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.
Didn’t expect CHIPS to backfire this fast lol.
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.
It got us a TSMC fab, soon ish maybe 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.
deleted by creator
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…
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.
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.
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.
You know they pocket those subsidies when this happens.
Right to the pockets of the least useful in the company - the executives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Idk about other subsidies but they’re probably not getting any CHIPS Act funds with this sort of behavior.
They only made 50 billion dollars of profit last year. Won’t anybody think of the shareholders
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…
Prepping for all those spicy class action lawsuits coming their way.
I’m rather OOTL with intel. Mind giving me a short summary? What’d they do this time?
They sold fairy high end processors. They took like 3 months to fix the issue. Processors that were damaged will remain damaged. I think Intel will replace them though.
This saga has moved fast so I don’t blame you, just an FYI Intel has issued a statement saying the microcode update “will” fix all affected CPUs (it won’t, because the damage is physical) and will not be issuing a recall.
We are witnessing one of the more obvious end-game states of capitalism. Intel continues to state they don’t give a single shit about this issue, and will not do anything about it.
The corporate nihilism will continue until the collapse. More and more companies will act like this because why does anything matter when we can profit more today?
What’s the alternative to Intel for a home PC? After getting caught up on this, I won’t be ever buying one again.
AMD
AMD. Maybe Qualcomm in the near future. AMD Ryzen chips are pretty damn good.
Oh man I would love a Snapdragon 8 Gen3 USFF or STB.
I want an arm laptop for work. I almost always use web apps or SSH or RDP. I don’t need or want a lot of power in my laptop, but fanless and big battery life sounds great.
Good to know. Probably have another four years on my PC before it heads out to pasture.
IIRC they sold and shipped 2 generations of CPUs that were essentially defective and unrepairable.
A bug or whatever in their 13’th and 14’th gen CPU’s makes them slowly but permanently degrade and cause crashes. Intel have not been handling the issue as you would hope since the discovery. Denying, downplaying, refusing a recall, refusing extended warranties, the lot. Now the lawsuits are cooking.
Ooo spicy… I’ll have to keep an eye on that.
Thanks!
Not sure a short summary will cut it.
They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.
AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.
Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.
Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.
The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU’s resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU’s to crash and sometimes fail altogether.
A case study for the generations
What is it with accountants being chosen as CEO? Like if you were a competent accountant, you should be CFO, and the CEO is someone who knows what the fuck the company sells and how it profits, which I can guarantee you has never been a competent accountant.
I always like this answer by Steve Jobs on the topic (here it’s xerox, but this also fits Intel pretty well).
This video is perfectly applicable, the rot that sets in in a large company when you have no competition to counteract it is exactly what has happened here.
It’s because the big investors only give a fuck about number go up. Accountants show number go up. All current large investors also seem to have a complete inability to look more than 1-2 quarters in advance, at most. So if number go down, instead must force change to make number go up, but again only 1-2 quarters to make it happen. If number stay down, abandon and go elsewhere.
Institutional investors, the ones with billions in assets controlled, and the real power in this world, don’t give a shit if the company is actually successful, or about sustainability, or anything other than continuous profits at any expense. And that’s how they perceive the accountants.
Number not going up now.
Number not go up?
Abandon ship to the next company where accountant promises number go up.
It’s a little like the sociopath hospital boards, having more billing staff than doctors and nurses. Making a massive mistake for quick profit and leaving it for the next guy to cleanup lawsuits. A little like robocall centers, okay with fleecing the poor as long as they only have to pay roughly 20% in damages, close shop and create a new call center all over again and rinse and repeat.
Don’t forget the potential oxidation issues.
There’s probably a huge story behind why Intel replaced their fab chief just days after it was revealed that he okayed sending out oxidized chips.
Yeah /u/[email protected] kind of understated the problem. They were seeing insane failure rates in data centers like 50%. At this point, any 13th or 14th gen CPU that has experienced any crash or instability should be considered faulty unless you know the cause of the crash is from something else. This isn’t just me saying this, mainstream outlets like Gamers Nexus are saying it.
If you’re a consumer and have one of those CPUs a replacement is probably in your future. And I wonder if Intel even has stock to replace that many at once…
I can’t think of anything like this ever happening on this scale before in computing history.
Lest we forget
You’re probably right, the generation 13&14 will be riddled with lawsuits.
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.
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.
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
I guess Intel needed that QA team, after all.
Two generations of bad cpu’s and their solution is get rid of the workers so they can keep their bonuses.
Gotta keep that angle at 45° forever and ever.
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”.
I wish them brain drain for being such greedy. Let their best people leave to better pastures.
Two words, bean counters.
MBA brain rot
FIFTEEN THOUSAND HOLY SHIT
stop ‘non-essential’ work
So those jobs they’re cutting start with everyone with “Chief” in their title, right?
Of course not. The Chiefs earn every penny by making the difficult decisions to keep stock prices up. /s
There’s a dude in wallstreetbets who dumped a $700k inheritance into Intel stocks. lol
Dude, what the heck is wrong with people. Wealth is wasted on the stupid.
What’s the problem? They put the money back into circulation. That’s a good thing, no?
The wealthy hoard their gold. They don’t circulate it.
The problem is that it is just poor money management. He could’ve been set for life. Put that into an index or S&P500 and get 10% every year. That’s 70k and he wouldn’t even have to work. If you took that 70k and invested back into the fund, you can double your money in about 7 years, assuming 10% returns.
Yeah I agree. That’s what I would’ve done. You saying that wealth is wasted just made it sound like the money dissapeared somehow. He wasted his chance on financial independence, sure, but that’s not away from the rest of us.
its mainly that our modern culture worships money and things whoever has more of it is inherently better.
So rich people make bad decisions because they think that being rich means they are always right, and that their ideas are special and magical and come from a mystical realm of refined thought only people with stacks of cash possess.
And when they fail, they blame everything except their greed focused short sightedness.
Layoffs will make the stock go up. It’s bizarre.
My experiences working for huge corporations have made it clear what an enormous percentage of corporate workers spend all their time on useless busy work, so in theory layoffs can make a corporation more profitable. The problem is that it’s rarely the useless ass-kissers who get laid off.
If the bureaucracy could easily identify the dead weight projects it wouldn’t need the layoffs but that also means it can’t make good choices when doing layoffs.
It’s like chemotherapy.
I just started a corporate job a while ago and they still can’t really tell me what I’ll be doing. My onboarding plan suggests that in month 2-3 I’ll be ready to get into it. Like, dude, wtf?
Just focus on the most important thing: going out drinking with the right superiors.
Ha, yes! I’m also enjoying the second most important thing: the fat paycheck
Yeah, my team has gotten cut and the end result is one management type person per person actually doing anything… They are “managing” teams of one each, effectively…
EDIT: To make it clear, I’m not an Intel guy, just commenting on an ‘Intel-like’ company behavior with respect to being stupid about layoffs.
I had a friend in the '90s who took a $40K inheritance and “invested” it all on $75 Fossil watches, the kind with Popeye and other cartoon characters on them. At least she was able to show them off at parties and get all the guests to go home.
Meh, he bought a significant dip, even if it goes lower in the coming months, in a few years he will be way up. It’s not like Intel will go away, they are in a duopoly market.
Intel has been down from around 50 YTD to 30 likely in a few years it will be back to 50 and he will close to double his money
Though he could have probably just put the 700K into S&P 500 and have his retirement taken care of, since he is in his 20s
Yeah but still… could’ve at least waited a day
Holy F, what an idiot nepo baby. Maybe daddy who pays for college works as a VP at intel
He’s gonna make a ton of money then, because investors love layoffs.
The stock is down 30% so far, so I think you may not understand investors very well haha
Give it time. Next Monday or Tuesday is probably the day to buy.
Layoffs usually cause the stock prices to increase because it shows the company is being “lean” and “cutting the fat”.
Yeah, Intel is down 33% over the last two days… didn’t work this time…
Some layoffs can be seen as “improving efficiency”. This deep of cut is “oh shit, things are screwed”.
It has me oddly hopeful. It sounds like they may have finally realized that they can’t ignore their core product/purpose. However, whether it’s too late or if they have the ability to actually execute is still to be seen.
Frankly, no idea. They talked the talk, but it’s vague enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut out some important people and kept a lot of the bogus crap.
Speaking from a company that has seen (less dramatic) rhetoric around similar circumstances, and everyone on the ground who understood nuance would have guessed certain projects to get canned. Then it turns out they treated the money losing projects as the sacred cows and cut the profitable projects to the bone and put them at risk rather than give up the losers.
Capitalist machines of this size blinded by profits seem to be unable to see what’s actually happening or make logical decisions.
It’s a good thing we gave them BILLIONS of Taxpayer Dollars! Otherwise they would have Laid Off Employees! Anyways we don’t have enough money in the Budget to Feed Starving American Children!
What the actual fuck
I wonder how many of the over 1000 VPs will get canned. You read that right. I worked there at the beginning of my career. I know a lot of people who are now VPs. Only one of them was actually any good. One guy couldn’t even manage his own staff meetings when he was a first line manager. Nice guy, not dumb or anything, but not brilliant, and a terrible organizer.
Ah yes, the ol’ “promoted to the level of their incompetence”. SOP. Or SNAFU, take your pick.
I hope this never happens to me but based on the Peter Principle I won’t know when it happens.
Oh shit maybe it’s already happened…
over 1000 VPs
I used to work for Comcast and it was astonishing how many vice presidents there were. It might be the most meaningless corporate title ever. Even if they had real work to do they never had time to do it - VPs there turned over faster than beignets at Cafe du Monde.
Publicly traded companies are a curse on humanity.
maybe the root-cause is less the publicly-traded part but rather the total lack of any consequences?
but yes i totally agree, any company publicly traded will get a payed-for-CEO after a while and latest at that point is where no problems are resolved any more, but instead are IMHO always created on purpose.
Problem with publicly traded is that there is no personal risk past the price you bought the stocks for. You paid $ 1,000 for some stocks of “evil chemical corp”? Now your financial interest, and thats the only measureable one, would want them to pollute for a damage of $ 10,000 respective to the stock value if that increases your stock price to $ 2,000, as long as the risk of them having to pay for cleaning it up is smaller than 50%. Problem is the same holds true for a damage of $ 100,000 relative to your stock. Or any arbitrarily large amount. Your share in the damage caused could be in the billions, but worst thing the company goes bankrupt and you loose your stocks buying price.
The only alternative would be holding shareholders responsible with their own money, if a company is forced to pay up for damages they caused, going past its bankruptcy.
like i said:
maybe the root-cause is […] the total lack of any consequences
but you used much more words ;-)
“publicly traded” does not imply that consequences would be impossible.
i see the opposite is true.
one could make that “public trade” also “very” public as in ownerships could only be changed together with a public note of who that new owner of that share is in person and only like not allow ownership changes more than twice a week per person, making investment more profitable than parasitic high performance trade. also the current lack of consequences could be improved by making the shareholders personally responsible for everything that the company does, including going to jail when the ceo left the country to not go there.
that could include making those responsible who owned that company at the time of its crime, making trust in the company way more important than that they can cause damage to society in macroscope just to profit in microscopical bits.
this way the shareholders would have a at least one trigger to actually want to look into who that bullshittalker is they want to let into such a position of “their property”
society should take care who they let do things with “their property” too.
All the idiot Americans cheering about scapegoating single mothers as welfare queens since the 80s, never an utterance by anyone with power of all the DO NOTHING private investors that drop their chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino and demand all the profit for no labor whatsoever.
“Fuck you, I’m an owner, pay me.”
Prior to the Jack Welch Ronald Reagan betrayal, the model was correcly “customers first, employees second, investors third.”
Everything falls apart when you give every spare penny to the people who A) dont DO anything to make the money they demand and B) demand the companies they own sabotage their missions and futures to goose net profit for the current quarter so they can profit and walk away having severely damaged those company’s ability to do what they existed for, only to demand it of other companies.
