Intel Corp shrinks. What does it mean?

The nimble will be the winners. Quick and dirty. No more long roads and pretty sunsets.

That is, I think, the real lesson from the Intel story. It’s not that the industry can’t afford engineers any more. It’s that expenditure on engineering talent has to pay back in cost, time to market, and flexibility of the resulting hardware/software platform designs. Forget increased performance or superior architectural elegance. Intel may be simply throwing away expenses, or they may be redirecting their engineering investment. But it behooves the rest of us to stop and think about what value we are really bringing to the table. It’s not about a glorious past when the microprocessor was young and the SoC an implausible dream. It’s about getting quickly, reliably to market and staying there with the least expenditure. That change has to work its way into strategy, architecture, and day-to-day design choices.

Read the EDN are linked here.