In response to Nguyen, firm’s latest actions — lowering their workforce by 15% and eliminating “non-essential” exercise — raises these considerations:
- The 15% workforce discount frees up capital, however are there sufficient workers redundancies to help this or are they eliminating some important personnel?
- Eliminating “non-essential” actions, just like the postponement of the Innovation Expo when there are important product releases developing, signifies that there isn’t a coherent advertising and marketing push for shoppers, companions, analysts, and press.
- There are, he mentioned, “questions remaining about how properly Intel can deal with further points: is that this sufficient to handle all rapid and upcoming short-term challenges? Or will they be compelled to do extra and put themselves in a worse place that will impression them long-term?”
John Annand, analysis observe lead at Data-Tech Analysis Group, put a barely completely different spin on the state of affairs, saying that any lack of concern from enterprise prospects concerning the flaw “most likely says extra about how far chip makers have slipped from being the middle of the IT world than concerning the goal scale and severity of the issues dealing with Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs.”
When the Pentium floating point bug got here to gentle in 1994, he mentioned, “it was on the high of everybody’s thoughts and rapidly a part of the broader cultural zeitgeist. We didn’t have memes again then, however we did have the B plot of the 2002 West Wing episode when a ‘blue chip firm’ discovered a defect in considered one of its 80 million deployed laptop chips.”
In the present day, mentioned Annand, “except an organization CEO has Intel of their private inventory portfolio, this present crop of Intel woes simply isn’t demanding the identical stage of government consideration: Experiences put the defect fee at four-to-five instances that of earlier chip generations, which might imply it stays solidly within the single-digit vary.”
The overwhelming majority of documented crashes, he mentioned, “happen with sure workloads below particular situations that trigger the CPU to attract an excessive amount of voltage. Until you routinely turbocharge your processor (as many retail shoppers and avid gamers are wont to do), possibly this simply doesn’t fee excessive sufficient on the enterprise threat register to get observed?”
He identified, although, “after all, this isn’t good for Intel. Client gross sales (together with its Foundry enterprise) have been one of many two vivid spots on the not too long ago ill-received monetary report.”