Intel is said to be considering laying off thousands of its employees to alleviate the x86 giant's unsteady financial situation.

The plan to swing the ax was outed by Bloomberg this week, which says it spoke to people aware of the upcoming layoffs. It's unclear how many thousands of employees will be let go, but anywhere from a thousand to nine thousand employees would constitute up to eight percent of Intel's total workforce of 110,000, which excludes spun-off business units. An official announcement is expected to land this week or later.

Savings from the rumored layoffs will apparently serve to fuel future R&D, which in theory would help Intel improve its odds against rivals such as TSMC, Arm, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and others that have chipped away at Chipzilla's market share in PCs, datacenters, and other sectors.

Indeed, not a whole lot has gone right for Intel lately. Its 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs have suffered from widespread failures, the ongoing US-China trade war has reduced Intel's revenue, the new Foundry business unit isn't doing so hot, and Intel's long anticipated Aurora supercomputer still can't beat AMD-powered Frontier despite having a big on-paper advantage.

These issues are likely to be reflected in Intel's Q2 earnings, due out on Thursday; the semiconductor giant has now forecast revenues of $13 billion for the three months versus $13.6 billion financial analysts earlier anticipated.

Not everything is gloom and doom for Intel though, as its upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips for PC are anticipated to rejuvenate the biz's competitiveness against AMD and Qualcomm; new Xeon 6 CPUs with tons of cores are also launching in the coming months.

The Register reached out to Intel, and the mega-corp declined to confirm or deny the layoffs. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/31/intel_layoff_rumors/