Intel To Slash 10,500 Jobs

[dredger]

I would also wonder if they were following the DEI hiring practices because it seems there are quite a few companies now firing or cutting back on their DEI crew.

Microsoft Reportedly Lays Off DEI Team With A Brutal Message​

It's fun to see it from the karma point of view : a rather fast backlash

@Palinurus
Strange, i can read it here from BE.
As the article is not much long here it is :

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody, many companies made highly publicized vows about “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives filled with all the typical left-wing rhetoric about race, having “conversations” and “doing better.”

Doing better how exactly? Focusing on your customer base and delivering quality service?

No. In 2020, doing better meant emphasizing identity politics in the workplace.

DEI is just a long-winded way of promoting discrimination through hiring initiatives and creating a toxic work culture where employees view each other by their race, ethnicity, gender and national origin. It is the antithesis of individuality and a vehicle for identitarianism.

Four years later, many businesses have realized that focusing on skin color or sex is not the greatest idea.

For example, Microsoft just laid off its entire internal DEI team, according to a Business Insider report on Monday.

“True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020,” a leader of the team wrote in an email “sent to thousands of employees,” according to the outlet.

The email said the DEI team was eliminated because of “changing business needs” as of July 1, the report said.

It was unknown how many people had lost their jobs.

In 2020, Microsoft pledged to double the number of black leaders in the company by 2025.

Undoubtedly, shifting focus away from DEI will hamstring those race-based hiring efforts.

Microsoft is not alone.

Bloomberg reported that Zoom laid off its DEI staff in February. Meanwhile, Google and Meta made DEI cuts last year, according to CNBC.

It’s almost as if instituting identity-based hiring practices and promoting division in the workplace aren’t so great for business, no?

Microsoft spokesman Jeff Jones maintained these initiatives are still important to the company — although he dropped the E-for-equity in DEI in a statement to Business Insider.

“Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritizing accountability, and continuing to focus on this work,” Jones said.

This is essentially corporate babble to dance around the fact that those employees were propaganda officers on whom Microsoft was tired of wasting money, but it would look outright embarrassing to denounce the effort as a whole at this point.

It was hard in 2020 to make the intellectual leap from a black man’s death in Minneapolis to the seemingly overnight push for a narrative infecting every waking moment of life.

If anyone is still wasting money on DEI, the motivation will surely dissipate.

These initiatives do not promote productivity or create profit. They only sow division.

 

[seek10]

It's fun to see it from the karma point of view : a rather fast backlash

@Palinurus
Strange, i can read it here from BE.
As the article is not much long here it is :

Microsoft spokesman Jeff Jones maintained these initiatives are still important to the company — although he dropped the E-for-equity in DEI in a statement to Business Insider.

“Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritizing accountability, and continuing to focus on this work,” Jones said.

This is essentially corporate babble to dance around the fact that those employees were propaganda officers on whom Microsoft was tired of wasting money, but it would look outright embarrassing to denounce the effort as a whole at this point.

It was hard in 2020 to make the intellectual leap from a black man’s death in Minneapolis to the seemingly overnight push for a narrative infecting every waking moment of life.

In our company, we still have to take DEI courses once or twice a year (Thank god they are not instructor led). My company set for another wave of restructuring (lay off) due to firing of some upper management and new management hires. I am also not sure of my own fate due to my boss change. Going along doing as usual supporting same systems ( old boss stuff) and working more to support new boss as if all that matters. We will see what will happen.

It is reasonable to assume that my company will wake up from sleep of this DEI nonsense and reduce some DEI hires. I don't mean it has to be based on skin color. For example in IT where brown skin dominates (in corporate non-management or lower management roles), White and Black are DEI hires. This is how it goes.

 

[Nienna]

@Nienna
I cannot access the article because truthpress.com blocks me. Although I tried various versions of the address, the result was the same every time. They say it's a security issue due to cloudflare (Cloudflare Ray ID: 8a6d6f5f2fa40c85).

I'm using Firefox (fully updated) from Amsterdam (The Netherlands; Europe). Maybe the content is reserved for USA readers only ?

Here's the article, Palinurus and thank you for letting me know:

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody, many companies made highly publicized vows about “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives filled with all the typical left-wing rhetoric about race, having “conversations” and “doing better.”

Doing better how exactly? Focusing on your customer base and delivering quality service?

No. In 2020, doing better meant emphasizing identity politics in the workplace.

DEI is just a long-winded way of promoting discrimination through hiring initiatives and creating a toxic work culture where employees view each other by their race, ethnicity, gender and national origin. It is the antithesis of individuality and a vehicle for identitarianism.

Four years later, many businesses have realized that focusing on skin color or sex is not the greatest idea.

For example, Microsoft just laid off its entire internal DEI team, according to a Business Insider report on Monday.

“True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020,” a leader of the team wrote in an email “sent to thousands of employees,” according to the outlet.

The email said the DEI team was eliminated because of “changing business needs” as of July 1, the report said.

It was unknown how many people had lost their jobs.

In 2020, Microsoft pledged to double the number of black leaders in the company by 2025.

Undoubtedly, shifting focus away from DEI will hamstring those race-based hiring efforts.

Microsoft is not alone.

Bloomberg reported that Zoom laid off its DEI staff in February. Meanwhile, Google and Meta made DEI cuts last year, according to CNBC.

It’s almost as if instituting identity-based hiring practices and promoting division in the workplace aren’t so great for business, no?

Microsoft spokesman Jeff Jones maintained these initiatives are still important to the company — although he dropped the E-for-equity in DEI in a statement to Business Insider.

“Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritizing accountability, and continuing to focus on this work,” Jones said.

This is essentially corporate babble to dance around the fact that those employees were propaganda officers on whom Microsoft was tired of wasting money, but it would look outright embarrassing to denounce the effort as a whole at this point.

It was hard in 2020 to make the intellectual leap from a black man’s death in Minneapolis to the seemingly overnight push for a narrative infecting every waking moment of life.

If anyone is still wasting money on DEI, the motivation will surely dissipate.

These initiatives do not promote productivity or create profit. They only sow division.

Added: Annnnd, I see it's been posted by others, But, I'm gonna leave it here.

 

[PopHistorian]

Here's another article prompted by the Microsoft layoff of DEI team, which also lists many other companies that have backed off of the DEI initiative, suggesting to me that, from a business perspective, they knew it was very damaging right from the start. What business person wouldn't realize that?

I found it interesting that MSN even carried an article with the dismissive-sounding phrase, "ditch 'woke' policy."

MSN

Microsoft has reportedly laid off a team devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion after pouring millions of dollars into the initiative — becoming the latest major company to ditch the “woke” policy.

The Big Tech giant disbanded the DEI team at the beginning of the month due to “changing business needs,” according to a July 1 email obtained by Business Insider. [...] Last year, Google and Meta reduced the scope of their DEI programs and cut staff as part of restructuring and layoffs at both companies, according to CNBC.

On Tuesday, tractor giant John Deere announced it will scuttle nearly all its DEI polices in favor of a quality-based workplace. That followed a decision last month by farm chain retailer Tractor Supply to axe all DEI goals and positions.

Zoom, Snap, Tesla, DoorDash, Lyft, Home Depot and Wayfair have also downsized their DEI teams.

Overall, DEI-related job postings declined by 44% by mid-2023 compared to the same period in 2022.

 

[lilies]

Attention-critical, high responsibility jobs:

Airport control tower, spaceport flight control, nuclear power plants central control room, battlefield commander's minute decisions determine if people die or survive, 20+ hour heart and brain surgeries, operator for software controlling large hedgefunds' computerized stockmarket money-making and in case of Intel:
- 12 seconds usually is given for an important decision by a human operator - if the operator makes a bad evaluation, the 98% robotized factory could execute an unwanted machining process - prepare the wrong order at a wrong time - resulting in a loss of millions of dollars.

Someone has to do it, otherwise society collapses. Imagine such high-responsibility people get into emotional imbalances, because of new stress in their lives. Covid and similar that disturbs brain cells normal functioning. Despite multi-level safeguards Intel messed up several of these high risk decisions, resulting contamination thus slowly rusting CPU-s created by the robot factories. Millions of people bought these expensive CPUs, heavily used them in their computers. Then the rust began eating away these processors resulting in errors then in broken down computers refusing to start.

If you are such a high-responsibility worker and you have a contract detailing the risks. If you make a bad decision resulting in a loss of millions of dollars, the enormous stress affecting your health, worries about the future, how do you sleep at night? :-o
The stupid saying:
- We are all human, we are prone to errors..
- Not in these jobs buddy, here you do NOT make mistakes! Or else..

 

[Persej]

Intel 18A Process Node Clocks an Abysmal 10% Yield: Report

In case you're wondering why Intel went with TSMC 3 nm to built the Compute tile of its "Arrow Lake" processor, and the SoC tile of "Lunar Lake," instead of Intel 3, or even Intel 20A, perhaps there's more to the recent story about Broadcom voicing its disappointment in the Intel 18A foundry node. The September 2024 didn't specify a number to what yields on the Intel 18A node looked like to spook Broadcom, but we now have some idea as to just how bad things are. Korean publication Chosun, which tracks developments in the electronics and ICT industries, reports that yield on the Intel 18A foundry node stand at an abysmal 10%, making it unfit for mass-production. Broadcom validated Intel 18A as it was prospecting a cutting-edge node for its high-bandwidth network processors.

The report also hints that Intel's in-house foundry nodes going off the rails could be an important event leading up to the company's Board letting go of former CEO Pat Gelsinger, as huge 2nd order effects will be felt across the company's entire product stack in development. For example, company roadmaps put the company's next-generation "Clearwater Forest" server processor, slated for 2025, as being designed for the Intel 18A node. Unless Intel Foundry can pull a miracle, an effort must be underway to redesign the chip for whichever TSMC node is considered cutting-edge in 2025.

Intel 18A Process Node Clocks an Abysmal 10% Yield: Report

In case you're wondering why Intel went with TSMC 3 nm to built the Compute tile of its "Arrow Lake" processor, and the SoC tile of "Lunar Lake," instead of Intel 3, or even Intel 20A, perhaps there's more to the recent story about Broadcom voicing its disappointment in the Intel 18A foundry...

www.techpowerup.com

They got the money, but how will they spend it? Perhaps they will waste it on another node failure.

The summer Intel fell behind

In the summer of 2020 Intel seemed poised for triumph. Then it all went wrong. “To put it briefly: Intel blew it,” explains Glenn O’Donnell, a research director at Forrester Research. Intel was forced to announce to the world that it’d be delaying its next major manufacturing milestone for its chips for another few years, an admission that, once again, Intel was falling behind the competition.

After years of misplaced bets, manufacturing delays, and changing leadership, the previously undisputed chip-making king has found itself faced by competition the likes of which it hasn’t faced in decades — while simultaneously finding itself at what could be the company’s nadir.

In 2020, Intel was forced to admit that it would be severely delaying its 7nm node, recently rebranded as Intel 4. This precipitated an exodus of leadership and the admission that Intel might have to face the unthinkable and outsource its own manufacturing.

Intel managed to survive its last summer hell, at the cost of being forced to dramatically rethink its business from the top down. Now it has a new CEO, a new plan, and a market hungry for more chips. It’s set ambitious goals, revealing its most detailed process roadmap and a bold promise to jump ahead and reclaim processor leadership by 2025, if it can avoid the familiar pitfalls of the past decade. The coming years will be a make-or-break moment of redemption that will either right the course — or send Intel into what might be its final tailspin.

“It wasn’t something that just happened suddenly. These things build, they build and build over time until something happens that causes the whole thing to kind of crumble,” says O’Donnell. Things have been headed in a downward trajectory for Intel for years, yet it was last summer — and the delay on 7nm — when the cracks in Intel’s facade started to look a lot more like canyons.

“For all of its history, until recently, manufacturing was one of the magic things that was going on at Intel — part of the secret sauce of Intel was the manufacturing innovations, and that’s why 7nm was such a big embarrassment,” O’Donnell says. “It was a huge hit, psychologically, across the company, but also across the market because that meant Intel no longer had that secret sauce.”

The fact that Intel still makes its own chips today is a rarity in the industry. The vast majority of tech companies are fabless, meaning that they outsource the fabrication of their chips — even if they design them themselves — to other companies. AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, and Broadcom are some of the leading examples of fabless companies today.

Intel is one of the few computer chip firms that still designs and manufactures its own hardware — it can design every part of the process to its own specifications and purposes, and it has an unmatched control over the actual manufacturing of its products. It actually owns its own fabs, and it’s the only major company still making chips in the US right now. Manufacturing has been one of Intel’s biggest strengths for decades. But the fact that the company missed its projections for 7nm, coming after years of 10nm delays that it was only just recovering from, was a huge blow.

Processor Processes​

​

When we’re talking about semiconductor processes — be it 10nm, 7nm, or 5nm — in the tech industry, we’re largely discussing marketing terms. Today’s chips don’t actually have transistors that are 10nm or 7nm in size. Instead, the nodes are used as approximate generational terms to indicate when large advances in manufacturing technology have arrived.​

​

The main thing that each node provides is greater transistor density, or the number of transistors that can fit into a space. The smaller the node, the more transistors you can fit, although exact numbers tend to vary a lot across different manufacturers — for example, Intel’s 10nm node features technology and transistor density roughly on par with that of TSMC and Samsung’s 7nm chips, precipitating Intel’s recent rebranding.​

Last year started well for Intel. The company announced its Tiger Lake chips (technically the company’s third-generation 10nm designs) which also saw the debut of the company’s long-gestating Xe GPU architecture, giving it an exciting new wave of processors with prowess in an area (graphics) that had long been one of Intel’s weaknesses. The chips offered great performance, even though — much like their own long-delayed Ice Lake predecessors — they were limited to only lower-powered laptops. The wait for 10nm and Intel’s new graphics turned out to have been worth it: the new chips outpaced AMD’s in single-core performance when they were released, and they actually lived up to the hype.

There was still more to do: Intel had only released 10nm chips for its weakest laptop products; if you were buying a thin-and-light computer, it’d be better than ever, with all the performance and power efficiency improvements that the new architecture node brought with it. But it took the company almost a full year before it released more powerful H-series Tiger Lake chips for beefier laptops designed for gaming and video editing, which are only just starting to see those benefits. And it still has yet to move its desktop chips to 10nm (to the potential detriment of this year’s chips, which tried to fuse 10nm designs on 14nm architectures to mixed results).

After years of manufacturing delays, Intel almost seemed to maybe, possibly, be heading back on track.

But when June rolled around, Intel’s troubles started back up again. Seasoned engineer Jim Keller announced that he was leaving the company for “personal reasons.” Keller is the Mr. Fixit of the chip design world: he helped Apple with its in-house A-series chips, AMD with its Zen architecture, and Tesla with its Self-Driving Computer chip. Intel brought Keller on board in 2018, and while the company didn’t publicly define his role beyond leading Intel’s silicon engineering team for “system-on-chip (SoC) development and integration,” his job was clear: as the leader of Intel’s 10,000-person semiconductor engineering team, he was to get Intel back on track.

Keller is known for short stints at companies — he often comes in, sets things in motion, and leaves before the fireworks start. But his less than two years at Intel and his abrupt departure marked one of his shortest tenures yet, and an inauspicious start to Intel’s summer.

But there was more bad news waiting for Intel just a few days later, when Apple announced at WWDC 2020 that it would be making the switch to its own Arm-based chips, away from the Intel processors it had been using for over a decade. The reasoning was similar to when Apple first switched from PowerPC to Intel in 2005: Bloomberg reported that the Mac maker weighed and measured Intel’s roadmaps, already riddled with recent delays, and found it wanting.

Apple’s Q2 2019 earnings report goes even further, straight up blaming a dip in Mac sales that quarter on processor supply issues with Intel. “We believe that our Mac revenue would have been up compared to last year without those constraints,” CEO Tim Cook noted.

At least one former Intel engineer corroborates those frustrations: outspoken principal engineer François Piednoël told PC Gamer that the switch was at least partially due to poor quality assurance with the company’s Skylake chips.

But the switch to Arm chips wasn’t just an announcement that Apple was fed up with Intel’s delays — it was a declaration to the world from one of tech’s most influential companies that Intel’s chips just weren’t up to snuff anymore. “When we make bold changes, it’s for one simple yet powerful reason: so we can make much better products,” Cook said at the announcement — to Apple, leaving Intel behind was a necessary choice to let the Mac leap forward. And sure enough, Apple’s first M1 chips exceeded expectations on every front, upending our concept of laptop performance when they arrived later last year.

But all that was still a prelude to Intel’s biggest looming disaster: an announcement on its Q2 2020 earnings call that the company had identified a “defect mode” in its 7nm process, derailing progress by at least a year. The next-generation chip, originally set for a late 2021 release and a crucial part of Intel’s strategy to get its production back on track and to catch up to other silicon producers like TSMC, were now delayed until early 2023.

And that’s a big problem for Intel. As Natalie Enright Jerger, a professor in computer engineering and leading researcher in computer architectures explains, there are two main ways that chipmakers can improve performance: new designs, like putting more cores or new AI accelerators onto chips; and adding more transistors, which primarily come from new and smaller architectures. “Without being able to shrink the node they’re losing out on one of the two key drivers of performance. They’re still able to innovate … but they’re not able to get that additional win of more transistors that AMD has.”

AMD is also a beneficiary of TSMC’s more advanced production: its Ryzen chips have been on 7nm since 2019, and it could be poised to leapfrog Intel again when its 5nm Zen 4 chips ship in 2022.

Intel has been competing with one hand tied behind its back

Intel is effectively competing with one hand tied behind its back. The fact that it’s keeping up at all is a testament to the advantages its in-house production offers, and the innovations in things like its unique Foveros packaging technologies — all of which is the aforementioned “secret sauce”— but the continued delays to new architectures show it’s the kind of trick that Intel can only keep up for so long.

The fallout from the summer’s events came quickly. Shortly after the 7nm news hit, Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala, the company’s former hardware chief, left his position. And Intel’s former CEO Bob Swan — previously Intel’s chief financial officer before taking the top spot — was replaced by Pat Gelsinger, a former Intel engineer best known for helping pioneer some of Intel’s earliest innovations in the 1980s and serving as the company’s first chief technology officer. Gelsinger was a hire meant to help right the ship, a sign to both employees and the world that Intel wanted to get serious about chips and play to its strengths again.

Gelsinger has wasted no time, already announcing a new “IDM 2.0” strategy for Intel that will see the company outsource some of its production to other players like TSMC and Samsung, work to establish Intel as a chipmaker for other companies through a new Intel Foundry Service business, and create an ambitious goal to return Intel to the forefront of cutting-edge chip designs by 2025.

The newly announced roadmap — the most detailed look at its future products that Intel has shared in some time — and the renaming of its technology nodes to better contextualize them with competitors is part of that strategy; a major declaration from the company that it has a plan to make its way back.

In a comment to The Verge, Intel executive vice president Michelle Johnston Holthaus said that “We have a solid foundation in place, and an exciting, strategic vision ahead of us,” highlighting the company’s new investments and roadmap.

But it’ll be a challenge to get there. Intel — the company once known for being the untouchable leader of CPU making — is undeniably behind. While some of its new announcements, like the $20 billion it is investing into new factories in Arizona, sound impressive, they’re bets that will take years to pay off. They also pale in comparison to competitors like Samsung, which announced a decade-long $116 billion investment in semiconductor production in 2019, or TSMC, which has announced plans to invest over $100 billion in expanding capacity over the next three years.

The ball’s in Intel’s court

Even Intel’s new roadmap is not guaranteed for the future. There are a lot of ambitious goals there, including launching its long-delayed 7nm Intel 4 chips in 2023, and next-generation transistor architecture with Intel 20A in 2024. But Intel is coming off its recent 10nm and 7nm struggles and will need to make sure that its aggressive annual pace it’s setting here doesn’t hit similar snags that could cascade through the PC industry. And competitors like Samsung and TSMC are already gearing up their next generation of chips with higher transistor density and more advanced technologies, meaning that newly reinvigorated competitors like AMD and Qualcomm will be waiting to pick up any of Intel’s slack. As O’Donnell explains, “‘They’ve got to leapfrog now — simply catching up is insufficient.”

Last summer was a wake-up call for Intel, a clear sign that the years of delays and missed opportunities were a buck that it could no longer continue to pass. The changes that Intel’s made in the year since are the right ones: bringing back experienced leaders, hardware designers, and focusing on getting its semiconductor business back on track. Intel will have to regain trust and rebuild its reputation as a leader that OEMs and customers can rely on and show that it can still compete on the bleeding edge of chips. The last year was a good first step, and the ball’s in Intel’s court. But now, it needs to deliver.

The summer Intel fell behind