Their "real" job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.

Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it's invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of "he's not working very hard so he doesn't deserve the money."

Not exactly. And larger companies simply CANT destroy competition without assistance from the government.

If you are free to choose what to buy, and who to buy it from, you can choose to buy from the startup. You can choose to buy from the guy running a business out of the back of his pickup. Or out of his garage. Or any number of options.

Problem is, right now we have our government enabling monopolies. Propping up failing, or non-profitable businesses by making it illegal to do business without spending millions or more on regulations that seem good on the surface, but when you start to dig into them, you see the vast majority of them were actually pushed by the big name businesses to stifle competition.

Our wallets should be the only regulation. Would you willingly buy products from a company that doesn't respect the environment? No? Well guess what! That's the power of the free market.

There's, right now, a hybrid truck manufacturer in Canada that is staring down the barrel of excessive regulations that will limit their ability to build hybrid semi trucks.

How many other would-be entrepreneurs simply don't even bother trying because there's no way they can afford it?

How many small 1 to 2 person businesses would be in existence right now to compete with all these large companies?

Yeah if you build a RISC processor directly you can just save the area needed for instruction decode.

The problems at Intel haven't even begun. When a big company does layoffs like that, there's a certain amount of institutional knowledge that just evaporates.

There are going to be a large amount of dropped balls at Intel and this is just one of them.

Sadly, I think instead of the market responding and Intel going under, Intel will mutate into a government subsidized technology company. At least for the present moment, they serve as an example of what could be domestic manufacturing.

To me, their attitudes strongly resemble Blackberry just prior to the iPhone coming out. They have a certain amount of arrogance and are resting on past glories. It's pretty clear that just cranking up the wattage and shipping a new product isn't a path they can walk forever.

It's a shame that Intel was actually on a plan to get things fixed up. Their former CEO pay Gelsinger had told them they had to endure some years of pain before things would be better. Unfortunately, the board was not so tolerant and kicked him out before the plan was fully realized.

Their board has some really questionable members on it too, so all around not a very good situation. Probably the only thing in Intel's favor is that starting a new microprocessor company isn't just something you do in the basement, so they have some room to turn the ship around.

If you look at the desktop, there is AMD and there is Apple silicon

You can get workstations with Ampere Altra CPUs that use an ARM ISA. It's not significant in the market, more of a server CPU put in a desktop for developers, but it provides a starting point, from which you could cut down the core count and try to boost the clocks.

There is also the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus with some laptops on the market from mainstream brands already (Asus Zenbook A14, Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, Dell Inspiron 5441). That conversely could probably scale up to a desktop design fairly quickly.

You're right that we're not there, but I don't think we're that far off either. If Intel keeled over there would be a race to fill the gap and they wouldn't leave the market to AMD alone.

It's time for Voodoo to make a triumphant return!

When I read your message, I get the impression that you think of "The Government" as this independent actor. I see it as a system that is primarily controlled by wealthy people. Either directly or through their funding advertisements (including astroturfing/bot-farms) to promote what they want.

So the larger companies do get government assistance... because they are the government. And this isn't some kind of weird coincidence. It's fundamental to capitalism's operation. You can't have a system that's based on capital and then have it be unbiased towards entities who have vastly more capital!

It's odd that you think it's fundamental to capitalism when it's exactly the opposite. True capitalism is an unfettered marketplace.

What we have now is a system here the profits are private, but the losses are socialized.

You may think that's an effect of capitalism, but it most definitely is not.

You are conflating a system of governance with a system of economics. And I get it, because in a controlled economy, the government is usually the one doing the controlling.

What we have is something in the middle, taking the worst aspects of truly free-market capitalism, and marrying it with the worst aspects of a controlled economy.

Our government the picks winners in this setup we have. Instead of letting the market decide.

Your issue is that you see all the things this half-breed, partially-socialist economy gives us, and you blame it on the market. But the market didn't get us here.

History tells me what will happen if we finally give in, and give total control of the economy over to the politicians. And I do not want that for my children, or their children.

Mass layoffs are never done in a thoughtful way. It's often the C-suite telling each division "cut x number of staff underneath you". That order is filtered down through layers of management until it gets to the people who do actual work. If they're lucky, they can negotiate some room on their team with one or two layers of management above them, but it just means another team underneath the same management layer is getting hit that much more.

Remember that when a CEO says "we had to make the hard but necessary decision". All that asshole had to do was say "cut 10,000 people" and filter that order down the stack. All the actual hard decisions were made far, far away from the board of directors.

The base x86-64 patents expired in 2021. Also, it was held by AMD, not Intel.

However, there are a lot of extensions that are still under patent. You can make an x86-64 processor the way it was when Opteron was released in 2003, but it won't be competitive with current offerings. Those extensions are patented by a mix of both Intel and AMD. Intel failing isn't going to fully open x86-64.

Edit: also, it's not just the patents, it's the people. Via is still technically out there and could theoretically make its own x86-64 to modern standards. However, x86-64 is a very difficult architecture to optimize, and all the people who know how to do it already work for either Intel or AMD. Actually, they might only work for AMD, even before the layoffs.