Intel's recent restructure had a much broader impact than I originally believed. Beyond the large number of employees who will lose their jobs, we're even seeing it affect other areas of the industry. Typically, ASUS releases their ZenPhone line with x86 processors, which I assumed was based on big subsidies from Intel to push their instruction set into new product categories. This year, ASUS chose the ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon, which seemed to me like Intel decided to stop the bleeding.

That brings us to today's news. After over 27 years at Intel, James Reinders accepted the company's early retirement offer, scheduled for his 10001st day with the company, and step down from his position as Intel's High Performance Computing Director. He worked on the Larabee and Xeon Phi initiatives, and published several books on parallelism.

According to his letter, it sounds like his retirement offer was part of a company-wide package, and not targeting his division specifically. That would sort-of make sense, because Intel is focusing on cloud and IoT. Xeon Phi is an area that Intel is battling NVIDIA for high-performance servers, and I would expect that it has potential for cloud-based applications. Then again, as I say that, AWS only has a handful of GPU instances, and they are running fairly old hardware at that, so maybe the demand isn't there yet.