CPU manufacturer Intel is set to cut thousands of jobs according to a new report from Bloomberg. It’s another blow to the embattled chip giant as it faces a consumer scandal around CPUs and struggles to find its place in a shifting chip market.
Intel is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings on Thursday and, according to an anonymous source speaking to Bloomberg, it will share its plans to cut thousands of workers from its staff of 110,000. Intel started cutting jobs in October 2022 and hasn’t stopped since, removing 5% of its total staff in 2023 alone.
The pending job cuts are just the latest piece of bad news for the chip giant. Customers with 13th and 14th-generation Intel CPUs have been having problems for months. The chips were plagued with constant crashes and blue screens of death, especially while performing heavy workloads like gaming. Video game communities have been warning their friends off the Intel CPUs online for months.
NVIDIA pointed the finger at Intel in April patch notes for its GPU drivers. The developers behind the popular free-to-play video game Warframe shared statistics for the recent spate of crashes in early July.
“After aggregating hundreds of reports from helpful players we discovered a pattern: almost all were coming from systems with 13th and 14th generation Intel processors,” the devs said in the Warframe forums. Other crash dumps from other developers confirmed enormous crash rates for gamers using 13th and 14th-generation intel CPUs.
People who dug into the problem suspected it had something to do with the CPUs improperly handling voltage. Intel eventually confirmed this and admitted that a manufacturing issue also affected some of the older CPUs in the 13th and 14th gen.
On July 22, Intel finally admitted that the CPUs weren’t handling the voltage correctly and that it would push out a microcode patch in the middle of August that would fix the issue. The problem is that voltage issues like this can permanently damage a chip. All that electricity and heat can degrade a CPU, shortening its lifespan and hurting its performance.
Those chips affected by the voltage problem are likely permanently damaged. Is Intel going to issue a recall or stop selling the chips until it has a fix in place? No, it told The Verge.
All hope is not lost, however. Intel CPUs come with a three-year limited warranty and it’s possible people with fried chips can send them back to Intel for a replacement. The Verge asked if Intel planned to extend this warranty or tweak it to make things easier for people with affected chips to get a replacement, but Intel didn’t respond.
There was a time when Intel was the only real option if you wanted a high-powered CPU in your desktop but that hasn’t been the case for quite a while. AMD offers competitive prices for similar performance. And when AMD recently had issues with its high-end CPUs, it delayed shipping them out of an abundance of caution.
Semiconductors make the world go ‘round but they’re not all created equal. AI has created an enormous demand for silicon, but not the CPU Intel is famous for. The company has gradually entered the GPU market and is pushing itself as an AI solution, but it’s hard to watch it struggle with the chipset it’s known for and imagine it’s doing great things in the market that it wants to disrupt.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Intel is planning to cut 110,000 employees. That’s the number of total employees at Intel. We apologize for the error.
