No one needs to guess its in the public presentations they made to investors.
https://www.intc.com/investor-relations/events-and-presentations/presentations/default.aspx
Read through them and its clear they want to reduce R&D, back to the norms before the whole going into phones debacle of the last 7 years. And BK in his BUM showed all the details and even a graph with numbers. R&D is 23% and needs to go to 20% by 2019
Math tells me that 3/23 = 13%. With 90% of the cost in PEG and TMG (the two big R&D groups) being HC, plus its hard to cut other cost like tools, SW etc that make up the other 10% without cutting HC it would seem 13% over the next two years would make sense. PEG is ~20000 so 13% is 2600. Simple math.
But its worse than that... As jobs move from OR to BA, moving to low cost geos and outsourcing on top of this means to go down 2600 and geo shift, cuts in US and Israel will be closer to 25% over the next two years. And it will probably be done in the spirit of we are getting more efficient, small cuts here and there so no one notices, managers with small spans, small teams disappear... no big announcements, no big ERP package.. just a tap on the shoulder and small redeployment package and find a job and your out. The pie will be getting small managers will be guarding turf and what is left of collaboration will go poof... it will be dog eat dog as the engineering world shrinks around them.
ACT last year was nothing compared to what was broadcast by management to employees and Wall Street. This will be a major change. Not sure Intel technical culture survives this...