From my limited perspective of having recently worked at Intel, they had a lot of dead weight. There was a lot of talent, but it was also diluted by a lot of management and bureaucracy.
I honestly don't know if layoffs are an effective solution to this, but IMHO they could definitely benefit from lower headcount and greater urgency.
I'm still trying to reconcile it with the CHIPs thing. Intel on one hand is admittedly bloated and inefficient, and so is choosing to reduce its headcount and therefore bandwidth to do work.
So what is the CHIPs money going to. Typically when you invest in something like this you are buying people's time to do the work and also materials and supplies to build the stuff like factories, etc. So if we are lowering headcount it's not going to labor.
I suspect as you say it's more about changing worker types, like getting rid of skillsets they don't need so they can hire those they do like people to build semi plants here.
So, in my mind, the only way it adds up is if Intel goes on a big hiring spree soon. Otherwise, where did the money go? We can buy equipment to build plants but who builds them?
Gelsinger thinks x86's days are numbered. So Intel's historical moat of designing and manufacturing x86 chips is going away.
So now it's more compelling to treat design and manufacturing as separate business concerns:
- For potential foundry customers, it reduces fears that Intel will give higher priority to fab'ing its own chips.
- It frees Intel's chip designers to design chips without needing to assume they'll be built at Intel's foundries. E.g., they can design chips for TSMC's process if that would result in a better product.
And given all these factors, I suspect Gelsinger and the Intel board of directors are planning to separate the design and manufacturing functions into separate businesses. (Either practically speaking by limiting their interaction within Intel, or literally by making them separate companies.)
----- B--- (Hupa) received a BA from Stanford and wrote her 2017 Berkeley PhD dissertation Wailaki Grammar on a Dene language spoken along the Eel River in northern California. Now an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University, her research focuses on Dene languages, and on historical-comparative linguistics for language revitalization within the Wailaki and Hupa communities. While at Stanford and Berkeley she also worked with speakers of Karuk, Yucatec Maya, and Sereer. B---- is a coauthor of "Xo’ch Na:nahsde’tl’-te: Survivance, resilience and unbroken traditions in northwest California" (2019, with Cutcha Risling Baldy, in Ka'm-t'em: A Journey Toward Healing), and has contributed to the Hupa Online Dictionary and Texts project (at UC Davis). She is also a traditional basket weaver and singer from the Xontah Nikya:aw in Hoopa Valley, and a member of the board of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.