>>510335269 (OP)Anyone in the fabs in Oregon can attest to this. Intel brought in a bunch of ex Korean Samsung fab workers and they used H1b's to hire them to work on their broken process. This is why 18A is turning out halfway decent.
Knowing this, they are gutting full time workers to make way for 'cheaper' H1b ex Samsung workers as Samsung is experiencing an exodus of fab engineers.
In the end, its all about cutting cost while focusing on bringing in people who can do what Intel couldn't in the past.
Their product line is also totally stagnant and they are cutting projects too soon or products that didn't have instant or mass profits (like Optane, NUC, various network products/tech, etc.). The new guy Lip-Bu Tan wants to have Intel focus on areas that other tech giants (like Nvidia and AMD) haven't already conquered. Thus he's focused on 'Edge AI' (which is going to be shit without a good software to go along with it and no one in the AI race is focused on bringing the most desired AI features to the edge). And in the datacenter, he is aggressively discounting their CPUs (some saying at a loss even) to help slow down AMD's take over of the Datacenter to give Intel time to try and close the gap.
All of it is hinged on ensuring their leading edge nodes are great thus the ex samsung engineers. So, we'll see in a few months if their 18A really is back to where Intel wants it to be.