Intel to throw networking biz over the side of its rapidly shrinking ship Intel isn't just laying off employees and closing plants in a bid to cut costs – it's also reportedly planning to get rid of its entire Network and Edge Group (NEX) to help right the ship. Chipzilla, which reported its Q2 earnings yesterday alongside news that it was shedding 15 percent of its workforce and closing chip …
Microsoft seem able to reinvent themselves as something always even worse, so most likely not. Fabs however can't be summoned by a press release, they take money, effort, real expertise and a half decade to build, all things capital markets don't like and they decide, if not who the CEO is then at least, who it 'was'.
How good an investment was that $108bn spent on buybacks rather than expensive and troublesome technological development now. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bypn9cdrc .
Maybe 'intel' the ship of theseus entity deserves their situation for that. No matter how much many of its individual planks may not. I think we'll all hate it worse then they're bought out. And especially by whom.
Maybe this is a necessary step, but all the parts seem to be assembling into a jigsaw of desperation. I wonder at what point DEC realised they were in a death spiral, and if this looks like that.
> How good an investment was that $108bn spent on buybacks rather than expensive and troublesome technological development now.
> https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bypn9cdrc
It's $152.05 Billion actually, since their share-buyback programs began back then;
> "Buckbacks
> We have an ongoing authorization (originally approved by our Board of Directors in 2005 and subsequently amended) to repurchase shares of our common stock in open market or negotiated transactions.We have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05 billion since the program began in 1990. As of June 28, 2025, we were authorized to repurchase up to $110.0 billion, of which $7.2 billion remained available."
> — INTC.com - Intel Investor-relations - Buckbacks (https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks)
Yet the actual crazy part is not, that Intel has wasted +$150 billion in share-buybacks since 1990 (On a prominently slacking stock, which basically side-graded since the Dotcom-bust in the 2000s), but that about a third of that sum was just spent since AMD's launch of Ryzen¹ in 2017 alone – No less than $44.6 billion USD!
¹ with Threadripper across the board and the Epyc following
Intel Foundry is in serious trouble.
Intel the chip designer is in trouble, although part of that is due to their close ties to Intel Foundry. (Other parts are due to their disastrous failures in the mobile phone chip and graphics card markets. And by graphics cards I include blockchain mining cards and AI cards).
Intel needs to spin off Intel Foundry into a separate company. That can go bust, or be bought, or be cut up for parts, or maybe even make a miraculous recovery. That gives the fabless chip design business a chance to survive.
Strategic error in 2006 flogging off Intel StrongARM/XScale - business who were market leaders for ARM …. for the hubris of Intel Atom.
They should have probably bought in Graphics card know/how in the 90’s like Matrox as they seriously lost their way in this with Integrated and little else.
I know it’s cool to bash Intel these days, and certainly they need it. They missed AMD creeping on them, GPU market, AI, etc. just assumed retaining x86 dominance was enough, which is why it was strange alarm bells didn’t go off with AMD.
I really hope they get some large 14a customers.
Anyway, the biggest factor Intel has going for it is the geopolitical factor. The US simply needs a pure US owned fabrication company. Intel will never disappear.
I just can’t imagine their stock stays tanked in 2026.
Maybe, maybe not. Remember that IBM's original vision for the PC was that it would be a little bit crap, thereby pushing customers onto IBM's more expensive machines once they'd personally seen what a little computer could do for their company. They chose an ISA that was a little bit crap rather than one that looked like it might have legs for future improvement.
>” there was no particularly good reason for IBM to choose Intel CPUs’’
In a straight technical 8086 vs. A.N.O. comparison possibly not, but remember the group within IBM charged with developing the PC had many years experience with Intel chipsets, so it would have been natural for them to follow the path of least resistance and use existing knowledge and relationships…
What was a fluke was the success of the IBM PC, which in -art was due to IBM effectively open sourcing its architecture and BIOS.
> The US simply needs a pure US owned fabrication company.
Does it really?
As events unfold, it does seem that “need” is more due to its desire to withdraw and isolate itself from the modern world…
It does seem the imperative for the bloc China is creating is a direct result of events in the White House since 2017 and has been given more urgency with Trump’s second term…
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
