So they got all that money from Uncle Sam’s CHIPS Act only to lay off 10,000 employees and make themselves “lean”. Govt funded unemployment.
Prepping for all those spicy class action lawsuits coming their way.
I’m rather OOTL with intel. Mind giving me a short summary? What’d they do this time?
Not sure a short summary will cut it.
They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.
AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.
Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.
Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.
The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU’s resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU’s to crash and sometimes fail altogether.
What is it with accountants being chosen as CEO? Like if you were a competent accountant, you should be CFO, and the CEO is someone who knows what the fuck the company sells and how it profits, which I can guarantee you has never been a competent accountant.
It’s because the big investors only give a fuck about number go up. Accountants show number go up. All current large investors also seem to have a complete inability to look more than 1-2 quarters in advance, at most. So if number go down, instead must force change to make number go up, but again only 1-2 quarters to make it happen. If number stay down, abandon and go elsewhere.
Institutional investors, the ones with billions in assets controlled, and the real power in this world, don’t give a shit if the company is actually successful, or about sustainability, or anything other than continuous profits at any expense. And that’s how they perceive the accountants.
Number not going up now.
You know they pocket those subsidies when this happens.
Right to the pockets of the least useful in the company - the executives.
Two generations of bad cpu’s and their solution is get rid of the workers so they can keep their bonuses.
While Intel has absolutely been losing money on its chipmaking Foundry business as it invests in new factories and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, to the tune of $7 billion in operating losses in 2023 and another $2.8 billion this quarter, the company’s products themselves aren’t unprofitable.
So what I’m getting here is that the CEO and or the board decided to invest in something that is losing a ton of money and so now 15% or more of the people who have been working diligently to actually make the company money are going to pay for it by losing their job.
So what I’m getting here is that the CEO and or the board decided to invest in something that is losing a ton of money
Intel has an enormous technical debt that they’re finally struggling to pay back after they hit a brick wall with their 7nm Titanium chipset.
It isn’t that this is wasteful spending so much as it is big upfront costs for future productive development.
That said, the fact that this work has to be government subsidized in order to be done raises the question of why this business is private at all.
I’m not sure I want the gov and huge amounts of my tax dollars going to operate federal gov chip fab plants. On the other hand I get your point that it is so heavily subsidized it is practically a de facto situation anyway.
I’m not sure I want the gov and huge amounts of my tax dollars going to operate federal gov chip fab plants.
That is ultimately what the subsidies amount to.
On the other hand I get your point that it is so heavily subsidized it is practically a de facto situation anyway.
I think the question isn’t “Do I want my tax dollars going to X?” (because they’re going there whether you want it to or not - semiconductors are an essential industry in a modern post-industrial nation). The question is how you want the business to operate. As a for-profit venture focused on returning the maximum profit to shareholders over the smallest time frame? Or as a public utility, focused on generating a sufficient quota of useful products for a fixed unit cost?
Part of the problem with the Western/Americanized economic system is that the second kind of enterprise is increasingly difficult to find. And where it does exist (the USPS, the state university system, the federal reserve, the SEC/FAA/EPA) there’s been so much privatization and regulatory capture that these institutions appear incapable of fulfilling their mandates.
But constantly diverting responsibility for fixing the problem by saying “I don’t want my tax dollars involved in this failed thing” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution. At some point, the public (and by extension the state bureaucracy) has to engage with our corrupt and failing economic cornerstones. Otherwise, we just become beholden to the nations we import from.
“Let Saudi-ARAMCO handle it” isn’t a solution I find particularly appetizing, either.
Doesn’t the US have semiconductor chip sanctions in place on China, specifically because it’s a national security concern? If semiconductors are that big of a deal that we need to sanction China over them… maybe they should be nationalized.
Doesn’t the US have semiconductor chip sanctions in place on China
Taiwanese Semiconductor is the global industry leader, and half of their output is sold to China. Korea and Japan are also major exporters. The Chinese manufacturers don’t care about losing access to Intel chips, when they’re a generation behind the curve anyway.
maybe they should be nationalized.
Wall Street would flip its lid if the US tried to nationalize Intel.
In January 2022, Intel announced an initial $20 billion investment that will generate 3,000 jobs,
Not sure why Biden didn’t put any terms and conditions on giving away all this money 💰?
The string is that they use it for the creation of a domestic chip plant, not salaries for existing employees.
Lets hope they ditch the israel division
Why that specifically?
Linkerbaan isn’t capable of any discussion that doesn’t involve Israel, and must involve it in any thread he participates in no matter how irrelevant. This is just what he does.
So, buying opportunity?
“Here is more evidence that our system is fundamentally broken and doesn’t serve the people who make it run anymore”
You: “How can I profit from this?”
You sound like a CEO in the making.
I mean, stock prices do go up after stuff like this. It’s a reliable way to profit.
The system sucks, but this is literally how rich people turn money into more money, while we complain we don’t have enough.
I may be a socialist, but I live in a capitalist dystopia, so sometimes I just exploit the system that exists instead of constantly taking the idealistic high road and getting kicked in the teeth for it.
Even Marx dabbled in the equities markets.
People seem to think having an economic philosophy is the same as having a moral philosophy. Absolutely not. If you look at a system and conclude “This is dysfunctional, it’s leaking money everywhere” that doesn’t preclude you from getting a sponge and mopping some of that money up.
Seems like a great time to buy AMD, ARM and QUAL
It’s a good thing we gave them BILLIONS of Taxpayer Dollars! Otherwise they would have Laid Off Employees! Anyways we don’t have enough money in the Budget to Feed Starving American Children!
