Intel slashes nearly 140 jobs after dropping IoT product lines

Intel will eliminate nearly 140 jobs after dropping three of its IoT-focused product lines in June.

The Silicon Valley Business Journal reported Intel has let roughly 100 people go at its headquarters in Santa Clara, California, in a second round of layoffs this year, and The Times said more than three dozen jobs are being eliminated at a campus in County Kildare, Ireland. The Register picked up both stories this morning.

Those moves follow last month’s news that Intel was quietly discontinuing development of the company’s Galileo, Joule and Edison lines, as Hackaday reported. The compute modules were developed to power a range of IoT-based devices and applications including wearables, smart speakers and robotics.

As The Register noted, Intel’s IoT business generated $721 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2017, up 11% year over year. But that amount represented a small fraction of Intel’s overall sales.

Those setbacks notwithstanding, Intel will surely continue to pursue its IoT ambitions through other initiatives. It apparently will continue to develop Curie, a 32-bit system-on-a-chip module that includes Bluetooth and a motion sensor and can do computations. And in April the company announced a $4.125 million collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University designed to increase their understanding of visual cloud capabilities that will play a significant role in 5G and the IoT.

“5G has those great characteristics of low latency and high bandwidth in mobile environments and will enable a whole new set of applications as well,” Jim Blakley, general manager of Intel’s Visual Cloud Division, said in April. Intel is also pursuing the autonomous car market, acquiring technology provider Mobileye in March for $15.3 billion.