According to Nguyen, company’s recent actions — reducing their workforce by 15% and eliminating “non-essential” activity — raises these concerns:
- The 15% workforce reduction frees up capital, but are there enough staff redundancies to support this or are they eliminating some essential personnel?
- Eliminating “non-essential” activities, like the postponement of the Innovation Expo when there are significant product releases coming up, means that there isn’t a coherent marketing push for consumers, partners, analysts, and press.
- There are, he said, “questions remaining about how well Intel can handle additional issues: is this enough to address all immediate and upcoming short-term challenges? Or will they be forced to do more and put themselves in a worse position that may impact them long-term?”
John Annand, research practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group, put a slightly different spin on the situation, saying that any lack of concern from enterprise customers about the flaw “probably says more about how far chip makers have slipped from being the center of the IT world than about the objective scale and severity of the problems facing Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs.”
When the Pentium floating point bug came to light in 1994, he said, “it was at the top of everyone’s mind and quickly part of the broader cultural zeitgeist. We didn’t have memes back then, but we did have the B plot of the 2002 West Wing episode when a ‘blue chip company’ found a defect in one of its 80 million deployed computer chips.”
Today, said Annand, “unless a company CEO has Intel in their personal stock portfolio, this current crop of Intel woes just isn’t demanding the same level of executive attention: Reports put the defect rate at four-to-five times that of previous chip generations, which would mean it remains solidly in the single-digit range.”
The vast majority of documented crashes, he said, “occur with certain workloads under specific conditions that cause the CPU to draw too much voltage. Unless you routinely turbocharge your processor (as many retail consumers and gamers are wont to do), maybe this just doesn’t rate high enough on the enterprise risk register to get noticed?”
He pointed out, though, “of course, this is not good for Intel. Consumer sales (along with its Foundry business) were one of the two bright spots on the recently ill-received financial report.”
