Or is it too late for Intel?
I'm not as defeatist as some people here who seem to believe Intel will be no more in a few years (really???) but I do believe we are well past our prime.
No matter what happens next, we are going to have to be satisfied with being in the middle of the pack.
with the company hemmoraging experienced technical staff and leaving behind the politicians and bloviators? not a chance.
No. It cannot, the success Intel had in the 90's was phenomenal and largely attributed to a huge economic moat, intel benefited from a great product with any serious competition hard to come buy, ramp time to become competitive not feasible to try. So success and lots of stock splits. AMD was the only competitor, never a bad company just smaller but it did compete - imagine the price of a PC for the end consumer without AMD's presence. Through misstep after misstep, Intel failed to stay at the top of the market and now is just another mediocre competitor in the production of chips. It possible that the company can improve and move forward , but the competition is coming at it for all of the various markets. In the 3 to 4 year timeframe improvement chances seem slight.
Given the recent continued failures its much more likely that its current downward spiral will continue. There is no CEO, continued delays to 10 and 7 NM production, excuse making, the addition of 'Fellows and VP's, the moral within the company is at an all time low, all of the significant leaders have fled, others were pushed out, the only strategy is forced fear to the rank and file (perform or your marked as failure w SS4), so result is a Focal process that is entirely broken.
Tipping point has been past !
It's the BOD, stupid!
i wrote here in July 2017 that Intel had only 5-7 years left before it's decimated and not recognizable compared to the Intel of say 5 years ago. BK has severely hurt us both short term and long term while pocketing so many millions. to me, one of the really crippling mistakes has been forcing diversity by firing so many long time, Intel blue bleeding employees and allowing far less qualified people to back fill them (if any back fill at all) simply to meet some made up and random diversity targets. Such a devastating mistake as we have seen demonstrated repeatedly with the issues, delays, cratered stock and low morale. Soon enough Intel will be a second tier supplier and tens of thousands will be fired. Soon after that, will Intel even be in the chip business? Sounds far fetched, but there is plenty of precedent for one time giants of their industries quickly vanishing from the landscape. Open your eyes.
@1nln There won't be.
The company will "get back to where it was" but the employees won't.
Upper management pocket the difference.
This shouldn't be any kind of a surprise.
@1twf But you might get your pity promo if you work like a slave for years and there aren't any URMs jumping the line.
@1kva Something was better than the nothing that we're getting starting this year
GPTW has been effectively dead for about five years. It's laughable to think of it as any type of serious program in the real corporate world.
I wouldn't call GPTW events "perks".
Last I checked Oregon quarterly budget was down to $12 a head. That gets what, a medium sandwich and a drink at Jersey Mikes on Cornell Rd?
@wud GPTW events.
Personally I think the Qualcomm peeps on this board are completely wasting their time because some Intel high-ups are already top experts at lowering employee morale lol
@hfx For the rank and file this cynical cost cutting results in the lowering of the political envelope, among other things. It used to be only the gr9 to gr10 promo had political overtones and a years served waiting list, now it's arguably down to gr6 to gr7.
what perks are left to cut now? the rank and file are operating in starvation mode while fatso leaves at 4pm in a chauffered town car.
@vjk oh don't worry they've cut plenty of perks nowadays lol
@nrl That was done with cutting back compensation and perks, pre 2000 Intel was among the top in comp, the start of the slide to bottom tier started then.
Also it does not help that cpus are a commodity now and id--t management missed both the mobile and GPGPU compute models. Watch them flail playing catchup on ML and AI.
@wrm still didn't see a huge cut even back then. Headcount ballooned even more afterwards
yonah was already demonstrating competitiveness even as Prescott was floundering and intel had the luxury of a backup plan after canceling Tejas. Intel resorted to paying off builders with massive kickbacks until Plan B came to fruition.
nowadays, Oregon's attempt to wrest cpu core development back from Haifa is in tatters after numerous departures and epyc will have a two year window to eat Intel's lunch.
@ipw oh I see, so that's what happened to Intel between Pentium4 and Core2.
Uh huh. Surrrrrre.
@cfw - The difference being that AMD was always a much smaller company so they were able to survive with less market share, lower margins, etc. Intel is a huge, bloated, rudderless behemoth which means that any marketshare or margin loss will require quick cost/hc reductions, therefore Intel will be a much smaller and less relevant company 5 or even 3 years from now.
intel is already ogre, competence has given way entirely to nepotism, tr----s, diversity hires, and 9 to 5 bloviation in pointless meetings.
stick a fork in it
"we are going to have to be satisfied with being in the middle of the pack"
...which is exactly what AMD did for ten years between 2007 and 2017.
@xfk - I agree. There's a lot of movement of internal 'tax' that has occurred over the last few years. Originally, it was to shift the burden of process start-up to DCG from CCG, which helped keep up the CCG margins in what was then a plummeting market. For various reasons, the desktop/notebook market has remained relatively stable and that huge chunk of Intel business has performed well. This was a brilliant move by BS, but even he could not have predicted the 10nm debacle, which not only opened the door to AMD, but also to begin to affect DCG margins. This is where the cracks are starting and will worsen as 7nm foundry gets into production (and I'm equating 7nm Foundry = 10nm Intel) this Fall.
Listen to both Intel and AMD conference calls - the margin issue at Intel got a lot of questions to which there were no good answers. That spooked a nu ber of analysts, and Institutional investors are starting to rotate out a % of their positions from Intel to AMD. This will continue throughout the week, and then settle down until a new CEO announcement bumps up Intel stock for a few days. Q3 earnings are gonna be a fun watch.
Just remember that the low down, dirty skank, BK, put the company in this position. BoD must get,bat least, half the blame by selecting such an inexperienced skumbucket to fill that role. Now the company will pay for it.
Intel just did 5 billion in pure profit last quarter.Yeah let that sink in. You are right you are not defeatist. You are just a skunk trumpet!