So they got all that money from Uncle Sam’s CHIPS Act only to lay off 10,000 employees and make themselves “lean”. Govt funded unemployment.
This is an admisson of no future.
They’re throwing crew out of their boat full of holes to assure investors they’re ship shape… for the next quarterly profit report.
Their corpse will be long since picked clean of their patents, assets, and trademarks by 2030.
Non essential work, oh dear Product and Project managers, where are you gonna stand in the way of good products next?
Executives will be “essential”, QA, sys admins, etc will be non essential.
Eliminating QA is a huge value. We all know it reduces costs relating to employing people, but that’s just the start. It eliminates the number of bugs found and reduces the amount of work that comes with it. All in all it helps projects to release on time. There could be no problem with this, clearly.
If you don’t check it, it never fails a check!
What’s there not to like?!
All my KPIs are saying this is a win.
Traditional QA is horse and buggy shit anyway. Shift left and make your tests the requirements (ATDD). Testing is self service, automated and there’s zero delta between behavior intended and behavior tested. Put product owners on the hook to learn Gherkin and Bob’s your uncle.
Two generations of bad cpu’s and their solution is get rid of the workers so they can keep their bonuses.
Part of the lackluster CPU problem is that Intel was pissing away their money on other adventures. CPUs were “in the bag”, so they kept spending money on other stuff to try to “create new markets”. Any casual observer knew their fundamental problem was simple: they got screwed on fabrication tech. Then they got screwed again as a lot of heavy lifting went to the ‘GPU’ half of the world and they were the only ones with zero high performance GPU product/credibility. But they instead went very different directions with their investments…
For example they did a lot to try to make Optane DIMMs happen, up to and including funding a bunch of evangelism to tell people they’ll need to rewrite their software to use entirely new methods of accessing data to make Optane DIMMs actually do any better than NAND+RAM. They had a problem where if it were treated like a disk, it was a little faster, but not really, and if it were used like RAM it was WAY slower, so they had this vision of a whole new third set of data access APIs… The instant they realized they needed the entire software industry to fundamentally change data access from how they’ve been doing it for decades for a product to work should have been the signal to kill it off, but they persisted.
See also adventures in weird PCIe interconnects no one asked for (notably they liked to show a single NVME drive being moved between servers, which costed way more than just giving each server another NVME and moving data over a traditional fabric). Embedding FPGA into CPUs when they didn’t have the thermal budget to do so and no advantages over a discrete FPGA. Just a whole bunch of random ass hardware and software projects with no connection to business results, regardless of how good or bad they were. Intel is bad for “build it, and they will come”.
Gotta keep that angle at 45° forever and ever.
Two words, bean counters.
MBA brain rot
I wish them brain drain for being such greedy. Let their best people leave to better pastures.
What the actual fuck
Seems like a great time to buy AMD, ARM and QUAL
Only if you have conviction. Buying tech in the face of recession fears is one thing, but buying tech that supplies hardware to tech is another. It’ll probably sound like a whip cracking if the AI frenzy ever collapses hard
ARM and Qualcomm aren’t really involved with AI, and AI only makes up 15-20% of AMD’s revenue. Nvidia the one to watch out for, an entire 85% of their revenue is just AI and Mellanox. The Nvidia pump has been insane.
The elephant in the room is the semiconductor ETF trade. People are actively trading ETFs more than actual tickers (SOXL is routinely one of the highest volume tickers day in and day out, and it’s been like this for a couple years now). Used to be that NVDA and AMD correlated with crypto because people would flip them on that basis, but not really the case anymore due to all that but I digress - if NVDA tanks, it’s really overweight in all these ETFs, ETFs tank, managers dump every holding in the ETF, and a bunch of non-AI semi stocks will wind up getting walloped about as hard
That’s true, Nvidia’s fall will probably crash the whole market. SOXL tickers don’t trade in unison though, see how much Intel fell in the premarket without affecting other stocks. Of course, Intel is a tenth of the size of Nvidia.
Yeah, the tail could definitely wag the dog. NVDA is now in the top 3 holdings of both SPY and QQQ, so if something like 2 Metas or 1 Microsoft started paring back and skipped on a product cycle, Nvidia’s forward metrics would suddenly be garbage, and between those couple companies, suddenly >15% of market is tanking and dragging entire sectors along for a wild ride
Nvidia’s AI gambit is at least diversified to different kinds of AI. Even if (or probably when) LLM AI taps out, Nvidia will likely also be behind the AI tech that takes its place.
I honestly don’t think investors can tell the difference between LLMs+SD and more useful neural networks like audio and video filtering tools. All the money is in LLMs, anyways, I don’t think anybody is buying $1B of datacenter CPUs for the more useful kinds of AI.
I feel like they have the farm bet on Falcon Shores and (to a lesser extend) the Xe line now, and of course the foundry.
It’d be great if the bad rumors and delays would stop… yeah…
The money needs to return to the government. Some wealthy fucks are lining their pockets.
So they’re only keeping marketing?
I just sat through a “town hall” at a former GSK now Haleon site and a site director assured people that volume was coming back through nothing but the power of marketing alone. Apparently 8 dollar tubes of toothpaste are non sellers in a tight market. Who knew.
There’s no corporate death penalty, but there is corporate death from alcoholism, coke overdose and syphilis.
I mean, you do a TRAFU and instead of firing those logically responsible for it you fire your actual troops.
This basically means they failed to find scapegoats inside the company who wouldn’t be management themselves.
Wow.
FIFTEEN THOUSAND HOLY SHIT
Somebody should make a Borat Meme with AMD and Intel “Big Success!”
Done.
Thank you kind sir!
You know they pocket those subsidies when this happens.
Right to the pockets of the least useful in the company - the executives.
And here’s where I say - what does an executive actually do? And someone will inevitably say something asinine about “risk” and “game changing decisions” and “meeting with investors.”
I’d rather they try and put a random janitor in the CEO seat for a year and see what happens.
Couldn’t be any worse than the current shit stain.
If you watch these companies they all want to be tech giants when they have no reason to do so. They hire tech execs from the giants thinking they’ll make some great business hybrid withithe help of the tech execs,but you know what? Sometimes a brick is just a brick.
Two things happen, the tech execs lead them on a wild goose chase since they have no idea how to function in a different industry and people get fired, or the CEO is scared and ignores the suggestions to follow the same thing every other company does and people get fired
what does an executive actually do?
According to conservatives, they trickle all over the rest of us. Isn’t that nice of them?
I’m still waiting - mouth wide open, head and hands towards heaven (where it comes from), for the trickle of capitalism to run down my face and enter my mouth.
And here’s where I say - what does an executive actually do?
I just see them as a figure head for the people really in charge. We are now focused on dumb ass CEO decisions or announcements instead of the board voting to ship jobs overseas or something else terrible.
The risk bit is self-evidently bullshit. Executives are the last to suffer when things go wrong. They can tank the whole company through greed and incompetence, and still collect their salaries of millions plus even bigger bonuses, before walking into a similar position somewhere else. It’s the employees that shoulder the risk.
It’s always the boot lickers saying they. CEO used to be THE guy in charge. It used to be someone who knew the company and worked their way up. McDonnell Douglas/Boeing used to have engineers in charge. Same with GE. Then Jack Welch came along and destroyed that entire ideology.
He was the one that opened the door to late stage capitalism, at least in the USA. It’s hilarious how these companies piece meal themselves off acting like they did something for short term gain. Meanwhile, the Japanese, Chinese, and European companies are happy to buy all this knowledge as they are still playing the long game rather than the MBA clown show.
I’ll have you know they deserve that money for doing a job no one else wants! Talking to other executives! /s
That’s…wait. That’s actually a decent point. Imagine being around the scummiest, fakest people in the world 24/7. I couldn’t deal with it.
For a couple hundred million a year i think i could deal with it. For like, one year, and then retire.
They only made 50 billion dollars of profit last year. Won’t anybody think of the shareholders
Idk about other subsidies but they’re probably not getting any CHIPS Act funds with this sort of behavior.
Probably just keeping the staff needed to replace all the 13th and 14th gen CPUs.
I really hope they plan on fixing the problems with those generations. 🤞
They aren’t fixing shit since the problem is unfixable
I suppose I should’ve phrased it as, compensating. Seeing as they are still being sold.
American companies don’t compensate unless legally obligated.
And then they send you a $10 Uber Eats card.
They just want you to wat out of their hand so you don’t have a standing to sue.
The problem is fixable in microcode -if- it hasn’t already caused damage to the CPU. Most CPUs are fucked.
It sounds like a workaround, not a fix. And it’s not clear that it stops the processor degradation, rather than just slowing it.
There’s no such thing as stopping processor degradation, it’s just that it usually takes so long that nobody cares anymore.
The micro code fix is to throttle the CPU. It’s only kind of a fix.
And the “fix” (big foam helmet) is not even out yet. They don’t have the chips to replace them all right now and are still selling more. You can help yourself by setting the clock speed (no boost) yourself.
Oh and after the foam helmet gets put on they will still sell these using the old higher specs.
Didn’t expect CHIPS to backfire this fast lol.
I don’t think it backfired…I truly don’t believe the Chips act is a jobs act. It is to address manufacturing gaps in semiconductors within the US. The US government wants semiconductor manufacturers to update foundries and gave them money to do so. The jobs that have been added within the industry have been icing on the cake but not the original intent imho.
Is this really a backfire? My read is that they’re actually focusing on their core business (plus cutting down marketing). It sounds like the right move, but maybe I’m too optimistic?
The CHIPS plants just started being built a few months ago. This is bad for the employees and short-term investors, but long-term Intel will be fine and the plants will be a net positive to the country.
Chips Act, Take 1: Hey Intel here’s 8 Billion dollars to make us more chips in the US. Intel: I gotta let 15,000 of you go, there’s just not enough money…
It got us a TSMC fab, soon ish maybe lol
I thought they would be more tacit about it. This is too obvious and too soon after taking taxpayers’ money. But they probably don’t care anyways. Who is going to stop them or hold them accountable?
Several tech companies have really stopped giving a shit lately. Intuit laid off a ton of people and referred to them as “not meeting expectations”, and Intel’s laid-off folks are now all apparently working on non-essential stuff.
Imagine losing your job and being told second-hand after you’d been shown the door that you were shit.
Fuck these companies.
Stagnation, baby.
Yes, I agree, and I think it’s a reflection of society’s values over the past 50 years.
We are living in a world with more of a “make money and fuck all else” mindset. Children of wealthy elites are living very privileged childhoods, and as a result, have less empathy and more contempt for real people. We are now seeing the effects of living in a society where the needle of social values is pointed 100% on the side of capitalism and 0% on the side of moral values. And how that has affected our perspectives of a society at large: a general lack of caring, a lack of empathy, a lack of conscientiousness from the top, tossing normal, real people aside like rubbish in a bin.
We’re seeing what happens when you let a generation of incredibly entitled children grow up to take the reins of society. We all know how it ends…
(And for what it’s worth, I think a long, extended Great Depression-style event is much more likely than a violent conflict, especially given how docile citizens of the west have proven themselves to be over the past several decades.)
I do a moderate amount of work with Intel, and I’d say the problem is not that the people are “shit”, it’s that their bureaucracy is so messed up. You have the people that actually engaged with their customers (support and sales), who marketing largely ignores, and marketing makes up stuff that isn’t in sync with the field guys, but that’s hardly a problem because the development executives then go off on their own “cool” ideas, without any buy in or anything from support, sales, or marketing. This has real impact, but then you have some middle managers spooling up side projects with like a dozen dedicated people each, adding another indirection of effort totally disconnected from any business capability.
So end result is you have an admittedly qualified team toiling away on a project that there’s just no way a potential customer will even hear about, working on problems that someone “imagined” that a customer never had, or is trivially solved in the industry already, but they don’t have the experience to know that. Even when the work is good and people might want it, it’s still doomed to obscurity because there’s such a disconnect between the engineers and any actual communication with potential customers.
