Intel to cut 1000 jobs ahead of earnings report

Posted Jul 14th 2006 4:17PM by Howard Tsung
Filed under: Forecasts, Other Issues, Bad News, Launches, Internet, Competitive Strategy, Intel (INTC)

In what may be just the tip of the iceberg in layoffs at Intel, 1,000 managers are to be laid off by the end of July.

Analysts are expecting more layoffs during the continued lead-up and follow-up to Intel's July 19th earnings report. If Intel misses another quarter forecast, it will be the third consecutive miss since 4Q'05.

Likely in a play to keep his job, CEO Paul Otellini has made a pledge to restructure the company within a 90 day review period. Intel will need to cut down fixed costs to boost margins and regain some of the flexibiltiy that competitor AMD seems to have no lack of.

Intel's big hope is in the coming release of its newest processors for the desktop and notebook markets, codenamed Conroe and Merom, respectively. Intel will be be using "Core" as a processor family designation much like "Pentium" was for Intel's former processor line. The newest Conroe and Merom chips will launch under the "Core 2" designation, with "2" signifiying the advance from current gen Core Duo chips.

This is a very important step for Intel as the Core 2 chips previewed thus far are significantly faster than AMD's most advanced chip the Athlon FX series and represent a fairly large jump in processor architecture (almost comparable to the 486 to 586 architecture jump).

Intel's newest brand platforms are already released with the Centrino platform for mobile computing, the ViiV platform targetting the entertainment/home pc segment, and the vPro platform targetting business customers.

Tags: core, core duo, CoreDuo, intel