Quite honestly, nothing can save Intel (INTC). They’ve had one processor, the x86, and they have been trying to spin that one-trick-pony for decades. Every time they try to break new ground it’s a catastrophe. Most of you are probably too young to remember the Itantic (officially called the Itanium). That chip family was finally taken out to the woods and got two behind the ear which is what it should have had prior to ever being sold.
You Cannot Fire Enough Workers to Cover for Incompetent Management
Intel announced it was laying off 15% of its workforce in some cost reduction plan. You cannot fire enough worker bees to make up for incompetent management. The incompetent management is in charge of choosing who gets laid off and they never choose themselves. Management always tries this and it never works.
I had the privilege of working on DEC equipment before the Itanic. Worked with some fine people at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Management allowed the DEC Sales Resistance Force to exist for far too long. You almost had to put a gun to their head to actually buy something. Ken Olsen had this “survival of the fittest” view of engineering. A great thing in college, not so great for products. This lead to the blunder of releasing the million plus dollar VAX 9000 about a year in front of the DEC Alpha. The Alpha was a small fraction of the cost, had higher throughput and didn’t take anywhere near the power. Customers who bought a 9000 were walking funny and didn’t know it until the next year.
G. Q. Bob
After Ken, whom I have the utmost respect for, “left” DEC, they brought in G. Q. Bob. Ken was an engineer and visionary who created the number two computer company in the world. As an engineer he didn’t know how to run a business and he never brought in a good layer for that. G. Q. Bob was focused entirely on his Golden Parachute. He paid lip service to turning the company around in the press then sold off the crown jewels hand over fist. Most of you don’t know that DEC created Altavista as a lab experiment to test out RDB with massive (for the time) data sets. It was the world’s most popular search engine. He cut funding for it and sold it off. RDB got sold off as well along with most every other crown jewel.
Monday Mornings
G.Q. Bob’s focus was his parachute. DEC had to have enough cash on hand to pay that and he seemed to care about nothing else. I was doing a project for DEC at Alberto-Culver during the reign of terror that was G.Q. Bob’s tenure.
Every Monday morning was another round of layoffs. All remaining employees had to report in on Monday. Most had to go into the local office for a one hour “meeting” to see who the headless horseman got next. We were trying to finish a multi-million dollar project for a client and staff that was turning in billable hours were being cut right and left. Mahogany Row chose to save the pure overhead that was Mahogany Row and can the worker actually generating revenue. We were hourly on-site. If you can’t put a team of IT workers at a client site billing hourly and make money, you have no idea how to set billing rates.
Why Did I Tell You About DEC?
Because this is the death spiral that Intel is now in. Management is slaughtering those who actually generate revenue trying to save Mahogany Row. You think me wrong? Nay I say. I’ve seen this movie before with DEC.
Wall Street doesn’t even know what is really wrong. They see some missed numbers and bad earnings. Intel is now an Osprey helicopter and like so many of those it is falling out of the sky.
What is Really Wrong?
Intel is going to have to replace under warranty roughly two years worth of gen 13 and gen 14 CPUs. Watch this video because they did a really good job digging up the truth. Yes, the dude needs a hair cut, actually a decent stylist with a razor. That has got to be the world’s worst beard!
That guy must have never heard of the Itanium!
Yes, about a week after I finished this build I find out about the “oxidation” problem. I agree with the reporting, Intel tried to spin this as just an over voltage problem. Given all the Crispy Critters Itanium processors turned into, that was a pretty safe spin. Try to sooth Wall Street’s nerves that you are going to fix it in the software.
My brand new build is sitting there on a desk powered off. Roughly $2000 and it cannot be used. It won’t get powered on until Intel release a microcode fix for the Crispy Critter problem and I hear from others it seems to work.
Oxidation
I have little doubt that a microcode “fix” will be released. It might fix one problem. But you can’t fix oxidation in firmware. Sounds so quaint doesn’t it? Oxidation. For those of you who don’t know what oxidation is:
You get oxidation inside of a chip via sloppy “cost cutting” fabrication. That chip gets sold to customers when QA looks the other way, much like Boeing 737 MAX inspectors.
Perhaps you didn’t pay attention to the whole video. Reportedly Intel knew about problems a year before they told OEMs like HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. I bet Newegg.com and other retailers will find out by reading this blog post. Y’all know they don’t read the OpenSuSE forum.
Rust will cause a short. If you somehow get rust hot enough to give off a bit of gas or water vapor, given the CPU is sealed and the rust is deep inside, it will cause a swelling/separation of components/layers. I’m not a hardware geek so the exact details escape me. What I do know is that oxidation of any kind inside the CPU will cause it to fail. Worse yet, it will just “work wrong” for a long time before Crispy Critter status. Wrong calculations. Random crashes. Bizarre software problems that cannot be replicated on gen-4 through 12 machines.
Summary
I would not hold Intel stock unless I could buy it for under a buck!
Couple more days like today and it should get there.
Intel should never have been given billions of dollars as part of the chips act. Honestly upper management should have been trying to stay out of prison for throwing national security under the bus off-shoring fab plants. We the people, and the Federal Government have to stop letting corporations do whatever they want. National security is thrown under the bus time and time again as nearly 100% of production for critical components gets moved off-shore chasing a fast buck.
Intel’s impending bankruptcy is what chasing a fast buck in the tech world gets you.
My next build will be AMD and it won’t be that far off. I’m pretty certain Intel will somehow try to screw me out of a replacement i9-gen13 CPU.
