Key Takeaways
- Intel’s next innovation event won’t take place until 2025 due to financial difficulties.
- Things are so bad that the company recently laid off 15,000 employees.
- Intel is aiming for a comeback with its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake chips later this year.
Intel’s next major “innovation” event, originally scheduled for September 24th and 25th in San Jose, California, has now been postponed until 2025, according to a notice sent to attendees. In a statement to PCMag, the chipmaker blamed the situation on recent financial problems.
“Our stronger than expected performance and outlook for the second half of 2024 forces us to make tough decisions as we continue to adjust our cost structure and evaluate how to rebuild a sustainable engine of process technology leadership,” the company said. “We sincerely thank our partners, sponsors, exhibitors, developer community and our entire team for their committed participation and support of the event.”
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Intel announced a week ago that it would cut about 15,000 jobs to stabilize profit margins. The company reported a loss of $1.6 billion in the second quarter alone, but at the same time plans to invest in expanding research and manufacturing capacity. For the foreseeable future, the company’s events will be limited mainly to webinars, hackathons, and other small meetings. The company may move some of its innovation-related material to the annual consumer electronics show IFA in Berlin, which runs from September 6 to 10 this year.
Another issue affecting Intel is a bug in the company’s 13th and 14th generation desktop CPUs. If this bug surfaces, it could cause irreparable damage, and Intel is still struggling to provide both immediate replacement units and a long-term patch.
Why is Intel in such a predicament?
Intel’s biggest problem is competition from rival chipmakers like AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. While it still dominates the PC space, much of the market is shifting to areas like mobile devices and AI processing. On top of that, Intel is struggling to keep up with shrinking die sizes, and competitors are moving into Intel’s strong suit. There are now Snapdragon-powered Windows PCs, and many gamers choose AMD processors because they’re cost-effective and avoid the glitches of Intel’s CPUs. Apple’s Mac computers have used first-party silicon for several generations now.
Intel hopes to turn things around later this year with its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake chips, the latter of which are likely to make it into many laptops and handheld PCs thanks to major improvements in AI processing and battery efficiency.
