Intel recently announced plans eliminate 12,000 jobs, or about 11 percent of its entire workforce as the company shifts some of its focus from personal computers to cloud services including data centers and the Internet of Things.
Now Intel CEO Brian Kraznich is offering a little more explanation of what that means.
Update: Apparently one thing it means is giving up on cheap, low-power Atom chips.
The company isn’t giving up on PC chips, but Kraznich says the focus is now on a wide range of cloud-connected products, which includes personal computers like laptops, tablets, and desktops. But it also includes phones, smart home products, connected cars, and much more.
So Intel is focusing on cloud computing and data center technology including virtualization and machine learning, IoT products, memory, storage, and programmable solutions including the company’s upcoming 3D XPoint memory and FPGAs, and tools that bind these things together.
Kraznich also disputes the claims that Moore’s Law is dead or dying. First coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the 1960s. Moore noted that the number of components on an integrated circuit doubled at regular intervals (originally every year, and later every two years).
Moore’s Law has always really just been an observation about the state or progress in the chip manufacturing industry rather than a fundamental law of nature, and its demise has been predicted a number of times. In recent years it’s seemed like chip makers have had a hard time keeping up with the progress predicted by the “law.”
For example, Intel has at least temporarily abandoned it’s “tick-tock” chip release schedule. The company’s next chips will be built on the same 14nm process as the last two generations. But Kraznick says the company still has a roadmap for moving to 10nm chips, then 7nm and eventually 5nm and beyond.
Of course, the existence of a roadmap has never been in question… what remains to be seen is whether Intel can follow it on schedule.