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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Reports elsewhere ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/repor... ) suggest that the layoffs might be a bit concentrated in the Sales & Marketing departments.

Is it just me, or do some other folks also smell "corporate bloat, which better management would not have allowed to happen"?

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Might make sense: If you're selling mostly to mobile OEMs and data centers you need a completely different sales/marketing strategy that's more focused on whale hunting than building "brand awareness" to a broad consumer market.

"Intel Inside" worked..

I wonder if it did? Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU? I know I always bought Intel laptops because Intel laptops were the only things available, not because I have some high view of Intel as a brand. I imagine the vast majority of laptop buyers wouldn't even know what an Intel is.

> Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU?

If you're a Linux user, Intel integrated graphics have always been the most compatible and most well-supported option.

That was a long time ago. AMD has shipped iGPUs/integrated platforms and dGPUs with fully mainlined drivers for ages now. Only recently has Intel gained credibility with Iris iGPUs beating AMD's, whereas for the longest time you had to pair Intel platforms with Nvidia GPUs to get any kind of graphics performance, spelling trouble due to Nvidia's insistence on closed drivers and binary blobs.

Back when I was not on Mac, I always preferred laptops with Intel integrated graphics, regardless of performance. It was just better drivers, less battery drain and boards didn't fail either. My first laptop had NVIDIA graphics, and it was whole combination of bad drivers and motherboard frying because of overheating. Things have probably changed, but I'd just get one with Intel graphics -- just because I trust Intel to keep pushing better drivers based on their history.

Speaking on AMD, 10 years ago at-least, there were very few premium AMD laptops, and they used to overheat quite a bit, has that changed?

Yes, AMD's APUs have filled the market vertical with good integrated graphics and CPUs starting about a decade ago with the AMD A4 through A10 lineup, and continuing today with the Ryzen processors with Radeon Graphics.

GPUs of the era your thinking of had high failure rates from issues with lead free solder, though the Nvidia GPUs on Macs and Laptops would outright fail from other issues, requiring a full chip replacement.

https://eclecticlight.co/2015/12/20/lead-free-graphics-cards...

> graphics performance

For the Linux users I was referring to, the most graphically intensive thing many of them run is a desktop compositor.

But yes, today, AMD iGPUs are a great choice for mobile, and AMD dGPUs are a great choice for desktop or for i-don't-care-about-battery gaming laptops.

I've seen this come up a few different ways over the past year, and I think I've also read that Intel contributes more to kernel development than any other company. One thing I'm wondering is: how dependent on Intel have desktop Linux distros become?

> If you're a Linux user, Intel integrated graphics have always been the most compatible and most well-supported option.

You forgot to add, "worst performing by a mile" to the feature list.

nothing much slower than when an nvidia dkms process fails silently and you're left without video options at next boot -- something that generally can't happen with intel-video/linux.

I get your point, but intel video options perform on par or better with regards to the most common consumer video rendering demands at this point. Video acceleration and high resolutions and multiple displays are well covered -- not everyone needs to process GPGPU workloads and play the newest games at 90FPS.

A slow functioning video card is still better than a fast video card that doesn't work.

In my experience nvidia with nouveau is slower than Intel with its free driver.

I recently unplugged an nvidia card from a machine because of kernel panics with the nouveau driver.

Of course I can install the proprietary one, but that means I can no longer just upgrade the system and expect it to work after reboot.

Compared to other integrated graphics?

Was this marketing to Linux perverts worth all this money that Intel poured? For the vast majority of normies, Intel Inside was useless noise.

I don't know, for a good while before Ryzen came out Intel CPUs were widely regarded as the best choice, so the marketing may very well have helped move machines.

On an unrelated note, "perverts" doesn't seem to me like a particularly kind appellation.

it absolutely worked.

the pentiums were a huge leap from the amd 386/486 and cyrix options. 'Intel Inside' was basically a premium-product differentiator for those that could afford it, and that was well understood by consumers at the time.

Ferrari/Gucci/Armani/Rolex/Louis Roederer labels also help to push product. Same phenomenon, people didn't buy Intel strictly because it was needed for specific workloads, they bought it because of the fancy sticker that differentiated their product from cheaper alternatives; even if the person didn't know thing-one about computers or CPUs.

It sounds corny, but having lived through it I can vouch that things are really that stupid.

I always bought Intel CPU laptops. Could never figure out the AMD naming scheme (and still can't but that goes for Intel now too). Also back then it seemed the AMD laptops were of poorer quality than the Intel ones.

It was one of the most successful branding campaigns. It allowed Intel to become the primary brand over the laptop/pc vendors. You can buy Acer/HP/Dell/... Because they are all Intel. Even non tech people understood that and this gave great bargaining power to Intel.

> It was one of the most successful branding campaigns. It allowed Intel to become the primary brand over the laptop/pc vendors.

I mean, it coincided with that. It's not clear how much was caused by branding/marketing and how much was caused by Intel being better (at least in laptops) from the Core Duo days until now[1] plus-or-minus a few years?

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1. Honestly, I haven't kept up with laptop hardware performance during the AMD chiplet era.

Before Ryzen, I strongly preferred Intel CPUs and Intel-compatible motherboards for building PCs.

For what it's worth, the laptop I currently use for work I requested a few years ago specifically because it had an Intel CPU – not necessarily because of performance (though that was a factor) but also I know how to get important performance counters out of it for diagnosing performance issues. I don't know if I'd make the same judgment today, though.

Intel marketing is NOT aimed at customers. It’s aimed at Dell and HP et al.

Then why did they (used to) run ads during prime time TV shows? Was that the only chance to get product buys from Michael Dell?

Because that’s part of the deal. You sell the campaign to Dell and promise to do co-marketing and advertising - how effective it is when 90% of the prebuilt market is already Intel is left to the reader.

>Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU?

I always buy Intel. I simply do not care for AMD's software jank, Intel has consistently proven more stable and reliable and that's not something I'm willing to trade for marginal differences in performance caps.

Among sophisticated consumers you would think people buy a laptop based on thermal envelope and longlasting performance on battery. The marketing around Intel CPU and the Nazi concentration camp style model numbers takeaway from an informed choice.

Should have pitched their mobile strategy as "Intel Outside"

By the time mobile got big, Intel was no longer an ideas company. There is no way they could have come up with a tagline this good.

Intel, if you're listening.. I hope you you're able to find this tagline and offer me a 7 figure contract for more of these ideas

It was the bunny suit dancers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMCNILzZsWk

"Intel Inside" worked to build awareness of the Intel brand. The campaign validated the idea that, for a certain amount of ad spending, one can build brand awareness, even for a CPU chip. But, compared to Qualcomm, for example, do people need to be aware of a brand in order for that brand to be dominant?

With the rise of mobile gaming, the fact that people don't know what chip is in their phone casts even more doubt on the value of brand awareness. Intel got dominant by always having a design and/or fab dominance over rivals. A "one-two punch." Who among PC buyers understood that?

On top of that, if Gelsinger is serious about building a contract fab business, that has sales and marketing needs way outside of anything Intel does today.

Did it? Or was there no other option for a long time?

(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180313, but we merged the thread hither since that article was a misleadingly titled ripoff.)

Seems normal that the number of employees in Sales would follow the rate of product sales.

Perhaps. Though I'd be a bit slower to react to the market here. Depending how sales are handled, removing staff can remove the relationships that they have developed. It's a pretty bad sign to be doing this.

Might be different for Intel though, everyone has to drink at the same oasis.

Yes, sales are at the front of the pipeline. If there aren’t prospects and customers to talk to, salespeople sit idle.

If you’re at a company and you look at your engineer to sales ratio you might think to yourself “gee, we have so many sales people!”

That’s because there’s not much multiplying factor to sales roles. There isn’t a lot of potential to automate like engineers can do. A salesperson only has so many hours in the day and they’re fitting maximum one or two customers into a one hour slot of their time.

There is indeed a lot you can do to avoid overcrowded sales departments, e.g. define minimum order volumes your prospects need to hit to let your salespeople interact with them (and refer them to an external reseller otherwise). Invest in online sales tools like product configurators to let you customer do the sales job etc.

Ads companies like Google/Meta are good examples. Any small account gets a webpage and that’s it. Still, it must be harder to sell semi-commodities like CPUs.

Their GPU group seems to have some minimal success. The CPUs are still great but obviously process issues dominate.

The rest of intel is a shambles. The networking group in particular is an industry joke.

FWIW, Ars are citing the same Bloomberg piece the submitted blogspam is, so I'd not take that as an independent validation or clarification on the magnitude of the sackings.

Tangential, but what are the consequences of upcoming layoffs cutting across the industry and impacting mostly these "soft" non-technical roles? Will this create a large disgruntled segment enough to start upheaval the like of the French or the October revolution?

That kind of doomer prediction would be more interesting if we did not live in time period with historically high employment rates.

>historically high employment rates

People will believe any statistic that aligns with their mindset.

Unemployment rates are at historical lows within a small margin, it's been 50 years since unemployment has been lower (i.e. something like 60% of Americans have not seen lower unemployment in their whole lives), and since the WWII war economy that they've been significantly lower (i.e. almost nobody alive).

What's the difference between historically high employment rates and historically low unemployment rates?

(employment rate) = (employed people) / (total people)

(unemployment rate) = (people not currently working, but actively looking) / (total people)

The first includes all people, the second excludes those not working, but also not looking.

In Australia at least "unemployed" according to parliament: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

"The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) defines a person who is unemployed as one who, during a specified reference period, is not employed for one hour or more, is actively seeking work, and is currently available for work"

So if you are desperately looking for more work BUT you have a casual job providing 1 hour of work THEN you are NOT unemployed. I mean, it's right there that you have a job.

Given the high rates of casual/part time work in our workforce, unemployment rates mean nothing to me anymore...

This is also true to a similar degree to how the US defines it. It's an important point, since a lot of people are arguably underemployed, but are still included in employed statistics. I just didn't want to get too far into the weeds of the definition and distract away from the point of how unemployment excludes people while employment does not.

Surely there's a Full Time Equivalent (FTE) employment definition somewhere to capture exactly this issue. But if there is, it never seems to come up in public discourse, possibly because it is difficult to understand or for people to directly relate to.

And, obviously, the employment rate is harder to game than the unemployment rate. There are long term trends that affect it (women entering the workforce, etc.), but it's an overall more stable and valuable metric to look at.

Or just look at employment, not unemployment data.

https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/labor-force-participa...

Historically high employment rates == historically low unemployment rates, right?

Not necessarily: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp

In the UK people sometimes make the claim that the unemployment rate the government is quoting is so low because people have given up even looking

Havent the calculations changed ?

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