Intel fired a fairly hefty 5% of its workforce in 2023. Now stories are coming in that the corporate is planning but extra layoffs this yr.
Bloomberg stories these new cuts could possibly be introduced subsequent week. At the moment, Intel has round 110,000 staff. The report would not quote a selected determine, solely saying that Intel plans to “remove hundreds of jobs”.
Nonetheless, something measured in hundreds will characterize a number of proportion factors of the prevailing workforce. Furthermore, this information provides to the broader unfavorable vibe at Intel of late, what with these crashing thirteenth and 14th Gen CPUs, to not point out Intel’s woefully insufficient response to the debacle.
As issues stand, Intel nonetheless would not have a transparent thought of all of the the explanation why these chips are crashing, it is not recalling them, it hasn’t stopped promoting them, it will not say if warranties will probably be prolonged or what number of chips it thinks has been broken. Good.
Bloomberg additionally stories that it expects Intel’s revenues for the second quarter of this yr to be flat in contrast with the identical interval in 2023, with the likelihood that the corporate will start present some indicators of development within the second half of the yr.
Regardless of all this, Intel’s share worth really ticked up following the report in after-hours buying and selling late yesterday, albeit Intel inventory remains to be down about 10% from every week in the past or so, down 40% from a yr in the past and down over 50% from early 2020.
Presumably, the information of layoffs is seen favorably within the sense that it alerts Intel taking motion to cut back prices and enhance profitability. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless fairly laborious to see the place the constructive narrative is with Intel proper now.
For readability, let’s recap the present state of play at Intel. For starters, the corporate has but to essentially display that its chip fabs are again on type regardless of a grand plan to regain management in fab expertise over TSMC. Its Intel 7 chips are actually 10nm rebranded and even now are trying a bit problematical with these thirteenth and 14th Gen issues. The Intel 4 node, in the meantime, is simply being utilized in a single small chiplet inside the Meteor Lake CPU, the remainder of the chip being produced by TSMC.
Oh, and the brand new Lunar Lake cell CPU is just about pure TSMC with solely Intel-made silicon appearing as the bottom tile on which the compute tiles sit atop. Likewise, most stories point out that Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake desktop processors will largely be made by TSMC, with maybe a number of fashions include an Intel chiplet.
On the identical time, Intel continues to lose market share to AMD in servers, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips threaten its precarious maintain on the laptop computer market, Intel’s efforts to make inroads into the graphics market with Arc have been a flop up to now and, in fact, its two most up-to-date generations of desktop CPUs are damaged. Yikes.
Anywho, this is hoping Intel can get its home so as and rapidly. A wholesome Intel producing nice chips is what we would like for our PCs. It simply feels an awfully great distance off proper now.
