Intel to lay off 12000 workers soon

Heard this on the news yesterday. It is attributed to declining demand for workstation CPUs. The report went on to say that Intel will be focusing on developing chips for mobile devices like smartphones. Doesn't bode well for us enthusiasts.

sucks to be a "fringe" person.

Maybe there's something good in this for AMD.

This came out after a report that Apple's chips were beating Intel's by a mile, coincidence much

trents said:

Maybe there's something good in this for AMD.

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That they should run , not walk , for the nearest exit?

Kenrou said:

This came out after a report that Apple's chips were beating Intel's by a mile, coincidence much

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Do you mean in the mobile device market?

I feel for the workers that lost the silicon lottery.

trents said:

Do you mean in the mobile device market?

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Yep, the iPhone 6S chip left pretty much ALL the competition in the dust, and there were a lot of joke references to the Intel mobiles not keeping up with Samsung let alone Apple.

This was one of the reviews i remember reading : http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-apple-quietly-built-a-silicon-empire/

Kenrou said:

Yep, the iPhone 6S chip left pretty much ALL the competition in the dust, and there were a lot of joke references to the Intel mobiles not keeping up with Samsung let alone Apple.

This was one of the reviews i remember reading : http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-apple-quietly-built-a-silicon-empire/

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Interesting read. Thanks.
Still doesn't change how I view Apple.

Sounds bad, but this [laying off intel workers] might be a good thing for AMD!

I guess I'm one of the minority of people whose lives don't revolve around their cell phone. I'd rather have a fast desktop or laptop.

trents said:

I guess I'm one of the minority of people whose lives don't revolve around their cell phone. I'd rather have a fast desktop or laptop.

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I agree. I don't need a ton of power on my phones.

But I think this is where Apple is big - the mobile sector so it makes sense for them to take big steps in this area. Their desktops can't compete with anything out there.

Apple desktop, laptop is powered by intel. I'm glad intel is cutting out some of the fat, they don't need so many employs for workstation CPUs.

wingman99 said:

Apple desktop, laptop is powered by intel. I'm glad intel is cutting out some of the fat, they don't need so many employs for workstation CPUs.

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Exactly, the mobile world is there area to shine.
Seems like they are doing well which is not well for intel!

Good news for us.

At the same time, Intel said it plans to invest more in "growing" areas of its business, such as convertible laptop-tablet devices, as well as gaming. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/19/technology/intel-layoffs/

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Intel is reducing costs as computers are not selling good. Still they say on all conferences that desktop sales went up by ~7% or more in last months so it's great market to invest. I just can't see how can it be good when most users move to laptops or other smaller/more mobile devices.
I also can't see how it can be good for AMD when reductions are caused by general low market sales what is well known for a long time and at least for me it was expected. AMD has even bigger problems in this case as their hardware is selling worse and general sales are low. If they won't come with any great and well priced products soon then they will lose even more. What is doing Intel is not really affecting AMD right now. There is much wider market for them than desktop PCs and AMD is way behind Intel in generally everything.

Intel will invest in:
- servers ( storage based on SSD ) and services, mainly services
- gaming computers - somehow they think that their IGP are also for gamers so they improve it
- mobile devices and low power chips, also for desktops - you can see that in plans for next years are mainly BGA chips

AMD is focusing on:
- mobile devices where are far behind competition
- IGP/graphics computation where are quite good but market is not convinced to their solutions
- they want to back on desktop market with new products but desktop market is going down
- they invest in low power server chips and so far they fail - think only ARM branded by AMD for servers which is constantly in tests for maybe 3 years ... and it's already old technology

What I see is that Intel doesn't have to do anything to keep good sales but they reduce costs. AMD need solid products or will disappear from the market. All what is keeping them alive are deals with Microsoft and Sony and some graphics products. They can't keep it for long as these are already old ( 3-5 year ) but refreshed products.

Woomack said:

Intel is reducing costs as computers are not selling good. Still they say on all conferences that desktop sales went up by ~7% or more in last months so it's great market to invest. I just can't see how can it be good when most users move to laptops or other smaller/more mobile devices.
I also can't see how it can be good for AMD when reductions are caused by general low market sales what is well known for a long time and at least for me it was expected. AMD has even bigger problems in this case as their hardware is selling worse and general sales are low. If they won't come with any great and well priced products soon then they will lose even more. What is doing Intel is not really affecting AMD right now. There is much wider market for them than desktop PCs and AMD is way behind Intel in generally everything.

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It's been ages, AGES, since I've heard somebody mention a build they made with an AMD chip, CPU and GPU alike. As far as I can tell AMD has its roots in the pre-built section of the industry. Most of your cheaper lappy's and desktops will have an APU in them nowadays. But in the custom build community AMD's existence seems to have been forgotten. Unless I'm missing something

But hey, at least AMD can say they made a chip that went past 8GHz with Liquid Nitrogen.

Vishera said:

It's been ages, AGES, since I've heard somebody mention a build they made with an AMD chip, CPU and GPU alike. As far as I can tell AMD has its roots in the pre-built section of the industry. Most of your cheaper lappy's and desktops will have an APU in them nowadays. But in the custom build community AMD's existence seems to have been forgotten. Unless I'm missing something

But hey, at least AMD can say they made a chip that went past 8GHz with Liquid Nitrogen.

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Intel still has higher shares in the cheapest laptops. Many brands don't trust AMD so much to put their chips in anything more expensive. Other thing is that AMD doesn't have anything faster what wouldn't need additional backpack to carry battery. Lowest AMD chip worth anything is ~17W. Lowest Intel is ~4W. IGP in AMD is really slow if you compare these lower models so they won't win with Intel even there.

I think that IBM or some other brand had 10 or 12GHz CPU. I don't remember exactly and can't find it now.

I see it as whole FX generation ( bulldozer etc ) simply killed all trust that AMD had on desktop/server market. Before that they had some server series in mass production and their desktops had higher % in home/office series. Now you simply won't find any AMD based servers from some bigger manufacturers or at least nothing is on stock.

AMD should fire all people who are planning their product lanes and all their marketing research department. They clearly have no idea what are the market needs and it's not changing for last nearly 10 years.

trents said:

I guess I'm one of the minority of people whose lives don't revolve around their cell phone. I'd rather have a fast desktop or laptop.

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Same.
Lol im rocking with my Nokia E5.
Btw im writing it from the Nokia so yeah, And this site pretty optimized for the Nokia browser *claps*.

This is not a big employee cut it is only 11% for intel they were just vary bloated the employees they are cutting were not doing anything at work, there just doing some reorganizing it will save us money in the long run for are gaming PC's

wingman99 said:

This is not a big employee cut it is only 11% for intel they were just vary bloated the employees they are cutting were not doing anything at work, there just doing some reorganizing it will save us money in the long run for are gaming PC's

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Sorry, I don't agree with any of the points you are trying to make here.

Cutting 10% of your staff is A LOT.

It's not going to save us squat.