Intel Confirms Major Layoff: 12,000 Worldwide, 11 Percent of Workforce (ieee.org) 238
Tekla Perry writes: It's all about the cloud and the Internet of Things, says Intel explaining the planned layoffs, which will affect some 12,000 employees. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich promises in an email today to employees, that the "transition" will be handled with the "utmost dignity and respect." According to IEEE Spectrum, "Intel Corp. today announced that it would cut some 12,000 jobs -- that's 11 percent of its total workforce -- by mid-2017, with the majority of those affected getting the bad news within the next two months. In a press release, the company said the 'restructuring initiative' would 'accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and the billions of smart, connected computing devices,' and that the company would be increasing its investments in 'data center, IoT memory, and connectivity businesses.'"
Damn cloud (Score:4, Funny)
I never really understood what it is, but I knew it was up to no good.
We can't say we weren't warned.
Re:Damn cloud (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, the cloud, yes. I just knew this had to have something to do with global warming.
Re: Damn cloud (Score:5, Funny)
I blame AMD. And hip-hop.
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Everything is about climate change. If you don't think so, that just proves you don't properly understand the topic.
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Moderated down for being a stalker
Sorry - I was just trying to get an answer to a question I've been asking for a week now. Thank you for your mod.
Vaporware (Score:3)
Are not clouds powered by vapor? Embrace the vaporware.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Damn cloud (Score:5, Interesting)
So you can buy a cheaper PC and get more overall processing done.
Unless you need that processing done locally for one reason or another, or else the prices being charged by "the cloud" were exorbitant or required subscriptions that essentially cause you to pay for unused cycles.
I'm not yet convinced this is actually the reasoning behind this trend. I suspect PCs are "fast enough" for the majority of the market, and the minority that requires faster PCs is going to end up paying more or possibly be starved.
Re:Damn cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only PC's but Servers as well.
I have a set of 5 year old IBM servers that run dual Xeon 2.9ghz processors with 4 cores each and there is ZERO reason to replace them. In fact I just picked up a pair of identical barely used units for parts for under $190 each off of ebay and replaced the SAS drives with cheap SATA SSD drives on the backup unit for testing to dramatically increase disk access speeds. (Yes my SAS raid controller happily manages SATA SSD drives)
I could spend another $10K to replace the two or simply spend $2000 and keep them going for another 5 years just fine. the 10,000Base T network interface is faster than we will need, and the SAN works just fine.
Intel has not made a processor worth upgrading to for over 5 years and the current gen stuff is less than 20% better than the older so there is no reason at all to even toy with upgrading. My new lenovo laptop is actually SLOWER than the old one it replaced, the 6th gen intel i7 processors are complete crap.
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there is ZERO reason to replace them
Current CPU technology handles almost all user cases perfectly nowadays, so I blame lack of general-AI research on that, as that would need hardware many orders of magnitude more powerful than what's currently available. But since software has basically stagnated, hardware caught up to it and things are now in equilibrium. No wonder then CPU makers are in trouble, and shortly GPU makers will be too.
Now, when GAI becomes real and in need of truly powerful hardware to be useful, when we see that throwing hard
The network is the computer. (Score:3)
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Unless you need that processing done locally for one reason or another, or else the prices being charged by "the cloud" were exorbitant or required subscriptions that essentially cause you to pay for unused cycles.
The nascent sharing economy has one very obvious application: sharing unused CPU cycles of people's desktop computers for processing. It's so much easier to distribute units of processing to other machines than to share your car or a room in your flat. It's just a matter proper software. The extant solutions focus on highly specialized tasks like certain scientific workloads, but the principle is universal. If we can't have Plan 9, at least we could get some level of resource virtualization this way.
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In other news, Microsoft apparently hates AMD (since Intel chips tend to have a smaller number of faster cores while AMD chips tend to have a larger nu
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If "the cloud" meant that costumers pay less, Intel wouldn't be switching to it.
Re:Damn cloud (Score:4, Funny)
If "the cloud" meant that costumers pay less, Intel wouldn't be switching to it.
ah! so that's why my last Intel sales rep's email started out with "trick or treat!". now I get it.
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What if it means the cost is 30% lower, and Intel can charge 30% less and have more consumers and make the same profit margin? That stabilizes Intel's business and opens up for consumers to buy more products. This is why cars still cost an average 56% of the annual income, yet they come with anti-lock brakes, satellite radio, independent suspension, EFI, and all kinds of other shit that wasn't on a similarly-expensive car in 1950: the cost came down, the price came down, and they sold you more things in
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The big cost of chipmaking is R&D, not per unit manufacturing, and the cloud won't reduce that by much. That's a one time cost that Intel has to pay no matter what, which is why it's in their best interest to try and extract as much money as they can from the technology they spent so much on developing.
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Layoffs in the Valley... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's odd that as Intel and AMD have shed workers -- they put the "Silicon" in Valley after all -- absolutely useless companies like LinkedIn are sprawling all over Sunnyvale. I understand why a company needs a large workforce to make microprocessors with nanometer thick wires, but I have no idea why you need thousands of people to run a website.
Maybe investors are just dumb....?
Re:Layoffs in the Valley... (Score:5, Insightful)
Four reasons
1)Scale. Scale is hard. Its not a solved problem. It takes a lot of people to make things run at scale.
2)You only see the tip of the iceberg. The algorithms for advertising, selecting what stories get shown, etc are 10x the size of code you see on the website.
3)Non-engineering. Want to monetize that website? You need salesmen, marketers, and the support staff to provide software, HR services, etc for all of them.
4)Speed. While you can't speed up small projects by adding more people, you can work on two projects at once by adding more. That's what they're trying to do. A team of one could write everything, given a few centuries. If you want it all delivered in a year, that takes people.
Re:Layoffs in the Valley... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who's talking about chip makers? The exact same logic applies to a factory making crisps. People fail to realise that basic business is not easy and any sizeable company, even one doing something perceived by some to be of no value will have the same type and number of departments to keep them going.
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How many people do you think Intel really need to run those robotic factories, beyond the one pressing the "start" button?
How many at Intel you think are involved in marketing, sales and support?
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Tons. I was replying to the "why do you need thousands of people to run a website" part. Fuck, intel has factories- that alone is hundreds to low thousands per factory. Of course intel has 10x the number of people linkedin has, because they need 10x.
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I seem to remember "Intel Inside" on just about every premade computer I've ever seen in school, administration, work, etc. Pretty effective advertising platform.
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1)Scale. Scale is hard. Its not a solved problem. It takes a lot of people to make things run at scale.
For services, that just sounds like insufficient automation. Expect progress in the future.
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Probably. I did early webservices at Amazon in 2005. At the time they had amazing tools for the industry. These days the generally available ones put those tools to shame. The problem is that someone has to solve the problems a first time, then a second time, then a third time to see what the shape of a generic solution might be. And since these are competitive advantages (and since they're usually customized to a particular company) they don't get open sourced very fast. So expect progress, but its t
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5) Customer service. From my experience with a medium-sized web site, CS takes up easily 1/3 of the workforce.
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They should have just used MongoDB
Re:Layoffs in the Valley... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Once companies like that dry up be afraid. These folks run the economy and have a boundless desire for wealth. I'm not sure what they're going to do but if you're a member of the working class instead of the ruling one it's not going to be pretty...
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So how's that any different from any other time in history?
This time we know it's coming (Score:3)
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and it's not entirely impossible we could do something about it. Trump, believe it or not, is the working class trying to do something. You're laughing, but he at least supports Tariffs and other pro-worker policies.
I'm laughing because Trump only supports Trump, and you think he gives a shit about anyone else. History shows that such an idea is fucking stupid.
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Working (Score:2)
It's also not that difficult if you have the wherewithal to become a highly paid engineer at Intel. Not a lot of people do. Take those kids in Flint, MI. None of them are going to be engineers now. That's not how lead poisoning works. Yeah, that's an unpleasant thing to say,
Re:Layoffs in the Valley... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Investors are stupid.
What? They're stupid for artificially inflating the stock price and making a massive profit? No. They're morally bankrupt. That's very, very difference. Never attribute to stupidity what is clearly due to malice. You can tell it's not stupidity when it comes packaged with success.
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It's the same thing. They are stupid because they are trading in long term consequences for payday today. All the shit they are doing will eventually bite them in the ass.
No, the shit they are doing will eventually bite you in the ass. They will have the money to retire to the last nice spots on earth and it's unlikely that it will become terribly unpleasant before most of them die, since most of them are wrinkly old white men with short life expectancies due to their lifestyles.
Another DotCom-type crash may be good for SV. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not that we want people to lose their jobs, but maybe what Silicon Valley really needs is another DotCom-type crash.
I mean, what positive things have Silicon Valley as a whole really accomplished over the past 10 years?
Well, they've managed to make advertising and the collection of personal data far more invasive and pervasive than it was before.
They've given us "social media", which is really just another way of delivering targeted, inane advertising, and harvesting personal info.
Anything new showing some potential, like virtual reality, is quickly being hijacked as yet another method to, you guessed it, deliver advertisements and collect personal data!
The programming languages they've created, like Go and especially Rust, are nothing impressive. We're still using C and/or C++ for any and all real work, and will be for some time.
Databases have taken a big step backward with all of the NoSQL hype they generated in Silicon Valley.
Web browsers today are worse than they were a decade ago. Just look at how badly Firefox has regressed. Its UI went from being really usable to being awkward to use thanks to Australis, lots of good functionality was removed, lots of dumb functionality was added in, and its performance still causes problems for lots of people. Chrome isn't impressive either.
The price of everything, and especially of housing and rent, has been distorted beyond belief in San Francisco and the surrounding areas, causing untold headaches for long-time residents.
Silicon Valley has a lot of potential, but so much of it has been wasted these past 10 to 15 years. Maybe another economic reset is just what that region, and the technology industry in general, needs.
Re:Another DotCom-type crash may be good for SV. (Score:4, Interesting)
We're in the start of a dotcom crash, things are exactly like they were back in the late 90's and 00's. Startups and other companies with huge bloated valuations(see nearly all startups currently), have thousands of employees but the numbers have increased from hundreds to thousands in the span of a few years(good example twitter and uber). Product development is at a stand still, but they claim that things are going great, you just need to wait a bit longer for all that stuff(aka directionless see twitter, yahoo and uber). Advertising revenue is falling through the floor, specialized sites are shedding editors/writers, right now clickbait sites are shedding both(see gawker, salon, guardian for example). Sites that didn't use that, are suffering from massive declines in revenue because the ad rate of payment is dismal and advertising dollars are disappearing.
Specialized gatherings/groups are being highjacked by extremists and are basically falling off the map as they produce nothing, in turn people lose interest. And VCs are seeing this and either demanding their money as soon as their return period is up or simply labeling it a lost cause and walking away.
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
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I mean, what positive things have Silicon Valley as a whole really accomplished over the past 10 years?
Well, they've managed to make advertising and the collection of personal data far more invasive and pervasive than it was before.
I was going to write a big witty reply but Google just harvested a lot of personal data and used it to tell me that the traffic on the A15 is bad and I need to leave 20min earlier to make my next appointment.
I'll refute the view of those people who only see the negatives and don't see the positives later, likely from my mobile phone which will remind me because we've synced up everything with my PC via a cloud based service. When I'm done I hope to educate as many people who want to listen by posting it on
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Technical snobbery. Lots of real work is done in languages like C# and even Javascript. The company I work for has a cloud platform (Azure) that is a mix of C# and JS, and which does real work detecting and locating leaks in water pipes. Billions of litres of water saved. People go out to side and dig up the road based on where it says the leaks are.
I happen to do the embedded site, which is all C and assembler. None of this namby-pamby C++ "classes" rubbish. But I respect the cloud guys because the data my
Re:Layoffs in the Valley... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry! These layoffs will be replaced with plenty of new jobs for H1B folks!
So I guess it will all work out for the best . . . in the end . . .
. . . maybe . . .
"It's all about the cloud and Internet of Things" (Score:5, Interesting)
Internet of Things = Intel is being forced to chase razor-thin margins just to have a new market to soak up their excess semiconductor production capacity.
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Who needs employees when you have diversity? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who needs employees when you have diversity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not making even a single judgement call, but is some unanticipated overhead, right?
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Intel's bottom line last year was over $11bn. So a one off hit of £300m a few years ago is hardly likely to be the straw that broke the camel's back. And diversity isn't expensive, certainly not expensive enough to cause 12,000 layoffs.
This is just Intel realizing that the market is going to shrink and acting before it is forced to, so that it can do it in an orderly fashion. They are still hiring in other areas.
Diversity has just become the default boogyman, followed by H1B and unions.
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It just occurred to me when I RTA that this might represent a larger problem that modern western companies have in competing with China, Inc.
There are seemingly many constraints (environmental regulations, fair wage & benefit issues, lawsuits, et al) that whittle away at any imagined western competitive advantage.
Who to blame? (Score:2)
Re:Who to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who to blame? (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel is a manufacturer. ARM is not.
The manufacture of flash chips alone dwarfs any impact that ARM could possibly have.
Inside my desktop:
1 CPU
1 GPU
16 flash chips
Inside a smart phone:
1 CPU
1 GPU
1 ASIC
4 or more flash chips.
Picking up the pattern here?
If Intel is laying off so many, its because some of their fabs arent running 24/7. Intel has 16 fabs and maybe 3 of those (the most advanced) actually make CPU's. The rest bang out flash, ram, etc. Eventually the current "advanced" fabs wont be so advanced and will be making flash, ram, etc..
Intel can also manufacturer ARM designs (and has so in the past) so that cannot be it. The fact that they are not producing ARM designs while simultaneously they are laying off workers.. that doesnt tell a 'beaten by ARM' story like you imagine. It instead tells a 'beaten by the other foundries' story.
Re:Who to blame? (Score:5, Informative)
While ARM is a tiny company compared to Intel and likely always will be, they've had an enormous impact on Intel's inability to leverage their manufacturing and design prowess for the desktop->mobile inflection point that's been occurring for the past 7 years.
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You're missing the forest for the trees.
The forest is the 16 foundries that Intel has, while its you that seems to be missing the forest and focusing on the few fabs that makes x86 chips.
Yes, ARM has a nice low power CPU design. Yes Intel also designs CPU''s. These fact are irrelevant. You are missing the forest.
Re:Who to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the forest, you pointed out in your previous message how many more chips get put into a computer vs a mobile device. That's fine except for the fact that PC shipments for 2016 will probably be around 270 million, compared to a projected 1.5 billion smartphones. Add to that tablets, internet of things, microwaves, automobiles, etc.. etc.. etc..
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the core reason for ARM's success is because they've been the performance-per-watt leader for embedded solutions for a very long time, including the early days when Intel even licensed ARM's technology for their StrongARM chip.
Which interestingly was the fastest ARM chip on the market at the time... and also the most power-hungry by far, resulting in piss-poor battery life for PocketPC devices at a time when they had no nonvolatile storage and if your battery died, so did your data. Microsoft+Intel teaming up to bring us overpriced garbage again.
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Re:Who to blame? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know we want to blame somebody. Anybody. Who is responsible?
Third order responsibility goes to the sales people, that apparently can't land enough contracts to keep all their fabs running 24/7.
Second order responsibility goes to the director of sales, who either hasnt replaced the bad eggs or hasn't provided enough staff to land contracts fast enough.
First order responsibility goes to the executives, who havent replaced the director that has failed to maintain contractual demand for the companies existing capacity.
There. That wasn't so hard. Its only hard when you complicate it unnecessarily with pretensive irrelevant hand waving bullshit.
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No matter how good a sales, if there is no demand (for lack technical need, for lack of economic need, for lack of money with customers, whatever) there are no sales. That could also be an issue. The market moving to mobile devices - smaller and fewer chips than a desktop or even laptop) may be yet another reason slowing sales.
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What if there's a demand for 1 billion chips one year, and a demand for 1.5 billion chips the next year; but, in the second year, you've retooled on a new process you invented which requires 50% as many labor-hours to produce each processor, so you can make 1.5 billion chips with the same number of employees who made 0.75 billion chips last year?
Answer: Your sales go up, and you lay off 25% of your workforce.
Can't blame Jobs (Score:2)
Mac sales are still going up, so Apple is actually the only bright spot in Intel's future (even though through the constant work on Arm they are also the cause of the demise).
I think Arm would have had similar success without Apple though, as the rise of mobile computing was inevitable - Apple just hastened it a bit.
shareholders (Score:2)
fucking shareholders
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I'm no authority but I can think of a few things that might affect it.
1) our workers aren't as good as they used to be, or maybe it's better to say they aren't as effective. There's no need for new hardware because software is becoming too simple in areas, and not pushing the limits fast enough in others. As an end user, the adobe line of products took a huge step backwards when they switched to their online versions of their software. Features that used to work fine, no longer worked. Things you really
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1) our workers aren't as good as they used to be, or maybe it's better to say they aren't as effective
The exact opposite is true, and is the definition of technology.
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Hello, Welch-era GE. (Score:2)
Trying to sneak it through in smaller bites doesn't help.
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12,000 jobs isn't a lot in a 350,000,000 American population with 170,000,000 labor force in a 7,000,000,000 population world.
The reduction of labor force per product made has important and highly-desirable impacts [wordpress.com], unless you would rather spend twice as much of your money on the basic food and clothes you eat now, and buy half as much cool stuff while reducing your access to health care.
Writing off 12,000 citizens == always bad. (Score:2)
Only if they're able to afford what is available
Unless you're a far-removed economist, trying to justify it against the technically capable subset of the workforce (much smaller than even the 170m) is a stretch.
I can see it if... (Score:2, Interesting)
I can see it if it's the team and support making their stupid Atom CPUs. They've utterly failed as a line to do anything like break into the phone business, meanwhile their main "Core" CPU line has been squeezed down enough with the Y series to get into fanless tablets. Meaning there's neither rhyme nor reason to keep the Atom line around at all.
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Its not about chip designs. Its about production capacity vs demand.
If a manufacturer is doing significant layoffs, its because their production capacity far exceeds the demand for it. You are waving your hands about a chip design you think isnt very good, that you don't see it in many products, but that is not a worthwhile measure at all as to whether or not they should continue making that design.
Apparently you are so naive that you imagine that Intel just runs off millions of chips without them
Times and tech are changing (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel has to restructure. It's too bad that they couldn't move some of those employees over to the growing parts of the business. Intel's business is kind of a niche one. Where will those laid off employees go? AMD? Motorola? And that's assuming that they need people.
And when Yahoo! starts their fire sale, there will be re-orgs there as well as layoffs and it will flood the market with even more tech people.
There are some bad times coming to Silicon Valley.
Re:Times and tech are changing (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel has to restructure. It's too bad that they couldn't move some of those employees over to the growing parts of the business. Intel's business is kind of a niche one. Where will those laid off employees go? AMD? Motorola? And that's assuming that they need people.
And when Yahoo! starts their fire sale, there will be re-orgs there as well as layoffs and it will flood the market with even more tech people.
There are some bad times coming to Silicon Valley.
Not to sound like a cruel heartless asshole and sorry for the SV folks reading this but I have to ask the following? Do kids fresh out of school need to be pulling 70k a year??! Does someone with a bachelors degree only in computer science and has 5 years experience need to be paid $120,000 a year??!
NO!
What will happen is a price correction to more of $45k a year for college grads coding and 85k a year for senior programmers like it should be compared to other fields. IT is overvalued as financie majors start at onl $15/hr fresh out of college.
What we have is a bubble. I may get an angry response and be modded down by someone who feels they should actually make 6 figures but you can kiss the ass of those who have masters degrees and 5 years experience in other fields and make just 65k a year. Seriously.
Re:Times and tech are changing (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to sound like a cruel heartless asshole and sorry for the SV folks reading this but I have to ask the following? Do kids fresh out of school need to be pulling 70k a year??! Does someone with a bachelors degree only in computer science and has 5 years experience need to be paid $120,000 a year??!
Do the CEOs need to be pulling in 9 figures a year??!
NO!
Define need. If someone is contributing enough to profit then yes it's worth paying them $120,000 per year. And, while there's money to be made, there will be competition for good people which will push prices upm even if evil people try to illegally suppress wages.
I may get an angry response and be modded down by someone who feels they should actually make 6 figures but you can kiss the ass of those who have masters degrees and 5 years experience in other fields and make just 65k a year.
Some types of skill are worth more than others. Stop worrying about what others have that you do not and instead concentrate on what YOU have that makes YOU happy. Unless you are richer than your peers (and given the bitterness, it appears not), then there is nothing to be found in the former bath but misery. If you embrace the latter, you will be happier.
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Not to sound like a cruel heartless asshole and sorry for the SV folks reading this but I have to ask the following? Do kids fresh out of school need to be pulling 70k a year??!
They do if they want a place to live in the Silicon Valley.
What will happen is a price correction to more of $45k a year for college grads coding
So which busted-ass state that nobody wants to live in are you planning for this to happen in? You can't afford to live where tech is in California on $45k/year.
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Foreign workers (Score:3, Insightful)
How much you want to bet that when they hire for cloud and IoT stuff, they hire
overseas workers or H1B people.
Accelerate .... (Score:2)
Intel lays off 12000. Hires 2000 H1Bs per year (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but they are lobbying for more H1B's while hiring ~2000/year
Laying off 12,000 people... (Score:2)
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... and yet I'm still getting calls to recruit me for contractor positions at Intel in Hillsboro... strange.
Why would you think it's strange that a company is hiring contractors while laying off full-time employees with benefits? Are you new? And I don't mean to Slashdot, just... new. Like, on this planet.
Fuck, these posting delays are shit. They don't dissuade spammers, who can create multiple accounts and use automated posting so they don't have to care. They only annoy the users who post most of the comments... you know, the comments this site runs on?
What does IoT stand for again? (Score:2)
It's their own fault. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just an observation from the peanut gallery.
In my view, PC sales are in decline because prices have been going up, not staying the same or getting cheaper.
Years ago, I bought a new PC with an i7 920 in it, along with a monitor, and they threw in a netbook for free. Factoring out the other items, I paid less than $600 for the PC - a price/performance ratio that I could not touch when it came time to upgrade. (I tried every avenue to actually upgrade my old machine, but every time it added up to more than buying a new PC). The new PC is only about 30% faster than the old - a far cry from my usual 100% increase.
I have kept my eye on the market as people have been talking about the decline of the PC, and the situation has not changed. We are not, and cannot get our money's worth out of new PCs, so we are not buying them. Ergo, fewer PCs are being sold. Increase the value proposition, and watch PC sales skyrocket - we still need our gaming fix, and we will still buy fast PCs - if we can get a deal.
Oh, and one more thing... Microsoft hasn't helped with their Windows offerings - the braindead stupid interface changes in 8 and up, and now being strongarmed into upgrading to the data-stealing Windows 10. You can't sell me a PC with that OS on it. So yeah, PCs are in decline. Give us a decent deal, and get Microsoft to stick to the better side of it's nature, and maybe that will change.
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In my view, PC sales are in decline because prices have been going up, not staying the same or getting cheaper.
I see your example, but there are awfully cheap ones you can get today. I think the real problem is not just that the CPUs flatlined a bit it's that EVERYTHING did. 10 years ago, a PC wouldn't last for 10 years, then suddenly they did as it were.
I'm typing this on an eee 900, which while getting more than a little long in the tooth still actually works remarkably well for a bunch of stuff. It's 8
Intel takes good care of their employees... (Score:3)
I have a life-long friend who has been at Intel for 15+ years, he works in the fabs and is a ME manager. Intel has always treated him very well. He's thought about leaving on occasion, but he just couldn't do it. Every 7 years - paid 3 month sabbatical on top of vacation. I don't know his salary, but he was doing very well. During the financial downturn, while i was being told I was lucky to have a job and not getting a raise, he was getting double-digit % raises and strong 5-digit bonuses. He gets stock options worth about half my salary. He didn't have any easy job and he was good at it. He had to travel some, but mostly just worked his 40/week and loved it. I never heard anything but good things about working at Intel. He said their philosophy was to hire good people and take care of them, and during down times take care of them even better. I had many conversations with him over beers when AMD was kicking Intel's ass in processors. He said their leadership's message was that it was one of the best things to happen to Intel because it shook them awake. They had become complacent, but would get back on top because they had the engineering ability to do so. Nothing smarmy, no whining.
As with large companies, I am sure that there were flipsides to his story. Maybe it was because he was in engineering, or because of what he did. I was always somewhat jealous of his love for his company, I wish any of my employers would have had half of that dedication and attitude towards their employees.
Intel is RISC ... x86 a facade (Score:2, Informative)
RISC WINS! Yay SPARC!
RISC already won, long ago. X86 has been RISC for a while. Legacy x86 instructions are translated into core RISC instruction and the later is (re)scheduled and run. No direct access to the RISC core is available, developers have to use the x86 facade.
Re:Intel is RISC ... x86 a facade (Score:4, Interesting)
RISC already won, long ago. X86 has been RISC for a while. Legacy x86 instructions are translated into core RISC instruction and the later is (re)scheduled and run. No direct access to the RISC core is available,
Not surprising, as it's not guaranteed to remain the same from processor to processor, and probably doesn't remain the same from processor to processor.
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Yep. I just love to confound compiler optimization enthusiasts by demonstrating a benchmark for my "inefficient" x86 code that runs rings around their "more efficient" compiler code. My dumb compiler and/or hand written assembly code is simpler and nowhere near as "clever" as GCC or Clang output, but it somehow runs faster?! It's because I know x86 opcode is getting translated by microcode into RISC instructions, and so I use a small subset of instructions with low translation overhead rather than try to
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So rather than being a dick about it, why not contribute a patch to GCC's and/or LLVM's codegens?
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It is not quite RISC, just normal microcode to micro-operations translation because hardwiring some seldom used instructions is a waste of silicon and because it is easier to optimise for parallel execution. Besides, the whole CISC vs RISC stuff was only relevant for a short window between 1985 and 1995 and in hindsight the RISC fanboys were mostly wrong.
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It's worse. They've been elevencimated! Nigel Tufnel would be proud! :D
Re:it's Official Inte's workforce has been ,,,, (Score:4, Informative)
No, the opposite: kill 10% of the soldiers to set an example for the rest.
Re:it's Official Inte's workforce has been ,,,, (Score:5, Informative)
Decimation was the ancient Roman method of putting down a revolt.
If a city-state rose up in a revolt against the regional governor or broke out in a riot or even just had persistent legal and judicial problems, and the Roman central government heard about it, they would "decimate" the population.
They would first send a legion or two to quell the unrest.
They would line up every man, woman, and child. Rich, poor, old, young, everyone. The soldiers would go down the line and count to ten. They would kill that person and start over at 1.
Then the legions would leave, having killed one-in-ten residents. The latin for ten is "decem" (pronounced "day-kehm"). Hence, decimation.
1 in 10 is equal to 10 in 100. The English word "percent" comes from the latin "per centum". "per" means "by", "through", or "from". "centum" means 100. So 10% is literally an English/Latin mashup meaning "ten from a hundred". So decimation is exactly 10%. Always.
Re:it's Official Inte's workforce has been ,,,, (Score:5, Informative)
No reason to make it more gruesome. This punishment was for deserters, it was handed down to Roman soldiers, not civilians as you imply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Well deserters as in the entire army (or particular Cohorts probably), not the individual.
Considering the alternative was to destroy the entire army (which takes effort and loss), or banish them (at which point you then have a rogue army to worry about, or at the very least a banditry problem), the solution, while gruesome was a form of severe punishment, that fairly (more less with lots) acted as a deterrent for future such behavior, while at the same time preserving 90% of your fighting force for that par
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Thank you AC for stating what should be painfully obvious.
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which is too bad since every project given to Intel India is horribly horribly late. I have not seen a single succesful project come from Intel India since the Whitefield debacle.
It doesn't matter if they are late any more, because AMD is now on a slow spiral into the toilet. They can be slow and still lead.