Quote from Jack Haddad, MD:
Intel's restructuring plan which was announced last April is a conglamerate move-- the most significant change since the 1980s-- When the giant chip maker abandoned its main memory chip business to focus on microprocessor chips. The company's broad revamp is aiming for savings. It's a methodical and strategic exercise, rather than an across-the-board cut. For example, the company may look at exiting their high-end microprocessors, dubbed Itanium, on which intel has spent well over 1 billion to develop since 1994. It might also unload its flash memory and communications businesses-- which are all losing money.
Theyre also increasing their long-term investment design in microprocessors. The company is accelerating the timetable for introducing a major design change to its chips to every two years; in the past, Intel has taken 5 to 6 years to introduce a major change to its chip architecture. It's last major design, Pantium 4, was introduced in 2000. Design changes are more than just simple speed upgrades; rather, they involve a complete redesign of how a chip operates. The company will employ several engineering teams that work on different generations of chips in parallel. Currently, Intel has more than 1000 people working on designs for a new kind of product, the Ultra Mobile PC. These are small portable computers, such as Samsung's upcoming Q1, that weigh less than 2 pounds and run the full windows operating system. This new development approach explains why Intel has increased its work-force so dramatically to 103, 700 employees, compared with 87, 100 a year earlier.
Ladies and gentlemen, this strategic move in development is likely to put heavy pressure on rival AMD, which has one-tenth the number of employees that Intel has. I have in the past interviewed fab supervisors, and senior engineer managers at Santa Clara headquarters who told me that Intel executes best when it's under pressure or when it's under a level of danger.