Intel has notified the state of California that it is planning to lay off about 84 employees in Santa Clara at the end of the year. Santa Clara is home to Intel’s corporate headquarters, reports Oregon Live. Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that in response to poor results, the chip maker is making cuts to its wearable computing group.
Intel continues to eliminate jobs
On Monday in an email to Oregon Live, the chip maker said that the pending job cuts are related to its ongoing restructuring. However, the chip maker did not say if they are related to the wearables division. Also the company did not reveal whether it is planning fresh cutbacks at its largest site Oregon. Last spring, the chip maker laid off more than 784 Oregon workers and several hundred in other places.
Officials in Oregon have not reported a new layoff notice from the chip making giant. However, it is possible that they would not receive a notice if any cutbacks there didn’t meet a federal reporting threshold, says Oregon Live.
Intel is restructuring to prepare for a long-term drop in its core market, which is selling microprocessors for laptops and PCs. Initially, the chip making giant said it planned to remove 12,000 jobs worldwide by the middle of 2017. However, the company said in its last quarterly report that its restructuring had affected 15,000 employees already.
Intel wrote that these reductions are in conjunction with its effort to re-balance its workforce to align strategically with essential areas like memory, the Internet of Things, and the data center business. Thanks to Intel’s growth in data centers, it has continued hiring for new positions even as it removed several jobs, says Oregon Live. The chip maker forecasts annual sales of around $59 billion this year, which is more than a 6% increase from 2015.
Skylake Xeon server processor packs 32 cores?
The chip maker has also started shipping a “preliminary production” version of its next-gen Xeon server processor line, it announced recently. The new chips are manufactured in the 14-nanometer+ technology and are based on the Skylake processor architecture.
Earlier, it was believed that the next-gen processors would pack about 28 processing cores, a step up from the current-gen Broadwell-EP-based processor line that packs up to 24 processors. But a new leak revealed that the top Skylake Server chips will pack up to 32 cores.
On Monday, Intel shares closed up 0.2% at $35.51. Year to date, the stock is up more than 3%, while in the last months, it is up more than 12%.
