massive intel lay off

[MT]

I can't remember the last time I used a PC whose CPU was 'too slow'. Every one I've bought in at least the last five years has been 'fast enough' for everything I want to do with it, and that includes games as well as work.

So, no need to upgrade, and no new CPU sales.

Add to that the well documented reasons not to want Windows 10, and the fact that a new PC will come with it, means I won't be upgrading voluntarily any time soon. I'll keep using my Windows 7 machines a few years longer instead.

Intel: if you want to sell more chips, kick Microsoft up the arse and tell them to take the telemetry crap out of W10. Tell me when you've done it, and I'll consider a new PC.

Hmm, i pondered if i could run win10 on one of my old PC's, googled around a bit and found out one can actually run win10 on 12 year old 256MB
machine! That suggest something for Intel perhaps!? So in hindsight upgrading to win7 and 8 appears like a robbery, if MS had made win10 lets say
just after XP then none would had to upgrade to a beefier CPU to begin with and Intel to hire all those lazy engineers to make beefier CPU's
and as such would now have not been forced to layoff all those lazy engineers ..  Oh how i remember the days of fanless 486's....

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/you-don-t-need-a-crazy-powerful-pc-to-run-windows-10-here-s-the-proof-1288287

[uncle_bob]

I can't remember the last time I used a PC whose CPU was 'too slow'. Every one I've bought in at least the last five years has been 'fast enough' for everything I want to do with it, and that includes games as well as work.

So, no need to upgrade, and no new CPU sales.

Add to that the well documented reasons not to want Windows 10, and the fact that a new PC will come with it, means I won't be upgrading voluntarily any time soon. I'll keep using my Windows 7 machines a few years longer instead.

Intel: if you want to sell more chips, kick Microsoft up the arse and tell them to take the telemetry crap out of W10. Tell me when you've done it, and I'll consider a new PC.

Hmm, i pondered if i could run win10 on one of my old PC's, googled around a bit and found out one can actually run win10 on 12 year old 256MB
machine! That suggest something for Intel perhaps!? So in hindsight upgrading to win7 and 8 appears like a robbery, if MS had made win10 lets say
just after XP then none would had to upgrade to a beefier CPU to begin with and Intel to hire all those lazy engineers to make beefier CPU's
and as such would now have not been forced to layoff all those lazy engineers ..  Oh how i remember the days of fanless 486's....

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/you-don-t-need-a-crazy-powerful-pc-to-run-windows-10-here-s-the-proof-1288287

Hi

Somehow the idea that an OS should *force* you to upgrade a CPU has always seemed wrong. If you dig into the "why" a bit, it actually is wrong. What forced the upgrade was more the programs that would run on the OS. Simply put, it's much easier to label your software "Requires Windows 95" than to spell out it's real needs. It's been a *long* time since your word processing software or spread sheet needed more CPU. It's not clear that email ever did need much CPU ever. Outside of a few engineering tools (CAD, simulation etc) and some games, it's a rare piece of software that has even forced an upgrade to a 64 bit version of Windows.

The problem isn't that Microsoft did this or that (in this one unique case, there's a lot of other things you can rightly blame them for). It's that the software people run no longer is CPU resource bound. Desktop bloat might force people to drop a bit more RAM into an old machine. It's not likely to force them to get a whole new motherboard after 4 years.

There are *lots* of things people upgrade without needing to. If you believe that all those clothing stores at the mall are only replacing worn out stuff ... think again. Products can sell for a lot of different reasons unrelated to cold hard facts. You may *think* you are immune to that sort of thing ... even if you are, the other 99.999% of the population is not.

Ask Joe average about the CPU in his PC. Chances are he can't tell you what is in there. Right there .. a problem for Intel. Now describe two CPU's to Joe. Stop when his eyes glaze over (likely 15 seconds into the description). Which one will he go for? In almost every case, the one with the higher clock speed. The rest of the specs simply don't get Joe excited.

Remember back when clock speeds went up with each generation of CPU? Remember how you needed a bigger power supply for the new CPU? That's what stopped the party. Finding a wall plug that will supply 4KW is not easy (in most homes ... not here .. but most homes). Running the air conditioning in the winter because the PC is heating the room to much .. no fun. Adjusting the window in February means a cold draft. Power, in a number of ways, is a problem for Intel.

Intel can't sell people CPU's because they actually need a faster PC (they don't). They can't push the one and only spec that 90% of the population recognize as "better", to sell what people don't need. No matter how many times they play with I3, I5, I7 names, people just get confused rather than excited. That's because CPU's *are* confusing, and less and less exciting.

Why do I say less exciting? I have a need to set up a pretty fancy workstation to run a bunch of design and simulation software on. I've been waiting to get a "wow" moment out of Intel's latest and greatest. Instead, when I compare to the machine I built 4 years ago, I get a "is that all there is?" moment. Even with a fairly high powered "need", Sky Lake just does not get me excited. So off I go to Wikipedia ... hmm ... what gets mentioned about Sky Lake? You see a lot about low power laptops. You see mention of use in smart phones (name one) and tablets (not many). Simple answer, INTEL stopped being focused on desktop performance a while ago !!!

So who killed the desktop upgrade cycle? Everybody did. That includes Intel.

Bob

[uncle_bob]

.......

Once you see Intel bolting acquisitions on in order to get a foothold in the next "thing" you will know they are in some trouble.

Look at Microsoft buying Nokia for $7.2B (was it?)  and then a year later writing the value down by a bit more than that. What's the deal with Win10 strategy? If they aren't selling software like they always used to what are they selling? Microsoft seems to be wanting to sell hardware in almost the exact reverse of IBM formerly selling hardware and moving to software and services. You have to wonder if any of them know what they are doing.

There was a fund manager Peter Lynch who coined the term "diworsification" to describe the process of company boards seeking to expand by buying other companies.  Look out for it, it is nearly always the beginning of the end.

Hi

Ok, so Intel acquired Altera end of 2015 and the layoffs hit 4 months later ...

Yes, that's not quite Dell and EMC, but it *was* an acquisition. $17B may not matter a lot to Intel ... hmmm .... how much did they "save" with the layoffs? .... hmmm ...$1.4B ... hmmmm....

Bob

[CatalinaWOW]

IBM has been written off for dead twice in my lifetime, and at least once before that.  The indicators looked at least as bad each of the previous times.  That is, IBM was a leader in industries that were declining because they had been superceded by new technologies.  They didn't appear to have any new ideas, and management appeared clueless.

While past performance does not predict future success, I wouldn't place large bets against them.  But if I was an employee in one of their current businesses I wouldn't get cocky either.  In each of the three past re-incarnations of IBM there was a great deal of carnage among the existing employee base (and to a lesser extent the customers of that technology base.)

[uncle_bob]

IBM has been written off for dead twice in my lifetime, and at least once before that.  The indicators looked at least as bad each of the previous times.  That is, IBM was a leader in industries that were declining because they had been superceded by new technologies.  They didn't appear to have any new ideas, and management appeared clueless.

While past performance does not predict future success, I wouldn't place large bets against them.  But if I was an employee in one of their current businesses I wouldn't get cocky either.  In each of the three past re-incarnations of IBM there was a great deal of carnage among the existing employee base (and to a lesser extent the customers of that technology base.)

Hi

I think the whole history of IBM and it's various revivals from the dead is something we could fill a number of threads with. That's not to say in any way that it's irrelevant to Intel right now. The thing we have not (yet) seen with Intel is their ability to change course. Back in the 1970's they were the obvious "CPU guys". I say that from the perspective of a direct competitor that I worked for at the time. They have been the PC CPU guys since there was a PC to put CPU's into. Can they change focus? We'll see ....

Bob

[rsjsouza]

A report from an insider...   
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lost-your-job-recent-layoff-kim-williams