Thread regarding Intel Corp. layoffs

Intel needs to rapidly restructure its business.

Intel plans on building lots of new fabs and manufacturing plants. The problem Intel has is it doesn't have the products to fill those fabs. Yes they have competent design teams considering they've been behind in process technology for a couple of years now. They have no chance of capturing the cloud computing or mobile markets because their process technology hasn't scaled. in the HPC market density and Teralfops per watt matter. in the mobile market it's also about compute power per watt. If you notice, Intel is participating less and less in the TAM of the semiconductor market. in the desktop market you can produce chips that burn excess power by ja--ing up the voltage and frequency but that doesn't fly in the mobile or cloud computing high density markets. They resorted to turning off features in their chips like AVX-512 because it consumed too much power when used. If you notice, AMD has been steadily gaining market share with much less number of employees because they build a core chiplet that's used in multiple product lines from, mobile, desktop, workstation and server computing. Plus AMD has a discrete Graphics Market GPU competing with NVidia. It's very difficult for Intel to branch into any new markets because their design teams are so large that any new market wouldn't support low volumes for new products. Ever wonder why Nvidia, Broadcom or Qualcomm have higher market caps even without significant manufacturing investments.? Intel needs to split their company up into Design/Marketing and Manufacturing/Packaging. They need to fill their fabs with a majority of non-intel designs. It would be up to the design groups to figure out other product lines to design and sell. x86 is in decline in total share. x86 isn't going away but it's not really growing. What about the compute power for vision devices, driverless cars, etc. Remember X86 only survived because it would run Microsoft Windows. Nvidia has tackled new markets with far less resources consequently they've been able to enter new markets because they can design devices with far less resources in less time plus they rely on their vector processing GPU architectures which Intel really never mastered. Right now the market is valuing Intel's manufacturing fabs and technology with a big fat ZERO (maybe negative value).
Intel's board of directors needs to make the hard decision to split the company up into smaller more focused groups. Intel's design group shouldn't be dependent on single source manufacturing and the manufacturing/fab group shouldn't sink or swim based on Intel's design group lack of 21st designs. Intel's manufacture group should be extremely focused on low power mobile first. Intel's process technology has been too focused on HPC desktop markets which are decline and have plenty of computer power already. The cloud computing market is the professional market that Intel has been losing because of cost and power issues. Adding more and more cores is not the answer for the desktop market. Eventually there will single CPU/GPU designs like Apple M1 devices. There is a point of saturation in the CPU market. In the gaming market the GPU is the focus and offer much more powerful vector compute solutions than CPU.
Nvidia's latest GPU has 76 billion devices probably 12 times the transistor count of a 8 core 16 thread x86-64 CPU. it's going to far more cost effective for the GPU to just absorb the CPU in desktop computing. AMD can do the same. AMD is in better position to absorb the CPU into their GPUs. The motions of the industry are moving in that direction.

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Post ID: @OP+1ja85x4X

7 replies (most recent on top)

Intel finally spun the fabs off

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Post ID: @85jjt+1ja85x4X

Intel finally does have great products in PC. Leadership products. Trouncing the competition. You can see that with the Customer announcements. DCG is where they need to catch up and if they make the right decisions over next 1 year, they very well could.

Now haters can feel free to dislike this comment.

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Post ID: @1vif+1ja85x4X

Intel has been chasing the market since Otellini, and losing ground since BK. Pat's cart is so far out in front of the horse, with no plan of execution, that Intel cannot catch up. Until they can produce a product that outperforms competitors (who do deliver as promised), why will people trust them? Why spend billions on fabs when they can't get a competitive product out the door in their existing fabs?

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Post ID: @lmj+1ja85x4X

Intel needs to rapidly fire thousands of indians.

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Post ID: @iyt+1ja85x4X

"Yes they have competent design teams"...Is this a joke?

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Post ID: @txi+1ja85x4X

OP and @xgh+1ja85x4X sadly this is what was obvious ten years ago when Intel had leadership in technology, manufacturing excellence and few could dream of design excellence.

Now Intel design isn’t special and even in x86 AMD is their match. Even using a Foundry Intel design is parity at best, using its own technology is a recipe for product failure.

Process and manufacturing, you are joking Intel isn’t even 2nd class. They have no clue as to how to do leading edge manufacturing, will never have scale, forget the culture and know how of doing leading edge Foundry, no chance.

They do have a good marketing team, they know how to sell people inferior products for lots of money. But the suckers have all been fooled one too many times.

Intel is close to being thr next Kodak / Nokia / Blackberry. For a while thought they could be IBM, now only give them 50% chance. Totally FUBAR, perfect storm for them.

I see Pat will lead a great second ACT

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Post ID: @ehr+1ja85x4X

Agreed. Intel should have moved in this direction five years ago even.

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Post ID: @xgh+1ja85x4X

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