As somebody said in another thread, it has been over seven months since the search for a new Intel CEO has started, and still we have no proper candidates (or much more likely - no candidates who would be willing to accept this job.) Which truly is embarrassing.
If it continues like this, we'll become the laughingstock of the industry...
Intel's manufacturing woes started with the 2016 employee reduction. It just took a while for that to become evident. The brute force tactics used by HR to make sure that they got enough people to take the buyout packages back fired and too many experienced people took the attractive retirement packages. They made it clear that packages would never be that good again, and they were right. Expecting to get the same results from cheaper RCGs by driving them hard instead of keeping good, hard working experienced people is a flawed plan. People won’t share their experience to the next generation of workers if they think it is going to cost them their job. Each new process technology gets harder to implement. Not having the lessons learned on previous technology releases just makes the job harder. Intel won’t recover the manufacturing process technology lead again, they threw it away…
Intel's manufacturing used to lead semi industry but things changed last year. Now, TSMC is 2 (two) generations ahead of Intel (10 nm and 7 nm) with risk of 3 (5 nm).
New CEO face a daunting issue - how to deal with the manufacturing:
Reform the division to make it strong again --- how?
Close down the division and layoff most staff to use TSMC instead --- blood on street
Sell wafer fabs -- who want them?