Our sources tell us mostly back office staff were let go, and that the mood in the office is very pessimistic

Intel has filed documents that reveal plans to fire around 5,000 staff, mostly in California and Oregon.

New CEO Lip-Bu Tan has warned Intel's in a bit of a bind - its x86 dominance is fading, the company is nowhere in GPU, and the plan to offer foundry services to other chip design companies hasn’t set the world on fire - so the layoffs are another step in its goal of cutting headcount by 20 percent and reducing costs.

News of the layoffs emerged in Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notices – filings that some states require when big businesses let go of staff.

Everyone's wondering if they're going to be next. There's an air of gloom.

WARN notices published in recent days show Intel plans nearly 2,000 layoffs in its Folsom and Santa Clara sites in California, plus around 2,500 workers from Hillsboro ...