely no way that he used the butterfly keyboards and said they were acceptable.
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”?
This time next year they'll be spinning it as giving underlings more decision making authority to execute faster, blah de blah. All corporate speak for bouncing off the wall in another direction because what they're currently doing isn't working. Do something different. Anything!
“Major” feels like a weasel word allowing for any level of review.
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?
"Thanks for working so hard to help us exceed our numbers and boost our stock price slightly this quarter.
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."
This sounds like reassurance that they aren't chasing last year's trends. On a technical level I don't know of any difference between inference and agentic inference.
Intel should just reposition itself as a hedge fund focused on making investments in Nvidia. They've got enough assets to leverage for capital and the market would eat it up
There's a lot of luck involved in the Nvidia story. Twenty five years ago no one was assuming there would be a need for $100M LLM training projects. No one expected the crypto mining demand either. To be honest they are lucky that CPU manufacturing didn't move into SIMD space and that the gaming market grew so much between 2000-2012.
Yeah they paved the road, but it's a surprise that it lead to many good destinations.
You aren't betting against Nvidia, you are betting against the burden of trillions of profit the hype has put in Nvidia. Can Nvidia really generate that much profits? If not its overhyped and you should bet against it.
NVidia is a great company, with a phenomenal product that they competently developed and made dominant. There was a big element of luck in that, but it won't continue forever no matter how smart and diligent they are.
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?
its unironically going to the moon. the mag7 are doing better than ever:
- 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.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe build chips that do things 10x more efficiently and sell them a lower cost to compete?
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.
Thats fine. Great even. But thats just normal nueral net inference. Why mention agentic AI over just AI? The gpu doesnt care if the inference is being done for object detection or chain of thought. Intel can only make gpus, their products dont care about the software at the app level.
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.
But "agentic AI" (and LLMs in general) are far less about compute than everyone talks about IMO. I know what you mean FWIW but she does have a point I think.
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.
Intel makes a lot of software. In addition to internal tools, they try to make things go faster on their chips (e.g. the Intel C++ compiler), and try to accelerate new areas of software so people will need more chips (this focus varies over time, of course).
Inference / Agentic AI implies "running models performantly using CPU cores" most likely (maybe with some optimizations / special AVX512 stuff) -- so essentially "welp, no sense in trying to build GPU's, we are too far behind nvidia to catch up".
No im saying that agnetic AI itself is software. The parts that require hardware is just the neural network. The agentic part is all in software. So how does intel focus on agentic AI beyond just making better datacenter gpus? That like a farmer saying they're gonna focus on wedding cakes; they make wheat, the wehat will get used for whatever demand exists down the line, they can only focus on making the best wheat they can?
In the context of the the lack of confidence investors seem to have in Intels long term vision this makes sense but it really doesn't feel like a good sign for their future
And even so they can't follow demand for their popular chipsets that aren't AI related but in high demand. We currently can't get N1xx for our devices even though we're ok paying the recent increase in price.
> we have decided not to move forward with previously planned projects in Germany and Poland
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.
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 :)
"Streamline" must be one of the most weaselly buzzwords floating around today's corporate jargon, and, for some inexplicable reason, LLMs seem particularly fond of it too.
Intel is circling the drain. At this point I'm of the opinion that the sooner it dies the better. Its death will probably result in a lot of spin-offs and startups, which might be what the US chip industry needs.
It'll never happen. It's the standard US playbook:
- 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.
Publishing papers, filing patents, and stacking degrees is more valuable than doing anything actually impactful. Managers expect expertise to be transferrable to any and all domains regardless actual education or experience. Team management is not there to build teams, mentor, create structure, etc. Instead, their job is to be the smartest and most capable person in the room at all time again regardless of background or experience. If they aren't that means the manager is useless. Senior management feels their job is to constantly work on finding out who's secretly hiding how bad they are at their job and then fire them. It's the only organization I'd ever worked in where the smartest and most capable folks were the ones no one ever talked to and management ignored or was actively trying to push out of the org.
A colleague of mine said it felt like working for the mafia. I think that's a pretty apt description.
I'm assuming they look at the org chart, measure the max depth from the CEO to the lowliest employee, and cut that number by half. It's actually the least worse thing in this letter.
Depending on which layers they cut. I know of a company that last year cut the bottom layer of management, giving managers an average of 20 reports. Maximum disruption
Four layers instead of eight? A large company could easily have IC -> manager -> senior manager -> director -> VP -> SVP -> CxO. Maybe Intel was even worse.
Practically it is more than eight, because when multiple branches of managerial deposits cross on the project you are working on, all of sudden your work depends on decisions of dozens of people and their management chains.
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.
Related breaking news, Intel openly contemplates exiting further cutting edge node development:
> "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."
This is a reasonable thing to put in an SEC filing.
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.
For those who don't know: Intel lost its technological leadership in chip production to TSMC years ago, which means their chips are no longer competitive and have to be sold at a much lower profit margin or even use chips that are produced by TSMC, which leaves Intel little money to develop and build their chip fabs.
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.
I blame INTC marketing that restricted innovation when they had a clear lead to squeeze maximum profits from the current generations. I hope INTC crashes and burns spectacularly.
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.
I see lots of doomers in here talking about Intel failing. Well, the truth is the government will just bail them out again.
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.
(1) is the most important and urgent action that Intel can do to sort out their issues.
when did they get bailed out before? And don't say CHIPS because Intel only actually received $2B to build fabs - and that's only a tenth of the cost of building its new fab in Ohio. That's not a bailout.
Intel CEO: Wintel hegemony will save us! Triple down!!
Everyone under 30 reading this dreck on their iPhone with a 5G radio: What the fuck is a Wintel?
Mobile in general (SoCs, CPUs, etc) has been a major growth sector for a decade and a half. Between IoT and actual mobiles (smartphones) it's a tens of billions of units a year market. Intel has not only avoided this market but actively dropped out by selling off any offerings they had in it. They've retreated to their less than a billion units moved per year CPU market to the exclusion of nearly everything else. It's been insane to watch.
Intel is doomed. They're going to Motorola themselves. Hopefully any useful pieces end up with someone with a clue. Unfortunately the fire sale will mean a ton of negotiation for all of the long term licenses around stuff like x86. What a shit show of their own making.
TLDR: "we've gotten ourselves into deep shit by saving money for shareholders. That caused a financial disaster so we'll fire 15% of you and save some more money. What could go wrong?"
Some mutterings were heard about the definition of insanity ...
That's not really what got Intel into deep shit. They got where they are now by ignoring the main business, and spending giga$ on every trend they could stumble headfirst onto. The money returned to the shareholders was reasonable, all the written down acquisitions and failed product lines were not.
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.
I don't agree. They got the trends right. They got the "giga$" right. They just totally failed to execute. For example, there WAS tons of money in making mobile CPUs. Intel invested in it ... and failed to make them. Despite that their mobile cpus were better, I've used them (in other words: it wasn't the technical department failing to produce good enough/better chips. It was sales and marketing failing to sell from a position of having the better product)
The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
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."
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
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.
> I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
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.
>Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
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.
Now I'm trying to remember what that tech company (I think pretty small, startup-sized ish but large enough that they would normally have at least one person in sales) that just straight up decided not to have a sales department was
A "sales meeting", intended in a loose sense, can cause involuntary and/or uncoordinated pseudo-collusion because it aligns various parties: a level playing field of information (e.g. convincing important managers of many companies that their strategy needs more AI and less actual experts) leads to similar forecasts and similar decisions.
You don’t have sales meetings from a vendor on a cruise ship in the west. Thats considered bribery
Well this is an extremely naive take.
You can rest assured that bribery in that way is extremely common in the West.
and balls out about it, too.
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.
You call it "training" and it's all good.
LOL ok call it a "conference" then
Or better yet: a "summit"
Yes it’s at vegas instead.
Where do you think the sales meetings happen lol
I conduct my sales meetings in open sewers. There may be whiffs of garbage, but not impropriety.
Sir.
> Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?
It's possible!
It is, but cui bono. I know that local software companies in my city had meetings coordinating the local software dev wage level. There's no reason to assume something like this isn't going on at a larger scale too.
Is that strictly legal?
Almost nowhere. But hard to prove in court. You should report it to the local authorities at least.
Nonsense. There's nothing generally illegal about vendor sponsored junkets for private industry attendees. Some companies have policies against their own employees attending such events but that's not a legal issue.
LOL. Or do the early 1900s thing and kick somebodies ass badly.
Yeah, everyone knows Jobs' mistake was to use email. This kinda thing is done very unofficially.
Here's an alternative take, but along similar lines. Many high level business leaders in large established companies loathe taking risks and sticking their necks out. Instead, they hire a management consulting company (think McKinsey) who do a study and make recommendations that said executive can take to the other execs, or to the board. If it works, executive takes credit. If not, it was those darn consultants. The thing is, the consultants are giving companies the same advice. In fact, it is even stronger when "competitor A and B" are already doing "strategy C" and they are ahead of you. I've seen this movie many times...
The Capital Order lays out an argument that austerity measures are ultimately labor suppression, not necessary. Of course, that’s true of many pieces of policy wisdom: they start from an assumed good. In this case, the assumed good is the current winners should remain the winners despite, well, losing.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...
I agree that this definitely is labor suppression, but it has a real cause: the end of low interest rates and inflation. They can no longer "grow" their way into their 6 month bonuses, so they basically have to trim fat and if they all collude on doing it, it _can_ work. If they dont all collude, someone gets cheap engine for growth.
collusion to suppress wages predates tbe raising of interest rates or inflation increases.
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
That real world activity is my underlying belief, but we shouldnt ignore that the free money era ended quickly and for these execs do continue to earn their ungainly bonuses, they have to cut costs. Modern texhnology/capitalism allows them to make the same choices without directing collusion.
Best example is the rental market and the landlords all using the same price setting "algorithm"
Also the end of full R&D expensing, which made software engineers in particular much more expensive in the US.
But that got rolled back in the last budget bill if i was following correctly
Is the hypothesis that the next 24 months will be measurably better for software engineering jobs than the last 24 months?
Hard to say. There's kind of a lot going on.
Either the tax treatment has an effect or it doesn't. If the market doesn't get better we can at the very least say that the whole tax thing was overstated.
Probably in China.
not if 996 is still a thing
High interest rates benefit creditors and hurt debtors. These companies hold a lot of cash equivalent assets (think bonds, etc). Their balance sheets only grew. High interest rates haven't hurt these companies, but instead fattened them up. They are hoarding cash! Imagine earning high interest on that cash.
I can’t imagine anyone colluding with LBT, unless they told him it was collusion to fool him, and he fell for it.
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.
Erm, what?
He’s from the future, dammit!
>> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time?
> Because they're told to.
This is largely it.
Consultants rule the earth!
> Because they're told to.
Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street.
Notice how they stopped talking about this after the election?
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...
Isn’t this straight up illegal? Anti-trust laws are no jokes. Many conventions have strict rules to prevent it.
I’ve been involved on layoff planning. It can be very cloak and dagger. But you never involve competitors. Ever.
There are a lot of venues through which collusion has become legal. Management consulting, private equity investments, conferences etc.
The incentives to collude are powerful.
Management consulting is a big one. It's illegal for companies to all tell each other their prices and costs. What isn't illegal? Apparently each firm hiring McKinsey who will tell you what your competitors costs and prices are because they have "industry knowledge". They'll then share your information too and then everyone can largely figure out how they can set prices above their marginal costs with some nice padding. It's probably still illegal, but it's what these firms do.
> I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.
Wonder if it’s “not illegal” if it’s done in international waters.
> 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.
It's very common for "million dollar clubs" (or whatever) to have a cruise or some other perk for top-performing sales reps.
No, because jurisdiction of the competition authority will still be based on the market activity (or place of registration etc.) of the companies colluding, not on the physical location of the colluding/anti-competitive activity itself. While such conspirative theatre may decrease the risks of discovery, collusions usually come to light by one participant notifying the authority in exchange for immunity or decreased fines.
Given the whole Realpage stuff for price fixing, it would not surprise me if there are similar things going on at the csuite layer with various business consultants and backroom discussions. They're all rich assholes, and naturally gravitate to the same venues.
It's all the more reason why labor needs to start being more aggressive and properly work together.
It’s called Mercer and Equifax. All large companies use them to collude on compensation.
There is no "Realpage stuff for price fixing" that resulted in any price fixing.
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.
im not sure what context youre replying in, but plenty of building managers joined the real page cartel, and successfully raise prices across the board.
That's demand going up with fixed supply because the US made it illegal to build anything. In a market where supply goes up instead (Austin or Minneapolis) their algorithm is going to tell them to lower prices instead.
> There is no "Realpage stuff for price fixing" that resulted in any price fixing.
You must not have been renting apartments in any significant market during the 2010's
Big citation needed on "defecting is more profitable".
The claim is that by not renting out some of your properties you can raise rent on the rest. But the way you make money from properties is by renting them, so if everyone else is refusing to do it then you get the rents from anyone who shows up.
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 never have to let any properties rot, you intentionally delay filling them to achieve the desired number of vacancies at any given time. And yes in principle competition is king but in practice it's for suckers.
Did you spend any time looking at the RealPage lawsuits and the reason why it's a cartel, or the reason why people didn't defect?
As someone else said, it was probably a sales meeting or other corporate training. You’re off in conspiracy theory land.
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.
Yes, it's most likely they saw some kind of sales meeting, but collusion also happens often. I watched a documentary not long ago about how smart they are about it now. For groceries the major chains just all report each product's price to the same company which then tells them how much they can mark up their products without being undercut. Is it illegal, almost assuredly yes. Is there anybody enforcing this anymore? No.
Lol. When I was a kid I worked at a gas station. My job was to arrive before the station opemed, drive around the neighborhood, and make a note of the gas price at our competitors.
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 were probably having you do this so that they could price the gas as high as possible while still in line with the neighborhood going price. Why sell at 200 while the best next price nearby is 260? Sell at 250.
They were worried about suing and being sued. In the place and time, gas stations simply did not make money off gas.
They made money by selling coffee, which costs less than a cent, for five bucks.
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc...
They all work with restructuring companies!! So, I hope that tells you how smart they are :-)
> 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.
Probably by majority portfolio owners
Heaven forbid the workers within or across any of these companies also consider coordinating on anything
That's basically what the founders of Intel did, when they left Shockley to start Fairchild: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
The elites definitely unite first.
That would be (gasp) _communism_!
Unionization isn’t necessarily communism.
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this isn't Reddit
Or at least save such remark for when somebody actually makes the statement. Don't just assume that people on this forum are too stupid to understand the difference.
It’s an open forum; any reason to believe everyone is a genius such as yourself?
Your comment doesn’t come across as much more than usual grammar Nazi who then goofs up their own correction.
So we see the difference. Are you smart enough to do anything? Yeah ok generating syntax to describe is easy. What next? if anything is the hard part
The capitalist class has always conspired to keep labor down.
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.
Don't they realize that if they raise the labor class up, they will correspondingly raise themselves up by a multiple?
How though? Unions or something else?
Unions are counterweight for HR. You want coops to get at least some pooled capital. Otherwise you need investors or debt and end up in the same place you started.
The problem is every tech worker sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed oligarch in waiting.
I’d say this applies to a far broader group; I’ll never forget when a professor asked for a show of hands on the first day of class: “how many of you will have more than 10 million?”
More than half raised their hands immediately. It was a Philosophy 101 class.
$10 million sounds like peanuts in an information environment where discussion is dominated by talk of billionnaires. When I was growing up, I remember Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's wealth being touted as a measly $40 billion or something. Today the numbers tossed around for Bezos, Musk etc are minds numbingly massive, 200 to 300 billion.
Meanwhile most people in "rich" countries will have to reach mid-career status to even reach $100k.
This is exactly what I'm referring to when saying "they fell for the propaganda".
Business leaders operate in overlapping networks. Conferences, advisory boards, private equity connections, etc. When McKinsey or Bain gives similar advice to 50 companies, you get synchronized behavior that looks coordinated.
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.
So, say… airline pilots extract more value than they create?
> 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.
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.
The "rentier class" framing assumes all value extraction happens at the top, but /r/overemployed will demonstrate that is false.
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.
You’re a category 1 worker, I take it? Or maybe beyond categories because you’re an owner and not labor?
All categories are false - The framework is just useful for pointing out the flaws in other frameworks (i.e., simplistic marxism).
My guess is that these layoffs will end up firing cat 1 and keeping cat 2.
Can't argue with that. Peter principle.
False consciousness at its finest
> The economy can no longer subsidize low-value labor
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
Intel’s situation in 2025 is not comparable to the rest of big tech. They have lost technical leadership, bled market share, and started losing a ton of money in a hugely capital-intensive business. They are actually in need of major triage to survive, not just hopping on a belt-tightening trend among still-massively-profitable software companies.
Yes this. Intel is in deep shit. This is exactly the thing you'd expect their new CEO to say right now.
One would hope HN commenters would be able to comprehend a microchip seller not having compelling products to sell means it needs to shrink its business, rather than jump to childish “CEO bad guy” sentiments.
Shrinking the business is a hard decision to reverse, and one should definitely read into the word "needs" from "needs to shrink" before doing it. People tend to take any claim that a gigantic company "needs" to downsize with a gigantic grain of salt, because we were born with pattern recognition.
The business had already shrunk 10+ years ago when it was evident mobile devices were the future and Intel had no product offering for them.
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.
They had that product StrongArm from DEC which they sold to Marvell.
From wikipedia:
> 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.
It's almost as if CEOs aren't really that smart or creative, got to their position through mostly politics, and look externally for clues about what to do.
CEOs like to brag about how AI is going to replace skilled workers. Yet, it should be obvious to anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.
Just keep smooth talking everyone into cost reductions and make arbitrary decisions to make it feel like you're actually in charge.
> anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.
That’s not my assessment. Why do you say that?
They make that claim because what CEOs write down could easily be written by a Markov Model, nevermind an LLM. If that was the primary value a CEO brought to the company they'd be right.
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.
because 95% of the time it's "follow the herd" BS + always defer to the lowest cost. the rest is schmoozing, making people feel comfortable, sounding confident, and working the soft skills.
chatGPT always sounds confident, and it's not hard for it to calculate the lowest possible option and take it.
because ceo bad/dumb and eng good/smart
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From the HN guidelines[0]:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Seems to me like a couple of if-then-else statements could do a better job than some executives.
> Yet, it should be obvious to anyone having experience in LLMs that top executives are the jobs that are most likely replaceable by AI.
Yes given those are jobs where hallucination is a feature not a bug
Wouldn't that be funny to see an AI bot replace the CEO of something like Boeing, and then see the company turn around in positive moves? Feed an LLM all of the business data that a CEO would have and then ask it to make the same decisions the CEO would be expected to make. Since layoffs would be the trend online for LLMs to train on, would they come up with slop that looks like they too follow the trends? If companies are willing to replace dev with AI, why are boards not looking at all of the C-suite offices with the same mindset?
Same with the Federal Reserve. Why not continuously adjust interest rates, instead of all of Wall Street agonizing over each decision made?
Because the agonizing is part of their job. That's called "animal spirits" / managing expectations. The expectation of future interest rates is nearly as important as what they actually are.
How would not adjusting vs always adjusting be any different? Is it not a made decision to leave it alone and not change it?
Interest rates work with different lags in different parts of the economy. The current hiking cycle basically only just has taken its full effect (think when people refinance debt and when they delay this.)
If data was reliable, instant, and comprehensive, this might work. Of course, under those circumstances socialism or communism would probably work out even better.
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.
Wallstreet would be screwed by this. You can't take away the gambling aspect and big wins because then you are left with a pre-80s style market where dividends and steady income matter over 'line goes up next quarter'. The current market would HATE that.
couldn't agree more.
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?
It seems to me that a large percentage of jobs exist just to exist, and that they use their continued existence to justify their continued existence. I wonder how much the world would keep spinning if 90% of people were laid off. Maybe we'll find out if AI is adopted widely enough...
You can't put an LLM in charge of a company. You need an actual human to take legal responsib- oh, wait a second...
CEOs don't have any data.
same with directors. BODs are incestuous, inbred.
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?
It takes me an hour to write 100 lines of slop -- code or text. AI can do it in 1 or 2 minutes. That might have something to do power usage.
> It takes me an hour to write 100 lines of slop
Skill issue. I can outpace your LLM if I get the same tolerances.
it helps to be able to type at 70wpm. My high school typing class in the 70s actually did wonders for my career as keyboards and screens took over. As far as processors go- that's a subject best discussed offline with a beer in hand.
That's what AI does. Makes power and politics have even more of a premium vs say learning, intelligence and hard work. Connections, wealth and power. It is almost ironic that our industry is inventing the thing that empowers the people that techies often find useless (as per the above comments) and dis-empowering themselves often shutting the door behind them.
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.
Its merely a personality contest, a sociological phenomenon. Humans band around (and more easily listen to) individuals bearing certain personality traits. These traits have very little to do with actual problem solving, and finding the most ideal path forward for an organization. Alot of times they go hand and hand but I'd wager, from the CEOs ive personally met, there are alot of them with just the charismatic set.
I don't think this is entirely fair. One analogy I like is boat racing. In boat races if you follow someone you're almost always going to do just as well as them. Take a dfferent path and you could get lucky, but just as likley you're going to hit a bad current and throw the whole race. So you follow the crowd and wait for oppritunities to take the lead instead of rolling dices. I don't think they're nessesarily doing anything wrong just because they don't want to do something super aggresive.
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what would you do if you were the CEO of Intel?
"Please, speak as you might to a young child or a Golden Retriever. It wasn't brains that got me here, I can assure you that."
He was being modest; he seemed shrewd.
It took me a long time to learn this
Because it's driven by investor/market sentiment. That's literally all. If your investors have ask you why you've not laid off 10% of your workforce due to AI efficiencies, when that's the prevailing sentiment, then you look incompetent. If in the middle of COVID the sentiment is remote work will drive more tech adoption/usage and money is very cheap then you have to start hiring as many engineers as possible otherwise you look like you're not a growth company or lack confidence. It doesn't matter if it doesn't increase your development cadence, that is not the point. The point is that "the market" is largely vibe based. Right now the vibe is AI companies are hot so as say the meta CEO you start burning a trillion dollars on GPUs, without anyone stopping to question why Facebook needs any more AI, or how it will make it ROI.
> If your investors have ask you why you've not laid off 10% of your workforce due to AI efficiencies
Ah, see? Prosperity has not come to your business because you have not made the proper offerings to the new AI gods.
Remember that executives answer to the board of directors. The board's job is to make sure execs do things that make the company money, or in practical terms, "things the board thinks will make the company money".
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.
> 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."
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.
Plus there's some reality bending that can go on. Everyone piling capital into something can sometimes make it happen, even if "it" is dumb.
That logic probably applies to NVIDIA too.
> There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag.
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.
There are no Steve Jobs left in the American tech.
You only need to look at board membership overlap between all companies (all companies, not just tech)
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.
There are CEOs and there are CEOs. My hunch is, most of them are just managers pushed out by investors, who have interests in multiple companies, maybe even multiple industries. That’s why they coordinated so easily.
But there are CEOs who define an industry. Those are not easily swayed by big capital.
Ah...but have you considered that there are also CEOs?
Competition. If all your competitors are doing something that you want to do but know will piss off your employees, you can safely do it too and know that they don't have anywhere else to go. Most of these big tech companies operate in markets with huge barriers to entry and very differentiated skillsets; a new competitor isn't going to spring up overnight without some form of warning.
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.
Many times it's a "watershed" moment.
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.
> why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time
It's like fashion, humans follow trends, almost always, and in the case of big companies, the CEOs are quite wealthy and that means the people they hangout with, the parties they attend, and the general circles they are part of, is pretty small (not that many people at that level of wealth), and so they're all mostly part of the same "clicks" that talk about and share the same ideas.
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.
All the layoffs and such have been going on for a bit and there's been more and more leading up to the end of the R&D tax credit. Their headcount has been planned for years.
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.
A video went viral a few years ago that showed that the majority of outstanding stock market shares are owned by big equity firms. And those firms, in turn, own large chunks of each other. And if you carry this recursion out a few iterations, the largest equity firm essentially owns everything.
The reason is always a secret coalition with a cool hand sign like the Illuminati.
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!!
> 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.
One theory that I saw earlier was that the industry is bloated, big tech companies executives knew that but they continued to hire anyway to make sure that the people they don't hire don't start competitors when there was funding, there is less funding now so that risk is no longer there so companies can reduce their size to their actual needs, but maybe that does not apply to intel since they seem to be really in a bad situation now.
It sounds cliche at this point. It is the focus on the next quarter, next year at best that drives a lot of this due to appeasing the great god of the shareholders.
I think they should do what you say but shareholders are looking for the quickest, best returns now, not in a few years time.
Same as it ever was except they learned not to write it down lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I have a recollection that Intel used to do this when Andy Grove was in charge. There was a fair amount of noise about them 'spending through the recession': building FABs and other plant so that when the recession ended they'd be in a great place to take advantage of the increased demand. Sadly, I can't recall exactly which depression this was about.
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
My personal theory is that it is ultimately the same reason you see things like software engineers blindly using the same tech stacks, because most people, most of the time, aren't working off first principles.
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.
Here's one possible reason for layoffs: https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-resea...
For counter argument sake, if a highly regarded company says: “we’re going in a hiring spree”, all of that available talent adds 50% to their comp ask.
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.
> Or is it just following the latest fad?
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
I think if it's not a collusion then it's concentration of wealth. CEOs are basically employees to the board, and the board is or is representing pretty much the same people in most major companies.
Because they all have the same management consultants from McKinsey et al. whispering in their ear.
It is some of both. Business conditions have changed, but also the bosses kinda collude to reduce power of the employees.
Eventually some companies will start scooping talent up, and everybody will zig :)
Cliché corporate leader herd mentality. In absence of leadership direction, do what everyone else is doing (and what the consultants recommend) including many rounds of layoffs and reorgs to simulate progress and achievement.
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.
While we often praise leadership for their decision making ability, the reality is most leaders aren't leaders, they're followers.
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.
Nvidia are hiring....
It's the companies with no ideas who have to cut costs.
Why does everyone hire McKinsey? So they keep their job. If you are CEO and go the board with a cost savings plan and layoffs you keep your job. You may not if you say we are going where the puck is. Lifestyle creep probably makes it very hard to envision taking this kind or risk.
eh it’s bc you’re never fired for making the same mistakes as everyone else
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
I tend to think all these business leaders are actually business larpers. They dress up as what they see other business people dressing up in, they lay off loads of people because they see other companies doing that, they send stupid letters like this out because they think that's what they're supposed to do while dressed up as a business leader. You get business larpers at every company, sometimes they happen to be good enough at the larping that people put them into actual leadership roles and then this sort of thing happens.
Mimesis?
> Or is it just following the latest fad?
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 a herd mentality for both. AI may be the next big thing. And the old things need realignment.
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...
Most CEOs follow trends so as to not get criticized and fired. It’s the same in American football. The “book” says you do certain things under certain circumstances- 4th down and 5, you punt. Everyone drafting linemen, you do too. If you zig and others zag you get criticized on ESPN (CNBC For CEOs) and if it doesn’t work you get fired. Better to have a few years of 8-8 performance than risk it for a 14-2 season.
It’s not just the same things - they do the same things to similar degrees. They are reading from the same playbook (and have, mostly, the same investors).
These companies are members of WEF and owned by major investment funds. That's the likely source of these shenanigans. The rich just want to be richer and to hell with normal folks.
>why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus
What would you do when you're bleeding money?
NVIDIA? ARM?
It's not about fads. It's just collusion.
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.
Because they're trying to make Number Go Up(TM) not run a business. Wall Street ruins everything.
I will stick this here to expand on your point.
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.
How did Wall Street prevent Intel from making a low power high performance chip?
By tying compensation to short rather than long term performance.
All the Intel executives are paid in stock. The value of those holdings has declined dramatically.
The Board of Directors does that, not “Wall Street”.
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?)
Who elects the board?
Various shareholders, or fund managers on behalf of shareholders. What difference does it make? It is still inconsistent to blame “Wall Street” for one company when the SP500 has plenty of examples of success.
Wall Street has more examples of failure than success. It's just that the returns from the successes outweigh the losses from the failures. They could be making decisions that are good for the SP500 but bad for Intel.
> The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time?
Because they all studied the same MBA programs.
Its just capitalism, only 10 people are the top pyramid of owning everything.
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
As far as I can tell, the flow of cheap money stopped when inflation started. This means all their portfolios of free stocks inflating the market stopped. These people all live in a world of 6 months to profit, and thus the market forces at work mean for them to demonstrate anything for their next fleecing of shareholder value, they need to trim budgets.
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.
it's not a conspiracy. they go to the same parties, restaurants. the circle is pretty small. A few guys make a move and now you're the odd man out
> why do all these business leaders all do the same
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.
These companies include the most valuable companies making record profits. They aren't struggling to survive. They are bowing to institutional investor demands to eek out another penny because the alternative is they get replaced by the board.
Fitness is a relative thing, especially when competing for limited resources, like institutional investor money. Everyone has to be prepared before it’s too late.
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.
Intel missed GPUs, missed ARM, missed ASICs, missed everything right under their nose for the last 15 years. This from Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" company, a company that in it's own past pivoted from commoditized RAM production to become the one that won the CPU race, a company perfectly positioned to win the next big cycle as the dominant leader in the industry.
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.
> 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.
It was put best by Steve Jobs:
“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.
It's happening at Apple right now. The hand picked successor to Steve was the one who could keep the ship running smoothly, not the one who pushed back with new radical product directions.
I don't disagree with you, but I'd argue the Apple Vision is (was) in that vein (and predictably unsuccessful). I'm also glad they're not charging ahead with AI at the rate everyone else seems to be.
I'll also say one of the best things Apple did in recent years was in-house their CPUs.
Maybe there's no revolutionary hardware left to invent except the next smartphone that will actually be a chip in your brain.
The iPhone was essentially enabled by (a) broadly deployed cellular networks, (b) touchscreens, (c) power efficient mobile chips, (d) battery technology.
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?
It's probably happening to ape right now as well. They haven't released interesting new hardware product like in more than 5 years. Apple vision is interesting but market validated not worth the money they asking.
Worth to compare xiaomi extensive product offering and apple. Even Amazon and Google trying to be more inventive.
Putting aside its success, wouldn't you consider the Apple Vision Pro as something pretty interesting from a hardware perspective?
You can go to any point in Apple’s history and you’ll find people saying the exact same sentence: they haven’t innovated anything in 5 years.
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.
Another innovation is their line of M-series chips. I'm typing this on an M1 Max and this is by far the best combination of industrial design and physical hardware that I have used over the past 20 years. I've had it for four years, three new generations of chips have come out since then and this thing chews through anything I throw at it.
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.
It's also easy to point to the failures as evidence, but both innovative and boring companies have failures...it's just that innovative cos have the occasional success that makes up for the rest.
(Hell, sometimes it's the same product, just in different eras, like the Newton vs the iPad.)
The issue with Intel is certainly not the MBAs, although they are numerous.
The issue is that engineering leadership failed to execute on the process technology roadmap.
But it won't cost you your job. Investing in a new strategy that fails might do so.
> 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.
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.
Heavily paraphrasing but I believe I remember Ed Catmul saying in his Pixar book having slogans like this are dangerous because you just say the thing and don’t actually do it.
> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over.
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.
It is tiring. It is also the correct description of reality and horrifically pervasive, which is why it is tiring.
When Intel's decline can be clearly linked to engineer CEOs, it's not correct.
> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over.
Google CEO is a McKinsey guy.
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You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless. Compare this to someone like Jensen, a nerd's nerd who gets up on stage with the latest GPU, can talk about new CUDA API's and goes deep on specs like memory bandwidth. He knows exactly who his customer is, and what kinds of workloads they run for AI.
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.
It's one reason why founders matter so much and why founder led companies often have better outcomes.
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.
Agree and I really appreciate your comment, as it wasn't immediately clear to me from reading the letter.
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.
I'm afraid without memory bandwidth they can't compete on inference either. Not on large scale. Which leaves local small models.
[dead]
Look at Jensen's computerphile interview, he's a poser
> You can tell
For those of us who cannot tell, what are the clues?
As somebody who works at a large company that routinely uses McKinsey to "set strategy" and "operating model", phrases and actual ideas overlap 100%, even though we are in a completely different business, in a completely different geography.
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!
So it is pretty much kabuki and micro management all the way from the top down. What a time to be an intel engineer.
Youre expe3cting their CEO to speak like a founder when he isnt one. Corporate speak is unavoidable in these roles, it doesnt mean he is aloof.
The heck would you know? LBT studied physics and did a masters in nuclear engineering at MIT, he then started but left a PhD in that subject at MIT. He's not some clueless management scrub.
Even in this letter he says he's going to be reviewing major chip designs before tape out. JFC...
Don't confuse education, knowledge and experience with passion.
I’m not confused.
If Jensen was that much of a nerd, he wouldn't be into AI grifting, but would be excited about games. He's into AI because he's a businessman, not a nerd.
If there's one thing I've learned in my 48 years of nerding out, it's that all of us are into games. If you're not into games, you're not a nerd. Seems simple.
I dunno. I can build a CPU from a bucket of transistors, design an ISA for it, microcode it, and write an OS for it in assembler. But games bore the shit out of me.
Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
The older I got, the more games just seemed like pointless wastes of time. Makes me sad to think back on how much time I wasted. I still fire up an old game or emulator out of nostalgia occasionally, but the time before I turn it off gets shorter and shorter.
I'm in my mid 50s and don't agree. Maybe they were for you, but I have many fond memories of games and gaming. There is a balance, of course, and maybe you spent way more time than I did, but even now I think they can be a great thing to do. All the fantasy/sci-fi reading I did? I kind of regret that time though. Definitely regret most of the time I spent just channel surfacing back in the "corded" TV days.
I honestly wish I had more time to play different games.
You ten years ago were not you today. I’ve played a ton of games when I was younger and I firmly believe at least some of them were helpful in life and it was passion for games that got me into IT and software engineering in the first place.
ive met so many amazing friends through games that i havent played in years, but i still talk to the friends daily.
Same. I grew up with computers. I wrote games on my Oric like my life depended on it (well, it was because that was the only way to get any games on the Oric..)
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.
> Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
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?
Funnily enough there are multiple games where you do logic design now. Though if I had to recommend one game for you to try, it would have to be Factorio.
so... you are into games
Real life can also be played like a game, by nerds and non nerds.
why would you run other peoples programs when you can make your own run those ?
You call it AI grifting, other observer calls it selling shovels for $4.24T.
As a gamer, I'm really looking forward to how devs will integrate AI into future games. I want immersive NPCs that don't repeat the same lines over and over.
I heard about this cool MechaHitler game, but they pulled it before I got to try.
Another flipflop. Canceling the Germany fab, bringing SMT back.
> 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?
I hope that pun is intentional.
For those downvoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)
I am ashamed at having totally missed that. I shall surrender my nerd card.
As OP, I think I'm supposed to arrange for the card to be collected... oh hey you're Kirk! It's Sean formerly of Amino as well :)
Sean! Hah, small world. It's great seeing you! If you're going to be in Vegas in a couple weeks, drop me an email (in my profile here) and let's say hi.
Don't forget to take your nerd card so it can be collected
Intel was ~20k when I started in 1988. When we started to flirt with 100k in 1999~2004 there were so many senior people complaining what it would do to bonuses and raises and revenue… everyone started getting the executive bonus and stock options around this time, too, not just grade 7+, which added to the fear and greed. People were claiming Intel only had “5 years left” and more than a few smart people left. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I really think it was 20 years of stagnation and failure to take risks that landed them in such a fragile position to respond to disruption. Just weird looking back on the new-hire-a-phobia from 25 years ago.
Intel headcount in 2022 was 131,900. Intel’s projected headcount for 2025 is 75,000. Intel fired 43% of its staff over the course of 3 years (when approximating natural retirements at zero and assuming a stop in new employments).
> Intel headcount in 2022 was 131,900.
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...
But the statistic parent poster showed is still correct.
Correct statistics is one thing, useful statistics is another.
This particular statistic is wholly correct and precisely defines the downward trajectory of INTC. It's not like the stat is from 1976.
INTC was clearly inflated in 2022 - it rose up with all the COVID hype, so yes, it is misleading. It's like looking at Gamestop stock right when it was artificially boosted by Wallstreetbets, and saying "Look at its decline!"
How can it be misleading? It is the factually correct number of employees they had at that time. It is unambiguous.
And who did they fire? Everyone with longevity and experience. Makes sense from an accountant’s perspective. Those would be the people with the highest salaries. Doesn’t make sense from a technical perspective.
Intel is/was a Bureaucratic hell hole. The people with longevity and experience definitely needed to be on the chopping block. Time for some creative destruction over there, the longest tenured are the ones who set the culture and the culture was crap.
Then get rid of the management doing the layoff too, as when you're talking culture, they are most responsible for it.
More cutting is needed. Nvidia has 36000 employees today.
NVidia is fabless, so that's an awful comparison.
Ok, cut Intel's employee count in half. It is still underperforming.
It's honestly impressive. Even during the major tech cuts of 2022-2023, I think many companies ended up about the same size or a even little larger over the course of a year, due to all the other hiring happening and the fact that the cuts may have partially overlapped with existing performance management anyway. 43% an incredible shrinkage for any company in such a short timescale.
Depending on how well AMD execute, this may be all too late. And if I am reading in between the line, I dont think Intel or specifically Lip-Bu understand much about Foundry business, and that is despite him being CEO of Cadence.
I am guessing Intel will give up on GPU as well.
Their Foundry is 3 - 4 years behind in terms of technical, volume and capacity. TSMC is aiming to do N2 next year in US, accelerating from previously expecting US Fabs to be 2 years behind Taiwan. Not only has TSMC be able to execute well, they manage to execute at speed beyond anyone thought was possible.
Somewhat along the line Server CPU market is finally cracked by AMD. In between 2022 - 2024 Intel's sales people managed to pull off some magic along with heavy discount, Intel managed to maintained 60 - 70% market share, at a cost of significant reduction of profits and revenue from Server sector. Current Zen 5 suggest AMD just broke the 50% market share and the trend will continue to increase. Zen 6 and Zen 6c is about to arrive. One of Intel's cash cow is no longer there. Just when they need cash flow to rejuvenate their Foundry side of business.
GPU burning cash, x86 losing business to ARM on PCs, Server market not competing well and nothing much on roadmap, foundry does not have any competitive advantage.
May be a chance for AMD to buy Intel in a few years time. There isn't any thing left with Intel.
So cut headcount and pray that things will get better! Inspiring vision! It will definitely work !
It wouldn't be the first time an Intel CEO resorted to prayer[1] as their business implodes.
1: https://www.threads.com/@masiosare/post/C-SoS6qJbU6?hl=en
"Well actually..."
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.
lol I forgot about this one, Intel have a very big collection of weirdo execs I guess.
You're missing the point. Sure, they're going to just keep doing what they've always done, but this time they're going to do it HARDER and with 15% fewer people!
So just like the plan they executed in 2023 and 2024! It must start working at some point right?
Admittedly, just because something hasn’t bourn fruit doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad plan. All they need is a major stumble by TSMC or AMD or some tailwinds themselves and they could start looking much better.
"Our plan is perfect, it's the world that's messed up!"
It worked for Twitter, very well from an IT point of view.
Twitter fired all the advertising account managers, and no longer makes money because it essentially no longer has ads.
It definitely has ads every four tweets and in the comments.
It wasn't a total collapse like some were expecting, they haven't really done much new however. Cutting some of the fat was a good idea but they might have gone a little too lean in places.
Genuine question: what makes you think Twitter is profitable? As far as I can tell, the numbers are a secret.
It works great for Twitter. Every other month there is a strategy failure to get some media attention.
I still remember the doom preached at the crossroads. Guess what happened over the next years.
Did Twitter get any better?
They didn't go down, but the lack of staff is starting to show in some areas. For example, clicking on certain links in their developer docs leads nowhere. There are also API issues, such as disappearing likes. Everything has its consequences.
Twitter doesn’t make a profit. It’s propped up by a billionaire so he can have social clout.
I mean hiring a lot over years did not make things any better so why not try the reverse.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. Layoffs and Return to Office!
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
> Imagine doing what all your competitors are doing while being one of the least desirable big tech companies to work for.
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.
Every large tech company is a competitor for Intel's talent.
How much talent is really there today?
Offshore. There's your solution bud
Of course, not sure why I didn’t see what’s plainly in front of me
He will announce they're selling the foundry business within the next 12-18 months. I'm certain of it.
That would suck.
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.
If they spin off the foundry it's very possible stockholders will end up having stock in both companies. If they sell it for cash that's another story.
To Nvidia?
If I were Nvidia, the last thing I’d want is a foundry. Much better to have multiple capital-intensive suitors—and governments!—bending over backwards for my business.
It'd be the final piece of Apple's vertical integration puzzle.
Why would Apple want a foundry years behind anything TSMC is doing?
For the same reason they would want a modem business years behind anything Snapdragon is doing.
Apple aims to design its own modems and retain ownership of the intellectual property. Apple is not in the business of manufacturing. its not the same reason
Well a long time they also weren’t in the business of designing silicones but here we are. Apple wants control in every aspect.
Apple is mostly selling mobile devices, so power efficiency is very important. Which means they need cutting edge TSMC nodes. For Nvidia, being server based, power efficiency (electricity cost) is less a concern I believe.
That was definitely true when the iPhone first came out. I don't know if it's true now. Given the average age of an iPhone/iPad keeps going up and up I don't think 90% of consumers are particularly bothered about it. I certainly would doubt that they would lose market share over it if their power efficiency stagnated for a couple of years, at least on an 'iPhone 16e' style chip.
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.
I think you have it backwards. Because iOS/macOS can run fine on what Intel fabs can make right now, Apple is not totally dependent on TSMC. In the worst case scenario, they will simply buy all the capacity from Intel, they have enough cash to do so.
Nvidia on the other hand need the latest tech to squeeze the most performance out of their chips for AI companies.
But Intel don't manufacture any ARM mobile SoCs that would be suitable for iPhones and iPads? It's not just a case of "upload A18 design, press print". It is at least a year or two of getting the processes up and running and validated.
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.
nvidia does not want a fab. Their product relies on being the best, that means they need to chase the best fab, not tie themselves down.
> Across client and data center, I’ve directed our teams to define next-generation product families with clean and simple architectures, better cost structures and simplified SKU stacks. In addition, 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.
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.
That letter really does not inspire investor or employee confidence. Seems to be written to falsely bolster a sense of we-have-it-together-folks, but nothing seems to be a concrete plan to generate capital. So far, they announced lay-offs and discontinuation of several plants to save capital, rather than precisely pointing where are they signing new customers. Interesting times. We are seeing a new Kodak in the falling.
Anyone have examples of companies that were in trouble and cut employees and spending heavily and that led them back to success?
My personal experience with working for such companies is that it leads to a death spiral, but I recognize my sample size is small.
Intel is absolutely in a death spiral. Not much else to say. They are cutting cost with no real plan on growth if they are saying they won't invest in the foundry anymore. Foundry was a solid play by Pat, really their only play. Instead Intel seems set to lose whatever remaining relevance they have to their Arm, TSM, Nvidia, and AMD competitors which have a lead in both design and manufacturing a decade in the making.
Apple but only because of Steve
Most big companies has done that at some point, why would it lead to a death spiral? Death spiral happens when you cut too late, so you are forced to cut but you are still running a deficit and just has to cut and cut and cut without thinking.
I'm not arguing that layoffs lead to a death spiral.
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.
Having been on board meetings - most people just follow the trends - honestly musk triggered this way back when he laid of twitter and nothing happened
Twitter was not a capital heavy business.
Yeah people still have a hard time accepting how effective that was.
To any software engineer, it was obvious that was going to work.
Software companies are bloated with people who...don't make software.
I mean they also have a large number of people producing investment goods vs doing operations. If you cut the former it's gunna take quite a few years to see the effect.
Twitter was never an attractive business and isn't one now, unless the goal is to have control over the hype cycle.
No real mention of GPUs, instead they're "revitalizing the x86". Reading between the lines, my guess is that Arc is getting cancelled soon. (Don't spend it all in one place, NVDA shareholders.)
Besides no mention about GPUs, there was no mention about their future server CPUs.
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.
I almost get the feeling the only thing Intel thinks it has left in terms of value is the brand name itself; a blue sticker to put on consumer/business devices, nothing more. I also would have liked to see Intel continue to pursue its own GPU technology but the engineering culture required to keep that going might have died a long time ago, and the MBA vultures running Intel are only just now burying it for good.
Statements like
>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.
But Intel got big on its dirty&complicated architecture, didn't they? There's a reason why their processors support more than 2000 different instructions. The only relatively "clean" parts of the architecture are the base 64-bit extensions, which came from AMD, and AES-NI, where the operations were already well-defined before Intel implemented them in hardware.
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.
The most worrying aspect of this statement is the lack of vision from the CEO himself. You direct teams to execute a vision, not to come up with one.
Hypothetically what this means is that teams will now be able to design products that are designed for tomorrows markets, rather than continuing to design products that are fundamentally designed to be sold to existing customers in profitable segments. In other words, product teams don't have to satisfy existing requirements of existing customers. No more legacy consideration
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%.
Tbh APX is a big and welcome addition. Much more useful than yet more vector instructions
> 2. Revitalize the Intel x86 Ecosystem
Extremely sad. What's the justification for ignoring ARM / RISC-V?
What competitive advantage does Intel have with either of those? ARM winning would be a catastrophe for Intel, and RISC-V would only be slightly better.
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.
Thats like saying why should kodak focus on digital cameras. Intel could throw its muscle behind RISC-V and beat the other big boys there
There's no fundamental difference between risc, arm and x86. It looks like when all else is equal (fab, die size) the chips tend to have about the same performance characteristics - so why mess with what's working?
As Apple and MS have shown, from a software point of view the difference is not that important. They both have ARM and x86 products. In Apple's case, the same software actually supports both. They literally just stuff two binaries in their executables. Their OS runs on both X86 and ARM (for now). That's how they seamlessly transitioned to their own chips over the course of the last five years. Users barely notice the difference.
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.
If there is no fundamental difference, then why aren't there more x86 mobile phones out there?
Probably no one will believe this but it's just because Intel didn't put much effort into the phone Atom chips. They could have been really good.
They're also not that different because the latest x86 extension turns it into arm64.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
Fundamental difference when it comes to performance.
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.
x86, ARM, etc. are huge ecosystems and things are orders of magnitudes more complex than we use those letters vs you use these letters for ISA.
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
x86 is the WORST modern architecture if performance-per-watt is considered. And extra power consumption means extra heat.
The only reason why I even still have an x86 PC is to play videogames. For all other purposes I’ve got ARM machines.
What is the energy efficiency difference between x86 and ARM expressed as %?
<1%? 1%? 2%?
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
That article is nonsense, even if it's up to the implementation, not ISA.
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?
Intel doesn't own RISC.
AMD is making money on x86 servers. Is anyone making money doing commodity (i.e. not captive) ARM / R5 server chips for sale? Ampere is losing money and hoping for acquisition.
They’re not hoping anymore. They already got acquired by SoftBank (well technically the deal hasn’t closed yet but I don’t think anyone doubts it’ll close.)
$$$+patents
Don't think it makes that much difference in the kind of places intel typically make money.
There's none.
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.
Intel's market capitalization was approximately $150 billion in 2015, which translates to about $193 billion in 2023 dollars.
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.
And their response is to double down? Isn’t this a clear enough signal to them?
> Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?
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.
Rant:
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.
Either way, Intel needs to get their new fabs sorted out and improve their products. There will be money to be made if Intel can get back the energy efficiency crown. The GPU division are starting to actually enter the lower market segment, but drivers leave a lot to be desired. Reducing work force even more just tells me they have no clue how to fix these issues and are grasping hard.
It's not just drivers. I'd line up to buy a a couple 24GB B580s to play around with local AI, but they're only going to be available in workstation systems. When it gets to the point where you're losing, but still won't sell people things they want, I think it's a good indicator that management is just plain dumb.
It can be rational for big companies to act like this because their existing assets are not protected from creditors.
A small startup can just go bankrupt if it fails, but in a big company (like Intel) there can be more collateral damage
It is not the layers of management that is the problem, it is the quality of management. While great engineers mind their own business and deliver great products, the people that are not great engineers manage their way into management. They are more and more incompetent and corrupt and this is killing the companies, slowly or not that slow. So it is incompetent and corrupt management, not too much management.
If they are moving into management and causing more harm than benefit, then isn't that by definition too much management? Said another way, not having that manager would make things better, all else being equal.
My company is increasing the manager headcount greatly! I suspect it's related to changing to a CTO from USA instead of one from EU.
I don't even know who my boss actually is now.
What does the geographical location/cultural origin of the CTO have to do with management headcount here?
After all all cultures are completely identical
About 70 years ago, C Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson's Law fame) wrote an essay on "injellitance" that you might enjoy.
More here, Forbes 1989 article: https://adamsmitheconomics.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/how-do-y...
It seems like the author of this article requires another reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brimelow
When will people wake up and see that venture capital is driving execs to show growth, overhire, then RIFF to consolidate wealth and drive profit metrics?
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
Intel is not funded by venture capital.
You could remove venture and it would still be accurate
Sorry, but I don’t find it a very insightful comment.
(Removed comment about it being AI-generated since that might be unfair.)
Its not AI generated. Sorry friend. Even if it was, assess the message, not the medium :)
The new fabs were funded by PE.
PE is not VC. VC is targeted at early-stage companies, which Intel is not.
Replace VC with shareholders - the point is the same. Someone wants more money out than in. That same someone doesn’t have long-term incentive to care about our future, or even the customer
To achieve that, business owners do as I mentioned and more. Not out of maliciousness or spite, but out of necessity
Depending on the PE firm, it could make the worst VC look like an angel
Not really. Intel made an agreement with a PE firm while well into building the fabs. In terms of the overall capital spent, most of it is Intel's.
The most of interesting part for me is the acked that dropping SMT was a mistake. I wonder if this means the end of E and P cores.
SMT leads to some nasty bugs. Some customers already turn it off due to security concern. Better adding real core(E cores) than SMT.
Plenty of computing uses don't run third party potentially malicious code.
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.
They are saying SMT for data center. There are no heterogeneous Intel CPUs for that market, right?
Not sure if there are true heterogeneous server CPUs or not, but with Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) you can mimic some similar features. SST allows you to set some cores to be higher base frequency, turbo frequency, etc, in return for other cores having corresponding lower frequencies. Naturally, the cores are not inherently different here, it's just distributing the power/thermal loads differently, so it's not a true heterogeneous system.
> 15% headcount reduction to 75,000
> Return to office in September
So 15% reduction now and another stealth reduction in September
The letter says
> 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
These big companies are run as inefficiently as the government. They can’t fire anyone so they have to do the dance of making things unpleasant - but it backfires because only talented people leave (because they can get a job elsewhere) and all the dead weight stays because they have no alternative so they will just do their commute and sit unproductive hours in their seats and complain. It takes a real leader to turn something like Intel around - not sure if they have that
Yeah it's interesting that a RTO is included, as if remote work was somehow part of the problem. Intel's spiral started at least 10 years before remote work was normalized, and you can make a pretty good argument that they stopped innovating in the early 2000's.
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.
"attrition" is in the plan :)
And if we get them to resign, we save money on redundancies.
Return to office so you can join zoom meetings!
I feel like one of the under-appreciated problems with modern society (1) is the sheer quantity of lies we are surrounded with. RTO is just the current most blatant example (2) in the American economy of people saying lies knowing that they will never be held to account for those lies. All of these lies together are corrupting and destroying civil society, destroying the sense of trust necessary for people to work together, to respect and trust institutions, and to build a better world.
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
You hear a lot about how toxic the hierarchical Japanese workplace is, but the fact that people are willing to openly admit things like "product B is better than product A, but we're going with product A because our CEO is friends with their CEO" ends up being surprisingly refreshing.
I find this difficult to navigate sometimes because I find myself looking around the room and wondering "we don't really believe this, right?" but I can never quite be sure
It is a complete lie unless of course it is backed by firing people who aren’t good enough. But 99% of the execs who force RTO are really just trying to get people to quit - unfortunately this gets good people to quit and crappy people stay
The other day I came to the office to join a Google Meet meeting. Another person near me was also in it, with their laptop speaker on. I'm hearing my headphones and their speaker, plus also them acoustically when it's their turn to speak. So I picked up my laptop and buggered off to a small meeting room where I closed the door and sat alone.
Ah well at least you got a laptop. At the office I have a desktop so I can't do that.
My favorite part about working hybrid is that no matter what, nobody meets in person, except the managers once a week, everything else is a Teams meeting at your desk.
it's called collaboration, and thanks to those sets of complementary off brand noise canceling headphones that welcomed you back to a desk, it's clearly increasing!
I find it such a darn waste. I spend anywhere from one to two hours commuting on what some consider one of the deadliest highways here, not sure how I-4 fares against the rest of the country though. Accidents every single day it feels like.
Ha! They took away my desk, hotelling space for everyone. At least when the layoffs come, easier to pack.
They did this here too, then learned everyone goes back to the same desk, so they're going to do away with it is what I heard.
Mine aren't even noise cancelling, and are so terribly designed that my skull gets painful after just 5 minutes of wearing them.
But I can (at least for now) wfh for the most part.
If one would be skeptical about leadership, one might assume that this is a forcing function for people to quit ahead of the layoffs.. :)
Yeah make the best people who can easily get a job elsewhere quit. Great strategy Intel.
100% It isn’t just Intel though. A large number of Fortune 500 and government are using this same tactic with the same flaw.
What companies are you all going to then?
There's like 10 that pay alot, actually hiring, and have remote work available.
If you're good, the people you've worked with who've left before will make headcount for you where they are now
craziest thing by far on HN echochamber is exactly this - you gotta slave at “faaaaang” to make a living… so wild!
I know a place doing RTO where most teams are at least 50% contractors from Central and South America. You can imagine how productive the office might be for those people, given that everyone is on zoom all day, and there's a whole 4 meeting rooms in a floor with 50 people.
I’ve not ever had to experience that particular management style, but I think it’s the one where they don’t give a rat’s ass about their employees or unique thought.
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.
Has anyone backtested a stock bot that just shorts every company doing RTO? It's clearly a leading indicator for company collapse.
> It's clearly a leading indicator for company collapse.
So, Amazon, Apple, ... are close to collapse?
I was being hyerbolic. I should have made that clearer. That said, there is a nugget of literal truth to my statement.
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.
I can mostly agree with that, with an exception for giant corporations like the mentioned Apple and Amazon. Their runway for making wrong decisions (like RTO) is exceedingly long, due to their money and their moat.
You have a solid point. I also ignore the fact that RTO actually does improve the bottom line in some narrow scenarios, such as when it's used as a backdoor layoff in companies that don't mind losing the best and brightest.
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.
Creatively? Yes, definitely, at least for Amazon. IMHO, for that company there is an internal battle what they want to be: a webshop filled with garbage or a cloud hyperscaler? The way the web shop is degrading, I strongly assume that Amazon will attempt to exit that business sooner or later.
As for Apple, I do love their hardware, but the software side has seen better days.
As the previous poster was talking about finance and the stock market I doubt some kind of "creative collapse" was meant.
Creative collapse can lead to financial and stock market collapse. Particularly Apple has gone through that already once.
See my other reply in this subthread - the money and the moat they have prevents a financial collapse for many years to come, even if they do not improve. So, I doubt RTO is a good indicator for (financial) collapse.
> the money and the moat they have prevents a financial collapse for many years to come, even if they do not improve.
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...
TBF it can also be Google Meet and MS Team ones…
A friend of mine recently quit his job because the CEO insisted on personally reviewing and approving designs. The thing is, as a CEO, he was super busy with other CEO stuff, so my friend could only get small time slots, like 5 to 15 minutes every few days.
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.
I'm having this right now with my manager
But also somehow
> 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.
Chatgpt thought it fit
Nothing says fast and agile like asking your employees to spend 2 hours a day getting ready for work, going to work, and getting home from work. 2 hours sometimes means someone is going to have 0% free time in their evenings. I don't see how this is empowering engineers or giving them speed and focus.
It's to make people quit without having to fire them and pay redundancy. The pain is the point.
i just wish these companies weren't led by sociopath liars is all
We're surely no more than 18 months away from the world's first 4nm micromanagement processor!
Is that something a CEO of a massive company like Intel actually has the time to do in an impactful way? I'm no chip designer but a major chip design sounds incredibly complex and would require a tremendous amount of time & effort to review meaningfully.
Strong Jensen Huang cosplay vibes here but I see some missing elements for this approach to be very effective.
It sounds more like "Why are we making this chip? If you don't have a good answer, it's canceled."
I consult for large bureaucracies where this kind of thing is occasionally enforced.
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!”
I used to work for a chief exec like that. They’d see something on someone’s screen and demand changes, destroying months of carefully planned work with a single comment.
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.
Just remove the duck
It did work for Steve at Apple.
You left out the best part at the end "...before tape-out"
So, he's going to wait until the tape out stage of a major new chip design before he reviews it? Bold move.
It's like a PR review before merge.
Apple worked that way; maybe it still does. If a product wasn't important enough for Steve Jobs to review it then they simply didn't develop that product.
Apple was built around Steve Jobs - he didn't parachute in the company like your average bean-counting CEO does
This is what I wonder about Elon Musk. In retrospect, of course humans could build sexy electric cars, reusable rocket boosters, and ubiquitous satellite data services. But humans, or perhaps more accurately, corporations and governments, DID NOT do those things.
It takes an overwhelmingly powerful personality to get anything done, despite the fact there are billions of capable people on this planet.
Yeah, at best those billions are capable of taking orders and executing it.
to a large extent, the government built those things, and chose musk as the guy to manage the build
Yeah but there arent alot of people like steve jobs out there. Despite what these CEOs think
Corporations and governments have strong incentives to squash such people.
The current CEO is an MBA empty suit. His greatest accomplishment on Wikipedia is "being the most connected CEO".
I can assure you that Tim Cook doesn’t review every product. I seriously doubt he even knows what’s going on with half of them. There is absolutely no way that he used the butterfly keyboards and said they were acceptable.
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”?
> Rumors are, that Cook doesn’t even use a Mac day to day.
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
Obviously he uses his iPhone for everything.
An iPad.
But the CEO of Google did use a BlackBerry years after Android was introduced.
I think the true part of the rumor is that people misinterpreted a reporter reporting that the reporter did not use an apple mouse.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/17/tim-cook-didnt-say-that...
This time next year they'll be spinning it as giving underlings more decision making authority to execute faster, blah de blah. All corporate speak for bouncing off the wall in another direction because what they're currently doing isn't working. Do something different. Anything!
“Major” feels like a weasel word allowing for any level of review.
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?
This guy gave up his engineering degree for business administration. Actually that sounds like what Intel is.
"Thanks for working so hard to help us exceed our numbers and boost our stock price slightly this quarter.
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."
Uck intel? What have they done in the last 20 years?? I would never purchase any intel computer. Apple m series are spectacular.
Agentic AI? How exactly does a chip manufacturer focus on agentic AI? Thats software. How does riding that hype bubble help them male better chips?
This sounds like reassurance that they aren't chasing last year's trends. On a technical level I don't know of any difference between inference and agentic inference.
There is none. Thats what im saying. There is literally no difference to the gpu between running a nueral network for a normal LLM and for agentic AI.
Wanting to be Nvidia is fairly understandable.
Intel should just reposition itself as a hedge fund focused on making investments in Nvidia. They've got enough assets to leverage for capital and the market would eat it up
I am not sure whether NVidia's luck will continue to last as it is currently.
Is driving down the roads you paved luck?
There's a lot of luck involved in the Nvidia story. Twenty five years ago no one was assuming there would be a need for $100M LLM training projects. No one expected the crypto mining demand either. To be honest they are lucky that CPU manufacturing didn't move into SIMD space and that the gaming market grew so much between 2000-2012.
Yeah they paved the road, but it's a surprise that it lead to many good destinations.
The crypto craze benefited both AMD and Nvidia(more for AMD because early day only AMD gpu could be used for mining).
Gaming, crypto, AI 36000 employees There are many others I would bet against instead of Nvidia.
You aren't betting against Nvidia, you are betting against the burden of trillions of profit the hype has put in Nvidia. Can Nvidia really generate that much profits? If not its overhyped and you should bet against it.
NVidia is a great company, with a phenomenal product that they competently developed and made dominant. There was a big element of luck in that, but it won't continue forever no matter how smart and diligent they are.
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?
its unironically going to the moon. the mag7 are doing better than ever:
- 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.
And Intel do make GPUs.
They're trying to make money not chips.
And besides I think you can probably guess that AI is probably the most hardware oriented the industry has been in decades
Oh, I don't know. Maybe build chips that do things 10x more efficiently and sell them a lower cost to compete?
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.
Thats fine. Great even. But thats just normal nueral net inference. Why mention agentic AI over just AI? The gpu doesnt care if the inference is being done for object detection or chain of thought. Intel can only make gpus, their products dont care about the software at the app level.
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.
But "agentic AI" (and LLMs in general) are far less about compute than everyone talks about IMO. I know what you mean FWIW but she does have a point I think.
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.
Intel makes a lot of software. In addition to internal tools, they try to make things go faster on their chips (e.g. the Intel C++ compiler), and try to accelerate new areas of software so people will need more chips (this focus varies over time, of course).
Inference / Agentic AI implies "running models performantly using CPU cores" most likely (maybe with some optimizations / special AVX512 stuff) -- so essentially "welp, no sense in trying to build GPU's, we are too far behind nvidia to catch up".
For the same reason Kodak presented KodakCoin... The stock price boost of joining the herd.
Isn't hardware software-designed though?
focusing its chip + software designs on inference and running ai agents, not on training models
software tools are essential to driving chip adoption; it's one reason why Nvidia got ahead (CUDA)
Are you suggesting that agentic AI is only used to write software?
No im saying that agnetic AI itself is software. The parts that require hardware is just the neural network. The agentic part is all in software. So how does intel focus on agentic AI beyond just making better datacenter gpus? That like a farmer saying they're gonna focus on wedding cakes; they make wheat, the wehat will get used for whatever demand exists down the line, they can only focus on making the best wheat they can?
Is this just marketing?
Will be answered by the ASI - soon. /s
But to be serious: Intel creates software too (compilers for example). Nvidia does provide software too. Its also nice to sell licenses.
In the context of the the lack of confidence investors seem to have in Intels long term vision this makes sense but it really doesn't feel like a good sign for their future
Just the CEO giving 'Lip' service...
[dead]
And even so they can't follow demand for their popular chipsets that aren't AI related but in high demand. We currently can't get N1xx for our devices even though we're ok paying the recent increase in price.
> we have decided not to move forward with previously planned projects in Germany and Poland
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.
They were planning to receive $1.8bn of aid from Poland[0], not sure how much they actually received
[0] https://www.gov.pl/web/cyfryzacja/inwestycja-intela-w-polsce...
No love lost for Intel if it goes away, other than that their Linux support has historically been great.
I wouldn't be thrilled about AMD having a de facto monopoly on x86 production through.
Granted, ISA is less crucial than it used to be, but there's still a lot of x86 binaries in the world.
>Granted, ISA is less crucial than it used to be
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 :)
> "Switch to Mac" means ripping out the whole MS management stack.
Surely that's not the only advantage?
bahahaha xddddd
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.
True except for their GMA500 graphics [1]
[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
"Streamline" must be one of the most weaselly buzzwords floating around today's corporate jargon, and, for some inexplicable reason, LLMs seem particularly fond of it too.
Its happening, the CEO's are using ChatGPT to write the letters they use to lay off people with. What an awesome future!
I for one would welcome our new AI overlords a bit more if C-suite jobs were the get first ones LLM'd into obsolescence.
When I get fired, the news better come in an email titled "Steps in the Right Direction".
Intel is circling the drain. At this point I'm of the opinion that the sooner it dies the better. Its death will probably result in a lot of spin-offs and startups, which might be what the US chip industry needs.
The federal government won't let Intel fail.
They may let them get bought, though.
Maybe this is why they and Boeing are such a mess. The rich kid that can’t fail usually is a total screwup.
The failson theory of business. Someone should write a book.
It’s hard to argue that Intel is critical to national security when we have TSMC making chips in the US now.
That's an interesting way to look at it.
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.
already started happening in Oregon, which will probably be hit the hardest.
They've already spun off their RealSense camera/sensor product line.
It'll never happen. It's the standard US playbook:
- 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.
Intel is in freefall. This seems to happen to most American companies that fail to reinvent themselves.
I've worked under their leadership. Toxic does not begin to describe it. I'm not surprised at all they are in this state.
Anything juicy you can share?
Publishing papers, filing patents, and stacking degrees is more valuable than doing anything actually impactful. Managers expect expertise to be transferrable to any and all domains regardless actual education or experience. Team management is not there to build teams, mentor, create structure, etc. Instead, their job is to be the smartest and most capable person in the room at all time again regardless of background or experience. If they aren't that means the manager is useless. Senior management feels their job is to constantly work on finding out who's secretly hiding how bad they are at their job and then fire them. It's the only organization I'd ever worked in where the smartest and most capable folks were the ones no one ever talked to and management ignored or was actively trying to push out of the org.
A colleague of mine said it felt like working for the mafia. I think that's a pretty apt description.
Jack Welch thought strikes again
what does "50% streamlining of management layers" mean?
I'm assuming they look at the org chart, measure the max depth from the CEO to the lowliest employee, and cut that number by half. It's actually the least worse thing in this letter.
Depending on which layers they cut. I know of a company that last year cut the bottom layer of management, giving managers an average of 20 reports. Maximum disruption
Is it? I have a feeling is God cutting the lower layers that actually get things done
Four layers instead of eight? A large company could easily have IC -> manager -> senior manager -> director -> VP -> SVP -> CxO. Maybe Intel was even worse.
Practically it is more than eight, because when multiple branches of managerial deposits cross on the project you are working on, all of sudden your work depends on decisions of dozens of people and their management chains.
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.
You should see Amazon, some are CEO (Jassy) -> AWS CEO -> SVP -> VP -> VP -> Director -> Sr Manager -> Sr Manager -> Sr Manager -> Manager -> IC
Amazon is known to have had up to 13 or 14 layers for some areas. (source: ex-Amazon coworkers)
Including CEO, I have eight people in my management chain.
No Senior Directors?
My understanding is that say the average employee had 6 levels of management up to CEO before, now they have 4
For those employed, the word "streamlining" is never good.
Nothing, really
Related breaking news, Intel openly contemplates exiting further cutting edge node development:
> "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...
This is a reasonable thing to put in an SEC filing.
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.
Imagine being one of their potential customers reading that. Oof.
15% reduction in headcount, 15% increase in foreign headcount INC
Well, in Intel's case, they were already in a nose dive, so it's not really macroeconomic.
But for most tech companies, yeah -- when money isn't free (or cheaper) there is no business model.
For those who don't know: Intel lost its technological leadership in chip production to TSMC years ago, which means their chips are no longer competitive and have to be sold at a much lower profit margin or even use chips that are produced by TSMC, which leaves Intel little money to develop and build their chip fabs.
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.
I blame INTC marketing that restricted innovation when they had a clear lead to squeeze maximum profits from the current generations. I hope INTC crashes and burns spectacularly.
Hyberbipeline is back :DDDDDD
https://imgur.com/a/dvUSgA3
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.
I see lots of doomers in here talking about Intel failing. Well, the truth is the government will just bail them out again.
But instead let's discuss some turnaround suggestions, starting with:
(1) is the most important and urgent action that Intel can do to sort out their issues.> (1) Acquiring at least one or two AI chip technology startups. (Lightmatter, Cerebrus, etc)
Intel spent $2B on Habana and it went nowhere. Too bad, the hardware seemed promising enough.
> bail them out again.
when did they get bailed out before? And don't say CHIPS because Intel only actually received $2B to build fabs - and that's only a tenth of the cost of building its new fab in Ohio. That's not a bailout.
Intel CEO: Wintel hegemony will save us! Triple down!!
Everyone under 30 reading this dreck on their iPhone with a 5G radio: What the fuck is a Wintel?
Mobile in general (SoCs, CPUs, etc) has been a major growth sector for a decade and a half. Between IoT and actual mobiles (smartphones) it's a tens of billions of units a year market. Intel has not only avoided this market but actively dropped out by selling off any offerings they had in it. They've retreated to their less than a billion units moved per year CPU market to the exclusion of nearly everything else. It's been insane to watch.
Intel is doomed. They're going to Motorola themselves. Hopefully any useful pieces end up with someone with a clue. Unfortunately the fire sale will mean a ton of negotiation for all of the long term licenses around stuff like x86. What a shit show of their own making.
TLDR: "we've gotten ourselves into deep shit by saving money for shareholders. That caused a financial disaster so we'll fire 15% of you and save some more money. What could go wrong?"
Some mutterings were heard about the definition of insanity ...
That's not really what got Intel into deep shit. They got where they are now by ignoring the main business, and spending giga$ on every trend they could stumble headfirst onto. The money returned to the shareholders was reasonable, all the written down acquisitions and failed product lines were not.
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.
I don't agree. They got the trends right. They got the "giga$" right. They just totally failed to execute. For example, there WAS tons of money in making mobile CPUs. Intel invested in it ... and failed to make them. Despite that their mobile cpus were better, I've used them (in other words: it wasn't the technical department failing to produce good enough/better chips. It was sales and marketing failing to sell from a position of having the better product)
Anybody worth shit has already left for the RISC-V startups.
Hey I know a few started up former hw design people that worked at intel just prior... maybe you've all heard of tenstorrent?
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I think your comment is retarded too, no offense.
"We're mad about NVidia and we're taking it out on you"
Elon should buy intel.
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.