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Renee also was the brains behind buying the $7.7B McAfee albatross, which cost more than the next fab would cost. Putting that money into a fab would have definitely had a better return in the next 10 years (4 of which had a chip shortage) than the $3B bath they took on the deal. Amazing how people can fail upward from something like that 
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Aug 6, 2022 21:36
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StarBegotten posted:It looks like Intel accidentally released some of the Raptor Lake specs. Well, at least this time it wasn't from someone internally running a benchmark program on an unreleased product and adding the score to the leaderboard
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Sep 14, 2022 17:26
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Optane was such a cool technology but I also understand why it wasn't considered a great product.
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Sep 16, 2022 22:59
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SourKraut posted:Because they want the MOST FRAMZ Getting 800 frames per second in a 10 year old video game is the most important problem to be solved in computing
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Sep 18, 2022 17:41
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mdxi posted:Browsers have a strong preference for getting things rendered as quickly as possible, because people get pissy when browsers are slow.  Chrome getting memory allocation
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Oct 22, 2022 19:40
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SourKraut posted:Edit: Cpu coolers made out of PEX, bing bang so simple
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Oct 31, 2022 20:10
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Adding ME MAYBE to the instruction set as callable
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Dec 13, 2022 07:09
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wet_goods posted:I took the voluntary offered in November after ten years of working there, I’m bummed for my friends still there, I feel like plenty more of them would have signed up for the vsp if they knew this poo poo was coming 10 years here too. It's the only place I've worked since graduation. I got notified that I was being included in the action 2 weeks before the pay cut announcement. I was pretty bummed about it, because I like the people I worked with and the stuff I was working on. And the whole job searching thing is at best an annoying chore, and it can be much worse than that. This week I've had a change of perspective. I think they may have done me a favor, because I stay on payroll for a while longer and then get a decent severance. Coming out way ahead compared to someone who remains who now wants to do something externally because they're pissed about the pay cut and feeling less optimistic in the company as a whole. My father in law worked as an EE for IBM his whole career, and then got laid off 6 months before he was eligible for retirement with the (legacy) cushy pension. He ended up somewhere else real quick and has been really happy there, but it shook him badly when it happened. When he tells people he spent nearly 30 years working at IBM, people say "Oh wow, I remember when they were big. Are they still even around?" I wonder if in a few years telling people I spent a decade in my early career at Intel will get the same reaction.
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Feb 4, 2023 04:44
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wet_goods posted:What sucks is I did really well there, three promos, got stock awards out of cycle, had a huge network inside and with our vendors all over the world, I felt like I accomplished a lot there but ultimately came to the conclusion that leaving was the best choice Yeah it was overall real good for me, when the corporate chicanery wasn't happening. An example of sillyness. A friend and colleague got booted in one of the actions a few years ago. Got notified in January, had until mid April to find a new role internally or exit without being eligible for rehire. He found something else (better) internally pretty much immediately. In April, he got his performance results for the prior year as the highest possible ranking, which (at the time) was supposed to be for the top 3% of performers. In May he got a promotion in his new role. Quite the ride. There's an adage inside the company about job security that "closer to the wafer is safer", which may have been true at some point, but definitely has not been what I've observed. A good bit of career advice I got early on was "the further you get from the factory, the happier you will be" and I have found that to be true.
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Feb 5, 2023 04:40
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WhyteRyce posted:I just remember Murthy and he’s probably thrilled that everyone forgot how much they hated him and how much a failure he was Murthy took home over $100M in compensation that would have been better spent on a litho tool. I saw him do a campus visit one time and he had an entourage of ~10 people surrounding him, including two security people. It was really weird because I would often see the CEO and other very senior people walking around the building by themselves just like everyone else. When BK left and the CEO position became open, he did a self-promotion tour across multiple sites holding "open forums" where he shared his story of overcoming adversity. He was the "awkward, chubby kid, bad at sports, from a midsized city in India" who rose to great heights in engineering!  (Also, his parents were loaded old-money 1%'ers and sent him to elite boarding schools and prestigious foreign universities)wet_goods posted:It took way too long to soft fire peng (he wound up jumping ship after an annoying stint in supply chain and works for a Chinese firm now), firing Myra took way too long, sohail had to be caught lying to get canned, the list goes on  Sohail was such a bully, and they waited ~5 years too long to replace him. Stacey would have been miles better as CEO than BK. I really liked and respected my direct managers and +1's for ~90% of my time there. The boneheads get very deeply entrenched at the exec and exec minus 1 levels.
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Feb 7, 2023 05:13
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Some other funny and weird corp stories and gossip. Aircraft: For context, Intel has a leased set of aircraft that run fixed routes between the major campuses (AZ, Folsom, Santa Clara, and Oregon). They're "free" to use for business travel, and typically cost less than flying commercial. Everybody uses them, from the summer interns up through the C-suite, and because you fly from the exec terminals you don't go through all the TSA/security nonsense and airport rigamorole. The flights nearly always leave without empty seats, so if you can't reserve an air shuttle seat you probably end up flying commercial. When Bob became CEO, he insisted that they lease a private jet for him to use so he didn't have to get on the shuttle with the rest of the rabble like us. One dude got fired for abusing the air shuttle, because he was taking several flights a week on it. He was based at one site and a new role relocated him to another site at great expense. He took the relo package (probably $10k+) and then just didn't move and instead commuted via air shuttle and got a small apartment. He did this for almost a year, so those 100+ flights he took pretty much directly translated into other people buying 100 commercial flights  . This guy had been working there over 10 years, and it caused some embarrassment to his spouse who also worked there in a pretty senior role.During the Cougar Point disaster with the catastrophic SATA bug on the PCH, air shuttle service was suspended because the planes became improvised cargo planes. They pulled out the seats, filled the planes in AZ with fully loaded FOSBs of the finished, corrected wafers, and flew them day and night up to Oregon to the die prep facility. The people who lived by the airports were pissed, because there usually weren't big planes like this taking off and landing at these small regional airports at 3 AM. Brian: BK has met all of his spouses and romantic partners at work, all of them process engineers. Seems he has a type. In 2011, BK was in Arizona buying a car for his daughter. The sales guy was chatting with him, as they do, and BK told him he worked for Intel (though no indication that he was running the ~40k employee manufacturing org). The sales guy said, oh, that's so cool about the new $4B factory being built, my cousin is in construction and is going to be working on it. The factory had not yet been announced and was supposed to be under strict NDA, and he was furious. After the news broke about BK planning a Trump fundraiser at his home in 2016 (which he cancelled), the company spent a 7 figure amount on adding security infrastructure and personnel to his house. Heard this one second-hand from someone who was told by one of the people present. ~15 years ago when BK was in some manufacturing leadership role long before he was CEO, he was meeting with a senior PE to tell him that they needed to lay off his entire team because of scheduling pushes. The PE pushed back and said that's stupid, because you're going to want these people back in 8 months and they have a pretty unique skillset, I'm not going to go along with this. It continued to heat up and BK took a swing at the guy. They both landed a few punches before the other people in the room pulled them apart, nobody got fired, and life went on. Factory: A factory appealed their headcount targets for the next year asking for more staffing. This was based on an analysis they had done (how?) estimating how many factory employees might become pregnant and would thus need alternate work arrangements. Night shift in one of the factories had an open secret amongst the techs of a hidden nap space. Pull up one of the raised floor tiles and someone had made a little bed in the subfloor with a mattress and pillow made out of cleanroom grade anti-static bags. During a factory conversion, they'd find contraband stashed in the darkest corners of the cleanroom. Empty liquor bottles and candy wrappers, but the weirdest was a bucket of KFC chicken, complete with discarded bones. A contractor servicing the fire suppression system in the cleanroom did not correctly depressurize the sprinkler line, and ended up accidentally turning on the deluge of sprinklers right above ~$50M worth of process-limiting machines. There was a fire in the factory once, and the entire facility was evacuated for over 2 hours. Fire suppression did it's thing and nobody was hurt, and the factory continued to run autonomously the whole time without any loss of product. Weird money: I was once on an email chain with maybe 15 replies in under an hour that had some big names on it, including someone two levels down from the CEO. I was worried it might be something urgent or important, but it was about which department to expense ~$600 of cat food towards so they can feed the feral cats onsite. Someone managing a pretty big organization of ~500 people got fired after repeated warnings for stealing snacks from the cafeteria. They were probably clearing $200k+ a year and got canned for petty shoplifting of hospital cafeteria-tier food. Once saw a recurring $200/mo charge to a defunct facility for telecommunications service. Upon investigation, it was a recurring billing for a 10mbit DSL line going to a law office offsite. The law firm had been engaged for some patent work in 1998 and provided that expensive $200/mo DSL line. They finished their work within a year or so, but the company kept paying the internet service bill for 20 more years. The law firm had actually moved ~15 years earlier, so it was providing expensive and slow internet to an empty office owned by someone else. A department of 200 people had 600 mobile phone lines billed to them monthly. Some were for phones they no longer had, others for data-only SIMs they had sitting in their desks that they never even used on a tablet or hotspot. Lots of fraud stories of stupid people being caught in stupid ways. One was a conspiracy to hire several "ghost" employees and collect the salaries. Another was expensing a sports car for the purpose of a "mobile communications test suite", and the test equipment was purchased but never installed because it didn't actually fit. Sales guy expensing his entire family plan's 6 mobile phone lines as a work expense. Sales guy putting a $2,000 set of tires for his vehicle on the corporate card.
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Feb 7, 2023 22:03
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HR executive goes to doctor. Says she's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says she feels all alone in a threatening business environment in a company that has difficulty with recruiting and retaining key talent, despite correcting a long-running compensation gap to peer companies by unilaterally raising salaries 10 months ago. Doctor says, 'Treatment is simple. Chief People Officer from Fortune 50 company Intel Christy Pambianchi is in my LinkedIn network. Go and seek mentoring from her. That should help you solve your problem.' HR executive bursts into tears. Says, 'But doctor...'
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Feb 11, 2023 20:44
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TheFluff posted:Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine lots of people were saying something along the lines of "that would be an incredibly stupid idea", and it was and it is, but that doesn't stop authoritarian governments (or corporate execs, or investors for that matter) from huffing their own farts. One would hope the math has changed a bit after the failed Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia's military went from being internationally perceived as a credible threat in conventional war to being clowned on by a motivated defender using donated prior-generation NATO surplus weapons and hobbyist drones dropping Soviet mortar rounds. They grossly underestimated the effect of international support and also had every deficiency in training, equipment, leadership and logistics exposed. Both of those would make the prospect less appealing, but yeah, can't count on maniacs and governments to not sometimes do the obviously dumbest thing.
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Feb 16, 2023 23:15
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canyoneer posted:10 years here too. It's the only place I've worked since graduation. Self posting, I found my next thing. Going into the thrilling world of self-employment, made possible by a pile of severance cash and health insurance continuity. I'm losing a lot of unvested RSU grants, but at current share prices they're literally worth less than half of what they were at grant date  I really feel for all my friends left behind. SO many of them have said they would have volunteered to leave if they knew the pay cut stuff was coming. Everyone in my group (non-technical roles with generic corporate biz analyst drone skills) has been there for 10 to 25 years and have had rewarding careers, and it's a shame that they're stuck in a dying company. We made career investments in the wrong company. Now the next question is if I use the employee discount in the last days of my employment to order a new CPU, GPU, or both. 🤔
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Feb 18, 2023 17:52
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tehinternet posted:I mean nothing wrong with an arc for budget building. Emp discount is typically ~50% off retail, but I haven't looked at GPUs at all. SSDs also had a discount, but last time I built was during the nand price crash, so a big percentage off MSRP didn't lower the price below typical market rate I still have my engineering sample 3770k running on my Plex server.
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Feb 19, 2023 17:27
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:I’m guessing no one clicked a blind link paste. Yeah it's pretty distressing. That was my old building, and to my knowledge the first death on campus. I can remember at least two pedestrian fatalities in Intel parking lots over the years. There was also a death in one of the manufacturing facilities last year 
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Feb 20, 2023 02:42
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WhyteRyce posted:The Raja thing was weird. I felt that a lot of engineers really held their punches because BK and Murthy were dicking around making asses of themselves He looks like a literal wizard When people ask me what happened at Intel, I now just say "a decade of mismanagement"
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Mar 22, 2023 03:24
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WhyteRyce posted:BK's personal corporate henchman got the same boot out no email treatment. One of the things I really didn't like about that guy was how he handled the cafeteria discussions. After they raised salad bar prices they put out an internal advertising campaign that highlighted the salad bar now had things like tiger shrimp and that they still charge less per weight than Whole Foods Despite the cafeteria meals costing slightly more than you'd want to pay, the cafe service contractor claims they can't make enough money off of food sales and require a sizable subsidy. Their only real cost is labor, everything else is either not their cost (prep/serving space, kitchen equipment, dishes and fixtures) or a straight passthrough (food costs, repairs, maintenance). When COVID happened and sites were restricted to essential onsite personnel (factory people and in-person lab techs), the service volume for cafes went down a lot. The subsidy would have needed to be so much of the total cost that Intel instead just decided to pay the whole thing and have no employee cost. That was meant to continue when people came back to office but then welp all the money was gone 
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Mar 22, 2023 23:25
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The secret to justifying budget items was always claim it was safety related. If you called it legal compliance you had better have receipts, but you could BS most anything with a nebulous definition of "safety". That's one thing I always respected about Intel culture was that health and safety was a real priority. Some of the specific practices that came from it after running it through the corporate bureaucracy were pretty funny though. Some highlights: Ladder Jail A full, 100% ban on metal ladders on campus for employees and contractors due to electrical hazard concerns. On any site doing lots of construction, you'll see a locked and fenced in "ladder jail". If you're a construction worker caught with a metal ladder on site, it would be confiscated, locked up in ladder jail and you or your employer would be given a receipt and instructions on how to reclaim your contraband ladder. Must be a pain to get back, because a whole lot of ladders just got left there to be eventually donated or something. Had a construction project in Egypt where the contractors had either metal or wooden ladders, both of which were not allowed. Ended up having to ship in a bunch of fiberglass ladders from Italy at great expense for the construction workers to use, presumably while rolling their eyes the whole time. SMBWA - Safety Management By Walking Around As a manager in a manufacturing site, you are responsible for the safety of everyone around you. So, take a few minutes to walk the floor and address any unsafe practices you see. You're then supposed to brag about it to your own manager in your next meeting if you found something and corrected it, a so-called "good catch". These are shared in staff meetings. This principle applies not just in manufacturing spaces, but across the whole site. So if you are an office dweller, you may be called out on the spot and "coached" by someone you've never met before if they see you doing something unsafe. This includes having a shoe untied, not using the handrail on the stairs, holding too many things in your hands on the stairs, walking up or down the wrong side of the staircase (keep right and no passing!), skipping steps on the staircase, not having a lid on your beverage cup, looking at your phone while walking, sitting at an improperly adjusted desk or chair, or using your laptop's touchpad instead of an external mouse. Your first reaction to being "coached" might be to ignore it or snap back and tell them to mind their own business. This could be a career limiting move, after all, you have no idea who this person is. The smart thing is to just nod and say thank you. The Extraction Team If you're an employee on business travel and your situation becomes unsafe, there's contact information provided for emergency aid. Perhaps there's geopolitical unrest, you're being threatened with unjust imprisonment, the local government is not allowing you to leave the country, riots, terrorist attack, etc. If needed, they'll send the private security commandos out to come extract you. It's happened before, and not even exclusively for the executive types. I know of at least one case where in the US, an employee needed help escaping an abusive domestic situation. HR and security coordinated to get the employee out and moved to an entirely different state. Went to work one morning, never came home to the abuser. The company paid and arranged to covertly relocate the employee and make them disappear from the abuser, a sort of private-sector version of witness protection. Again, this person was not an exec/VIP/whatever, just a regular schmo that the company was doing the right thing for. COVID protocols They were absolutely militant about this. It was great. They even had us work-from-home office drones take home a monitor and nice office chair (Steelcase Leap or equivalent) and provided an extra several hundred dollar stipend to buy an adjustable desk. When it was time to come back to the office they told everyone to just keep it, not wanting to inventory/catalog/clean the goonlair chairs that people had spent 18 months farting on.
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Mar 23, 2023 23:41
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WhyteRyce posted:Keller was a flashy BK hire and I don't think BK gave two shits about disciplining one of his big moves because *waves in the direction of Murthy* The weirdest Jim Keller fun fact is that he's related by marriage to  Jordan Peterson 
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Mar 27, 2023 05:04
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Methanar posted:I hate when hardware companies change their naming conventions for no reason other than marketing dipshits inventing busywork to justify their continued employment Surely you don't mean the logo redesign from 2020 
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May 2, 2023 01:09
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WhyteRyce posted:Solidigm is an standalone subsidiary under Hynix. Originally they were shipping their own products with their own controllers with their own NAND with their own firmware sold by their own teams. The joint venture separation from Micron was a huge mess. There were a couple hundred Intel people working in the Micron facilities in Idaho and Utah where there were no Intel sites. As part of the wind-down, one day Micron just said "naah, your badges don't work here anymore" and booted everyone off site. The official long term plan was to relo those teams to other sites, so they spent a fortune opening temporary offices locally so those people would have an office to come in to. This seemed like a dumb idea at the time, spending a pile of money on an office and prolonging the inevitable migration of people from the Intel/Micron joint venture to working directly for Micron. Shockingly, ~98% of the joint venture employees didn't want to move to a different state! They instead got immediately poached and hired by Micron and the offices stood up for 200 people ended up being used by fewer than 5 people. Also, I think Rob Crooke has the funniest name of anyone who ever worked there. Sounds very untrustworthy!
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May 11, 2023 21:33
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BurritoJustice posted:
I will always read "dedup" in the tone and cadence of the Pink Panther theme
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May 16, 2023 21:16
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First draft of Intel's name was dumb too. Founders wanted to name it Moore-Noyce, which is like naming your catering company Sam & Ellis. They lucked into the less dumb name which you can't tell is supposed to be short for Integrated Electronics.
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May 16, 2023 23:04
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Cygni posted:I dont see this part anywhere? NUCs weren’t the only vPro systems, and all of the Tiny Mini Micros from Dell, HP, and Lenovo have vPro as an option. Can't remember if it was Pat or Bob who went on record throwing shade at the Microsoft Surface for "competing with their own OEM customers". If anyone was actually buying the NUC that would have been a very hypocritical thing to say!
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Jul 12, 2023 05:19
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WhyteRyce posted:You can also look at it as an interest free loan to Intel from the employees in the best case I really, really want someone on an investor call to ask this question framed in the same way.
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Aug 2, 2023 21:35
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Beef posted:The permission bureaucracy is the same when you are inside. But the big hurdle is usually the bad discoverability, just finding what you are looking for. You hope there is a wiki page that lists what roles you need. Otherwise, you have to know who to ask. There was a system I needed access to that was controlled through a formal enterprise rights management thing with an approval chain. The application owner would get the access request, which included the employee's full details (department, title, role, etc) and a justification which was already approved by their first level manager. This application owner was so persnickety about the requests that she would deny them unless you followed the specific script she wrote. She denied my request because I didn't paste in the exact verbiage into the justification field, despite having met me face to face multiple times, knowing my role, and sitting at a cube 30 feet away. This was the factory organization, so nobody thought spending a week navigating that bureaucracy was surprising. Contrast that to an HR role, where the access process for getting EXTREMELY sensitive employee information (health records, home address, location data) that literally required written approval from Legal and an explicit business need would usually be fully completed within an hour or two. Another funny thing that happened was duplicate enterprise software licenses and deployments. Company has giant enterprise deployment of big dollar software (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft products, Salesforce). A department wants to begin using it or add features to it. Chronically underresourced IT requires them to jump through a bunch of hoops to make that happen. The department is impatient, so they end up just buying another license, hiring a third party integrator and standing up their own deployment. That's how you end up with the situation where people ask "why do we pay for 8 different production on-prem and cloud deployments of Sharepoint, some of which are literally running on a server underneath someone's desk?"
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Aug 3, 2023 19:11
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WhyteRyce posted:At some point people lose sight of the overall goal of the company (hey, ship this out on time and at a high quality) in favor of their direct measurables and indicators (hey I want our graph to be green not red to make us look better, I don't want to be the one holding up PRQ) The 14nm process was such a disaster for this same reason. Process Technology Development threw it over the wall to high volume manufacturing in such an unhealthy state with garbage yields. It took a very long time to get 14nm yields to the same yields that 22nm STARTED at. So, yeah, 10nm was delayed and delayed but at least they weren't trying to fix it in prod like 14nm
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Aug 14, 2023 17:25
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Cygni posted:this is why you dont let execs do interviews without supervision My first experience with Michelle was when she took over Sales and Marketing Group and had a video call in which she announced that they were going to lay off ~30% of the organization and a lot of people remaining would have to reapply for their own jobs. She chose to wear a huge gaudy gold Chanel necklace for this video call. Great optics, MJ
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Sep 28, 2023 05:25
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Altera was probably their best acquisition. The company and product was good and it was a good complement to the core business. The fact that they couldn't stick it says a lot about their management culture
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Oct 4, 2023 02:17
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Intel was very scared about thin clients. They felt hedged on it because they had such crazy market share in data centers and welp. Turns out the thin client thing wasn't as bad as expected but the real fight is in the data center now
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Oct 24, 2023 22:59
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Every time I hear a news article talking about huge investments in AI and how Nvidia is the world leader supplying silicon for that I think about Saffron Technologies. Intel bought it in 2015 and had it run sorta autonomously with ~100 employees without smothering it to death in the way that giant corporations who buy small firms with bleeding edge IP usually do. It was profitable and cash-flowing as a traditional software product and SaaS models. It also drove local high performance computing demand, because when customers bought the software it took a lot of horsepower to run the product and Xeons were the right answer for it. There were also some great synergies in applications developed for and sold to external customers in manufacturing that could be reused internally in the fab process. Sounds great, right? This is where the good decisions end. 3 years later they folded it into another internal AI group who immediately killed it and fired everyone because it was Not Invented Here. One of the axe-men said that they didn't see it turning into a $10B market in the next 5 years. It's the Intel M&A pattern of buying into a nascent technology really early, getting impatient and divesting, then trying to buy back in too late after it already went big. If they didn't have an empty suit in the driver's seat and kept it going, Saffron would probably be a double-digit percentage of net income these days or at the very least could be sold for a tidy profit
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Apr 4, 2024 00:24
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