Thread regarding Intel Corp. layoffs

Jim is a legend and rock start. No company had as much money and perceived talent and competitive advantage as Intel. When he came and left quickly says it all.

How many CEOS has Intel had. Why did Bob step aside, why did Pat decline and finally demand unconditional support from board. Why has Pat said no government money no fab?

Duh, the IDM2.0 and IFS model is a broken Dinosaur on the way to extinction strategy. Don’t matter what you try if you believe it’s the time of the Dinosaurs when it is really mammal time you have the brain of a reptile and will go extinct.

How did Intel do in the biggest semiconductor bo-m, contracted. Totally past the pivot point and in denial and soon dispair.

Layoffs are all but certain

@2xxq
Cool idea for JK to ki-l NGC and push for atom being the locomotive for intel future chips with 100+ cores. But then what?
Then he left, and israeli team is back in charge with cpus. How's SPR going?

It's a damn shame is what it is.

That RK said “Intel has a great GPU architecture" tells the difference between him and JK. The AXG arch GM was forced out. Many new hires from AMD, Qcomm, Imagination are fixing the architecture. I didn’t see RK made any deep technical presentation like JK. JK has the guts and vision to ki-l big initiative like NGC. RK is just a politician, diplomat, salesman, showboat, good at talking pretty PowerPoint slides. His first noticeable impact is bringing in professional PowerPoint graphics designers; our PowerPoint slides do look much fancier.

In answer to "Raja brought Jim to Intel not vice verse." (I wrote the "Clash with Murthy was the final straw") - it's very likely my brain mixed up the order of events - I stand corrected, apologies!

And, on Raja - he's not all bad, most of the things he was saying since he joined were smart - perhaps obvious to industry experts outside, but went against the grain internally. One example was the constant downplaying of the importance of big GPUs for computation and feeble attempts to do it "Intel way" with Larrabee offshoots (Xeon Phi, etc.) which went nowhere.

But, Raja also had/has a blindspot (well, at least one) - he did not see Intel's GPU architecture for what it was, and did not understand the changes required. Few months after he joined he said that "Intel has a great GPU architecture" which is what most people within intel were telling themselves, but was demonstrably false. And instead of fixing it, he went on doing costly and complete nonsense media campaign and chasing short term goals for publicity, none of which went anywhere (https://youtu.be/bNPdJ8hKPTs).

Now Raja and Co. keep implying "hardware is good, drivers are the problem" which again shows how badly they misunderstand the subject. They are one and the same thing, two sides of the same coin. If your GPU is designed so it is less compatible with established market leaders, and has easy-to-hit glass jaws, and you expect to "fix it in the driver" - then yes, you can blame the driver when it's bursting at the seams due to complexity and compatibility issues, but ultimately it's a consequence of the bad architecture design.

Mix that with PatG who was and probably still is really clueless about GPUs - and has been for 20 years - and you have a recipe for.. well definitely not a success.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080412184652/http://www.dailytech.com/NVIDIA+CEO+Were+Going+to+Open+a+Can+of+Whoop+A-s/article11448.htm

Agree with the post "Clash with Murthy was the final straw" except one thing, Raja brought Jim to Intel not vice verse. Raja was Jim's manager in AMD? It is very sad that Jim could do his contributions while he was in AMD and a couple of other companies, just not when he was with Intel.

I admired Keller because he was one of the few in upper management who could understand the issues facing Intel and openly speak the truth. Most of Intel is pretty inbred and can't see the forest through the trees so to say. I seems like in the last 7 years Intel has lost so many people in leadership that were willing to speak the truth.

Nothing like sitting in your 3rd level staff meeting week and week listing to HR and there fans drone on about diversity while the Intel fails around you.

"No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke
And chromium steel
And we're waiting here in Allentown"

Think about it.

For awhile things were going good under Jim. Difficult and correct changes to our methods were just beginning to happen. We really could've been more competitive under that path. In retrospective, that was all just minimal effort window dressing by the product team leaders. We quickly resumed the staus quo: the same inefficient Intel way. Never learning from our past mistakes ( that would be admitting...), always learning the hard way, no capacity to do it right the first time - then defend it as the correct trial and error technique. Fail quick and fast sure, but there are some areas where you don't require failures to accomplish what you are doing.

Clash with Murthy was the final straw - at least those were the rumors while I've been there. Murthy was useless waste of space - like many Intel execs - knew how to talk the talk but didn't walk the walk. He got fired soon after Jim left but damage was done. Intel is rotten all throughout, Jim was doing a good job but couldn't do enough in an environment of too many vested interests and backstabbing politics. Decisions at Intel are more often made on what gets someone promoted than what's good for the products and company long term.
The only thing I've got against Jim is him bringing Raja Koduri to Intel. Raja is another talk-the-talk and not-walk-the-walk executive who did squat to fix Intel's GPU and wasted years and is responsible for the awful state that Arc product line is in now.

Sounds like he knew what he was doing and that also threatened some people like Murthy

The absolute fanboying of this guy is insane.

@cna+1jXpo4fu IFS is a joke nobody spent more time and money when they were ahead. In 2015 Intel was on top of the world in technology and they couldn’t make it work. Now they are years behind on technology, decade behind on ecosystem and about 10x behind on scale to be competitive. 10 years ago IFS would have been compelling. Today it is a money pit wet dream

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/pdf/foundry/sunit-rikhi-keynote-semi-gartner-market%20symposium-presentation.pdf

I think the that was the 'canary in the cage' warning for investors. Arguable one of the best architects in the world leaves. He put Apple and AMD in position to win and he couldn't do the same with Intel?

Was he for outsourcing or against it?

I am EE and was silicon designer inside and outside Intel. I worry Intel really has no idea what it even means to run a foundry business. Intel has tried multiple times and failed. If you really want to play this game, then hire 4-5 top guys from TSMC and be prepared to change Intel's org structure, spend twice as much money and time as you think and be willing to fight this out for 20 years. Even then I seriously doubt it will work.