Fresh within the last hour ......
http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2017/10/intel_begins_layof...Intel has begun notifying workers in its finance group that their jobs will be eliminated early next year, according to multiple employees familiar with the plans. The chipmaker had warned staff last summer that these cuts were coming, part of a broader plan to bring down spending.Last year Intel whacked 15,000 people and declared to the world that they were leaving consumer electronics for greener IoT and database/server pastures, forever, never to return.
Those greener pastures turned out to have herds of aggressive ARM cattle already living on them, ARM cows with long wicked fast horns that gored Intel badly when Intel breezed in to "take over the world". Intel got kicked out of the new promised land by these real world ARM competitors, mainly because Intel was so very very far from being a real competitor in those new ARM based worlds. Totally pitiful, actually.
Intel then came limping back to Consumer Electronics land A FULL YEAR LATER, A FULL YEAR FURTHER BEHIND TECHNOLOGICALLY AND A FULL YEAR MORE "OUT OF DATE" ON ALL FRONTS and so far Intel has done nothing practical to improve on this miserable miserable sad state of things except cut tons and tons of people and buy more toy drone companies.
To cap it off, during the long one year Intel absence AMD had joined the ARM camp and completely disavowed their old x86 heritage.
After having done an across the line DynamIQ ARM redesign AMD immediately began kicking Intel's butt badly by using their new ARM technologies and philosophies built at Global Foundries at several nanometer levels, but all of them were less than 14nm.
AMD and ARM have now taken ~25%~ of Intel's consumer "enthusiast gaming" market share in only 4 months as measured at that point in time .....
So, Intel begins to respond by adding extra cores to all their chipsets at 14nm, using the same amounts of the same sorts of memory so the net results are not really able to overcome the combined edge AMD had made for themselves using ARM design patterns at smaller lithography levels. AMD is putting both graphics and light duty AI functions into their designs and selling them for 20-30% less than Intel does, no matter what Intel gives out for a price drop this week.
Intel also has NOT REALLY MET any of the lower AMD pricing, but apparently thinks they deserve 20%-50% extra just because they are "Intel Inside".
This is mostly prideful "stupid" talking and this trick is losing market share for Intel week on week ......Now Intel has got to go cut some 1,400 more people to appease Wall Street, and the ones that get let go this time are going to be the bean pickers themselves, as they add nothing to the bottom line (and they are still around to be cut as bean pickers never seem to cut their own jobs willingly).
These are core central key functional jobs, and it signals a company shrinkage that is both permanent and not likely recovered from.You have heard the term "cut and build" before, right? It is when you cut the ones you really don't need and add in the ones that will bring in some real money.
Intel is running around buying failing AI companies and buying not working Quantum computing companies and Intel is still chopping off all the rest of the remaining old key x86 support people, apparently by doing so
functionally acknowledging that x86 business is already lost at this point in time.
Intel will send their next knee jerks signals (panic reactions) when MS starts the flow of ARM based Win 10 laptops -- trying to defend a "preeminence" that frankly no longer exists.
The first Qualcomm 835 based Win 10 ARM laptop units will be attractive, but will be somewhat over priced. They will still take an immediate 30%-50% market share,
but this lost share will come from Wintel's own old product lines as that is what is going to happen naturally anyway.
No one will want to buy old kudgy slow high voltage Intel tech any more.The instant response from Google will be Chromebook AI and it will be crushingly fast. MS will regroup Win 10 on Qualcomm's next AI based top dog SOC and, if they are smart, a couple of other vendor's top dog AI chipsets as well.
HOWEVER, middle of the road ARM AI SOCs are really the key to MS surviving, really -- if Win 10 ARM runs well on these mid-range ARM AI SOCs then MS remains a player out into the future.
Run well on Mediatek and Rockchip, Microsoft, or you too will fade away ......At this time if Intel still has nothing to put out on the playing field then they are done. If they are desperate enough to sue MS (to make them pause in place) in an act of pure obstructionism then they are done.
Linux will still be out there, clearly available and running on the ARM AI based SOCs better and cleaner and cheaper than Win 10 can do.
Chromebook AI will be looking better and better all the time and will still likely always be 25-30% cheaper than the current Win 10 machines.
The AI Chromebook will slowly become a serious player in business
if Google doesn't get played by some contrived, arranged third party lawsuits again this time around.
If some sort of x86 consortium forms to defend x86 by some sort of concerted trollish legal actions against Android or Linux,
well then you will likely see Fuschia's Zircon crystal razor edge come out, slicing through these obstructions by a real threat of complete replacement. Once people realize how fast "a built for AI" OS really is, it will gradually take over naturally anyway.
Within the next 10 years, big iron and the data farms will get replaced by many many times fewer Quantum computing boards (sitting around in vats of liquid nitrogen no less). Your AI driven handheld local equipment will be able to communicate so freely through 5g and new and even better air and laser optical cable driven means that the superfast inter-device communications will never hit a slow spot any more no matter which local device you are using.
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HEY, Google did something really really new this time -- it keys into them owning their own phone company again and
taking control of their own future pathway accordingly.
Without saying anything they augmented a "top of the line" Qualcomm SOC by adding in an external AI adder block that totally redid Qualcomm's vaunted Adreno 540 GPU/Camera output to make it completely world class and they ADDED AI functions to the Pixel 2 XL.
Yep, the Pixel 2 XL is an AI augmented phone done by retrofit .....
yeah, AI can do shite like that 
Did they totally just say Qualcomm's current best SOC isn't nearly good enough? Yep, they just did. Not
nearly good enough.
So, notice is served,
HEY QUALCOMM if you don't keep up technically or get all bullheaded and prideful you may just wind up being "helped along" some by custom designed AI adder blocks. Or else not used at all.
A lesser vendor, say Mediatek, that fully adheres to the DynamIQ standards can be easily magnified in power to beat the head dog's current SOC, should the head dog start balking at the leash and growling at people.
Or going too slow because fat dumb ol' Mickey holding on to the other end of the leash simply can't waddle fast enough to keep up with the crowd ....
And a stronger, quicker mid-line vendor, say like Huawei, that fully adheres to the DynamIQ standards
can easily magnify itself in power to beat up the head dog's next newest "greatest SOC" by their own additional use of AI adder blocks -- which is what Huawei just did with the Kirin 970 and the Mate 10 XL PC / Phone.
And they can do it again at the six months mid year point very cheaply and easily by just beefing up the memory and the external AI block.See Huawei keep that #2 spot and start working on taking #1 if Qualcomm doesn't quit waiting around on Mickey to catch up / keep up.
Samsung will now have to begin to rely on their own AI SoCs completely again as Qualcomm simply isn't bringing the best to the party any more and Samsung has to see a homegrown easier and cheaper pathway to stay in #1 position.You can tell how fast things are evolving by Qualcomm's dropping the Snapdragon 835, then dropping the Snapdragon 836 Improved, then dropping Samsung Foundry (10nm) process completely by mid 2018 and then moving on to the 840 SOC on 7nm TSMC, then dropping it before it is actually built and going with the much much more complex and advanced 845 AI on 7nm TSMC
all in the space of two-three-four months of current production planning change wave speeds.Qualcomm sees what is happening, and has to realize they cannot keep up with the speed of the change wave while carrying 'ol Porky Slow Minded Mickey up on their shoulders.Oh, and about old porky slow minded Mickey ----
they are jest simply shocked they can't get their favorite laptop folks to commit to building their "Chromebook beating" Win 10 ARM laptops using a 2016 designed Snapdragon 835 chipset, a chipset that was developmentally dropped by Qualcomm over six months ago.
..... keep up, Mickey, at least try to keep up .....
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