this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
233 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

59672 readers
3246 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Will more funding be needed to keep Intel competitive?

On 1 August 2024, Intel announced financial results for the second quarter of 2024. They weren’t pretty; the company’s stock dropped more than 25 percent as it announced an aggressive plan to cut costs, including layoffs that will impact 15 percent of its entire workforce.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] darkevilmac 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Intel's current CEO is Pat Gelsinger, he's an engineer who was the chief architect of the i486.

It's not just who's at the top, the issue is that the company has gotten too big. There's a reason why AMD with such a lower staff count has managed to leapfrog Intel.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There’s a reason why AMD with such a lower staff count has managed to leapfrog Intel.

Jim Keller was a pretty big reason.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Intel had Jim Keller, and then Jim Keller left prematurely because of political infighting within Intel.

He could barely get anything done and was blocked all the time, because people thought his longer term goal was to become Intel's next CEO.

His Royal Core project, which looked promising, has been cancelled by Pat Gelsinger.

Intel had a goose that laid golden eggs, killed it, then threw all the eggs they had into a volcano.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Intel had such a huge competitive lead during AMDs Bulldozer debacle. I assumed they were still making internal advancements and just sitting on them since there wasn't any need to push the envelope while they had basically no competition.

Now I'm wondering if they did the typical US corporation thing of laying off their actual talent and using their obscene profits from this period for bonuses for their corporate officers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Mostly, it's more that they had massive infighting, different projects kept fighting each other because everybody wanted to own "the next big thing", so they kept smothering other projects in their beds.

Read about knights landing, it was a beautiful piece of engineering that was eaten by politics.

Imagine a knights landing Ai core.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I suspect Intel has a broader product range than AMD to justify the headcount, but I'm not sure where the extra resources should go.

Their networking chipsets were gold-standard in the 100M and Gigabit era, but their 2.5G stuff is spotty to the point Realtek is considered legit.

They've pulled back from flash, SSDs and Optane.

There must be some other rich product lines that they do and AMD doesn't

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

AMD doesn't have fabs, and contracts that work out to TSMC. Intel has fabs worldwide. That alone makes Intel a much more capital-intensive, labor-intensive business.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's a reason why AMD with such a lower staff count has managed to leapfrog Intel.

AMD just makes the designs and farms out manufacturing. Intel has to make the designs and manufacture the chips themselves.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

That should be an advantage for Intel, yet here we are