from Hacker News

A Message from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to Employees

by gok on 9/18/24, 11:38 PM with 88 comments

  • by Karupan on 9/19/24, 1:59 AM

    > An engine of financial performance

    Cool, new strategy?!

    > Through our voluntary early retirement and separation offerings, we are more than halfway to our workforce reduction target of approximately 15,000 by the end of the year. We still have difficult decisions to make and will notify impacted employees in the middle of October.

    Oh right.

  • by htrp on 9/19/24, 2:03 AM

    > Additionally, we are implementing plans to reduce or exit about two-thirds of our real estate globally by the end of the year.

    But we'll still want everyone back in office in Q1 25

  • by cameldrv on 9/19/24, 2:11 AM

    Man this is sad. My read is that they’re throwing in the towel and they’re going to milk their x86 duopoly and government subsidies through a steady, managed decline into irrelevance.

  • by jordanb on 9/19/24, 1:52 AM

    So their strategy is to cut their way to wall street liking them again. When that doesn't work, presumably, more cuts.

    When did our corporate leadership become so dumb and predictable?

  • by jauntywundrkind on 9/19/24, 3:11 AM

    I have a lot of hope for Intel getting back in the x86 ring with real contendors. Lunar Lake is looking incredible (the MSI Claw with it looks like a stunning system), Arrow Lake ought to be solid.

    I am a little curious to see where Intel goes with data-center chips. They have been expensive and hot, and the many-small-core offerings at least finds efficiency again. Otherwise it's less clear to me what coming up has promise, and gee, it sure seems like Nvidia and AMD both are super focused on that massive data center market.

    One thing that was super interesting in this message was what Amazon want's Intel's 18A for. It's not a CPU, they want it for AI fabric? Interesting seeing the switches be the highest demand. Switch chips are normally quite big, yes? Given how much likelier defects are as size increases, that's going to be a hard test - where-as AMD for example has lots of small CCD's it can stack on a interposer. But also Intel has some fantastic advanced packaging that maybe makes them an ideal partner here - maybe EIMB bridges to PHY or on-package optics stuff, what's grown up from integrated Omni-Path (although not Omni-Path itself, that got sold off already). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...

  • by nxobject on 9/19/24, 2:34 AM

    A few things that I noticed in passing:

    - Intel’s divesting from Altera;

    - Intel seems to be eschewing the consumer device/computer market for more B2B custom collaborations, e.g. with AWS and hinted later on.

    A lot of retrenchment from Intel. Once Foundry’s no longer embarrassing to Intel, though, what’s their plan for anticipating the future?

  • by SlightlyLeftPad on 9/19/24, 1:29 AM

    No mention at all of the millions of defective CPUs, only billions of dollars of cost cutting what could possibly go wrong?

  • by light_hue_1 on 9/19/24, 3:38 AM

    > Our AI investments—including continued leadership of the AI PC category, our strong position with AI in data center

    I had a lot of hope that Pat Gelsinger being an engineer would lead Intel to a revival. But this is total delusion. Intel isn't even a remote player in AI.

    If they can't admit the dire situation that Intel is in, having missed the AI boat almost entirely and even managed to fall behind Apple somehow, they aren't going to find a way back.

    They have nothing to offer over Nvidia for AI. They have nothing to offer over TSMC when it comes to their fab aside from being a US based alternative (and taking billions from taxpayers). x86 has nothing new to offer; their insane moves with AVX have fragmented the platform terribly. It's not even easy to ship high performance x86 code these days.

    Looks like all this is, is an announcement that they're going to fire a lot of people soon to make their financials look good while the ship continues to sink.

  • by scovetta on 9/19/24, 8:02 AM

    I don't understand why executives don't seem to understand the basics of effective communication. It's not like they don't have access to staff and expertise here.

    When you have difficult news to share, get it out first. Be direct and authentic. Say you're sorry, that you messed up (hint: if you are the CEO, every success is partially yours and every failure is partially yours).

  • by Bluebirt on 9/19/24, 6:10 AM

    Okay, this means reducing Innovation to a bare minimum I guess. It is baffling to me, how this giant company manages to suck at everything they touch. They managed to be unrelevant in every trend over the past decade.

  • by arder on 9/19/24, 1:31 PM

    It's really sad to see how far Intel has sunk, back in the good old days they'd lay off 10,000 at the drop of a hat. These days they're so rubbish it's taking them months to deliver those juicy juicy firings. Nice to see they're still doing well with their arbitrary movement of thousands of employees between TLAs though. Man that CCG is looking juicy right now.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 9/19/24, 3:28 AM

  • by MegaDeKay on 9/19/24, 3:04 AM

    No mention of their discrete GPU line in this. I don't know if that is good news or bad for Battlemage and follow-on products.

  • by ilyagr on 9/19/24, 2:38 AM

    I wonder: if my sentiment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41587866 is correct and Intel is essentially giving up on innovation in chip fabrication, what, if anything, does this mean for AMD? I'm quite ignorant on how AMD works, e.g. do they even have a chip fabrication plants?

    If they do, can they compete with Intel's for US govt grants, or has that ship sailed now that Intel got a grant?

    If not, is there room for meaningful innovation in x86 chip design?

    How about TSMC? Do they now have a monopoly on state-of-the-art chip fabrication?

  • by limpbizkitfan on 9/19/24, 3:38 PM

    Refocus on x86? Why would they double down on the archaic stuff?

    Intel has all the opportunity to innovate and they choose not to.

  • by arenaninja on 9/19/24, 2:58 AM

    The death of tick tock :(

  • by reliabilityguy on 9/19/24, 1:58 AM

    The Boeing way!

  • by pharos92 on 9/19/24, 11:46 AM

    It's cringe when a bean-counter attempts to be an engineer, but it's pathetic when an engineer attempts to be a bean counter.