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HenryTo
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 Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:21 pm Post subject: |
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Intel's earnings and outlook. Stock up 6% in AH trading so far.
| Quote: | Intel Posts Record First Quarter Revenue of $9.7 Billion
Tuesday April 15, 4:15 pm ET
-- Record Server Microprocessor Revenue
-- Revenue up 9 Percent Year-over-Year
-- Gross Margin up 4 Points Year-over-Year
-- Operating Income up 23 Percent Year-over-Year
-- Net Income $1.4 Billion; EPS 25 Cents
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intel Corporation today announced record first-quarter revenue of $9.7 billion, operating income of $2.1 billion, net income of $1.4 billion and earnings per share (EPS) of 25 cents.
“Our first quarter results demonstrate a strengthening core business and a solid global market environment,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. “We saw healthy demand for our leading-edge processors and chipsets across all segments. Looking forward, we remain optimistic about our growth opportunities as we continue to reap the benefits of our 45nm technology leadership.”
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Financial and Key Product Information
Intel’s microprocessor and chipset businesses came in as expected. Total microprocessor units were lower sequentially, with the ASP approximately flat.
Consistent with the company’s updated expectations, NAND revenue was flat as significant price declines offset unit growth.
Gross margin was 53.8 percent, in line with the company’s revised expectation.
Restructuring and asset impairment charges of $329 million included $275 million in impairment charges for the assets transferred to Numonyx.
The effective tax rate was 33.5 percent, higher than the previous expectation of approximately 31 percent, primarily driven by a higher than expected proportion of profits being in higher-tax jurisdictions along with the tax effects of impairment charges related to the assets sold to Numonyx.
The company used $2.5 billion to repurchase 122 million shares of its common stock.
Business Outlook
Intel’s Business Outlook does not include the potential impact of any mergers, acquisitions, divestitures or other business combinations that may be completed after April 14.
Q2 2008:
Revenue: Between $9.0 billion and $9.6 billion. The forecast reflects a significant reduction in NOR flash memory revenue as a result of the Numonyx transaction.
Gross margin: 56 percent plus or minus a couple of points.
Spending (R&D plus MG&A): Between $2.8 billion and $2.9 billion.
Restructuring and asset impairment charges: Approximately $250 million.
Net gains from equity investments and interest and other: Approximately $75 million.
Tax rate: Approximately 33 percent.
Depreciation: Approximately $1.1 billion.
Full-Year 2008:
Gross margin: 57 percent plus or minus a few points, unchanged.
R&D: Approximately $6 billion, higher than the previous expectation of approximately $5.9 billion.
MG&A: Approximately $5.5 billion, unchanged.
Capital spending: $5.2 billion plus or minus $200 million, unchanged.
Tax rate: The tax rate for the third and fourth quarters is expected to be approximately 33 percent.
Depreciation: $4.4 billion plus or minus $100 million, unchanged. |
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HenryTo
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Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
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| Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 2:23 am Post subject: |
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AMD finally getting its act together, but problems still remain:
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9928579-1.html
| Quote: | AMD has long claimed that its quad-core chip has advantages over Intel because of a built-in memory controller--for better memory sharing across many processors--and strong floating point performance. These are the very reasons the Texas Advanced Computing Center selected AMD's quad-core Barcelona processors for its supercomputer that will house more than 60,000 processors when it's completed.
That said, AMD has a lot of catching up to do. Though the company said in its first-quarter 2008 earnings conference call that it shipped more than half a million quad-core processors in that quarter (about 100,000 more than the fourth quarter of 2007), eight months have past since Barcelona was introduced (September, 2007). And until recently the only takers of quad-core Barcelona chips had been select high-performance computing (HPC) customers such as the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Mainstream server vendors had put off Barcelona deployment because of the now-infamous "TLB" processor bug, among other issues. Phenom quad-core processors, on the other hand, have been shipping to system builders for a few months.
The problem is that Intel has pulled way ahead of AMD in the interim. "Intel is a full (manufacturing) process generation ahead," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at CRT Capital Group. A growing percentage of Intel processors shipped to customers are built on the 45-nanometer (nm) processor while AMD is shipping 65nm chips. AMD is slated to shift to 45nm at the end of this year. |
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HenryTo
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Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
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HenryTo
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Joined: 06 Aug 2004
Posts: 7210
Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 11:57 pm Post subject: |
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Intel launches its Atom processor:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20857/?nlid=1124
| Quote: | Shenoy said that the Atom breaks with the Intel tradition of making faster and faster chips, which have an inherently higher cost.
By contrast, he said, the low-power Atom is relatively cheap to produce and exceptionally small, with 2,500 of the chips -- each containing 47 million transistors -- fitting on one 12-inch wafer.
That's the equivalent of squeezing 11 of the devices onto a penny.
"Intel has always been about faster, faster and faster chips," Shenoy said. "But we want to innovate in a new direction this time, very low power, very small size, and, yes, very low cost."
Retired information technology analyst In Wei-yee, formerly of UBS AG in New York, called the Atom's launch "very significant."
"They're trying to address a large market that needs low-cost solutions," he said. "The idea is to get beyond current bottlenecks." |
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HenryTo
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Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
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HenryTo
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Joined: 06 Aug 2004
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Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
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| Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2008 2:14 pm Post subject: |
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Unfortunately for AMD, Intel is about to take this away:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3326&p=9
| Quote: | The fact that we're able to see these sorts of performance improvements despite being faced with a dormant AMD says a lot. In many ways Intel is doing more to improve performance today than when AMD was on top during the Pentium 4 days.
AMD never really caught up to the performance of Conroe, through some aggressive pricing we got competition in the low end but it could never touch the upper echelon of Core 2 performance. With Penryn, Intel widened the gap. And now with Nehalem it's going to be even tougher to envision a competitive high-end AMD CPU at the end of this year. 2009 should hold a new architecture for AMD, which is the only thing that could possibly come close to achieving competition here. It's months before Nehalem's launch and there's already no equal in sight, it will take far more than Phenom to make this thing sweat. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 1:17 pm Post subject: |
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Discusses the anti-trust environment in Europe and Japan vs. that of the US for Intel:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/business/21nocera.html?pagewanted=1&ref=technology
| Quote: | For as long as we’ve had antitrust laws in the United States, predatory pricing — pricing intended solely to prevent a rival from being able to compete — has been against the law. After all, if a big company drops its prices on a short-term basis to drive a smaller rival out of business — and then can raise prices with impunity because it has eradicated its competitor — consumers are ultimately harmed by the price cuts.
But our definition of predatory pricing has tended to vary over time. In the 1950s and 1960s, United States antitrust enforcers — and the courts — tended to view many forms of discounting as predatory. One sorry result was that actions that actually helped consumers were considered illegal practices.
But in the 1970s, that all changed, as legal scholars argued persuasively that anticompetitive behavior had to be defined in more rigorously economic terms, and that there needed to be a high standard of proof that monopolistic behavior was harming consumers. This became known as the Chicago School of antitrust theory, and in time, the courts embraced many of its theories.
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One reason A.M.D. has had more success pressing its case abroad than in the United States is that in many places in the world, the reigning antitrust view is what’s called the post-Chicago School, which holds that there are times when pricing above cost can still constitute predatory behavior. Indeed, the European Commission tends to put far more emphasis on competition than on consumers, and views with suspicion companies with oversize market share, like Intel
But what happens if the commission rules against Intel — as seems likely — but the F.T.C. and the United States courts rule in favor of the company? That’s what happens these days with mergers that need government approval — Europe has turned thumbs down on a number of mergers involving two American companies, and as a result they haven’t gone through. The world economy really won’t function very well if multinational companies have to dance between dueling regulators. Either we need to adopt their standards, or they need to adopt ours. The Intel-A.M.D. shows, if nothing else, how untenable the current state of play is in antitrust. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 6:30 pm Post subject: |
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Dreamworks switches to Intel from AMD:
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9985989-1.html
| Quote: | Essentially, DreamWorks looked down the road and liked what it saw coming from Intel better. "When we look at the Intel roadmap, it is more closely aligned with our needs," John Batter, president of production at DreamWorks Animations, said during a conversation with Nanotech: The Circuits blog. "The rendering times have been going up because of the complexity and richness of the images. Then you layer on top of that 3D. Something that's already growing--and doubling it."
Intel had the best technology, Batter said. "You need a lot more horsepower. On Intel's upcoming generation, the number of cores is going to help us satiate the big spike in our needs."
DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD, Batter said.
He explained that Intel is also helping DreamWorks to redesign its animation tools. "Our animation tools are all proprietary here. Intel is rearchitecting our software tools...to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable."
DreamWorks uses rendering farms with as many as 5,000 cores to create animation and its tools need to be adapted to the increasing number of processor cores, Batter said. The Nehalem chip, for example, is expected to integrate as many as eight cores. Currently, Intel offers no more than four cores per chip. Larrabee is expected by many to offer as many as 32 cores. |
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HenryTo
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Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
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HenryTo
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Joined: 06 Aug 2004
Posts: 7210
Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
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| Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 2:03 am Post subject: |
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Intel names its next generation processor the Core i7:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12625
| Quote: | | The impending launch of Intel's Nehalem processor in Q4 2008 already has the hardware community buzzing. Nehalem has already shaped up to appear quite the performance beast. With the power of eight logical cores (four physical, doubled by hyper-threading) built on a 45 nm process to leverage, it’s shaping up to be a strong offering. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 12:03 am Post subject: |
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Intel's microprocessor roadmap to 2012:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12685
| Quote: | The next new architecture after Nehalem is codenamed Sandy Bridge (formerly known as Gesher) and will be built on a 32 nm process. While details are scarce, Intel is hard at work on its development and details have begun to trickle out.
Sandy Bridge will feature many key improvements. It will support wider vectors, which Intel says allows for more power efficient floating point operations. It also will feature "advanced data rearrangement", involving the use of 256 bit primitives. Intel says this will improve cache coordination and help to speed the flow of data. Furthering Sandy Bridge's monolithic nature, the new architecture will support three and four operand instructions and non destructive syntax to minimize register copies and allow for extensibility.
The architecture also features "flexible unaligned memory access support", which Intel indicates will allow computations to be immediately performed on data loaded from memory. Also Intel will offer up an extensible new opcode (VEX), which it says will reduce code size. The net results of the improvements Intel says will be an increase in performance of as much as 90 percent in certain mathematically intensive operations such as matrix multiplies.
With the Sandy Bridge processors expected to land in 2010, 2011 will bring a shrink codenamed Ivy Bridge, which will be made at the 22 nm node. Finally in 2012, the next new architecture Haswell will arrive.
While Haswell is still in the very formative stages, Intel has big plans for it as well. Early reports indicate that it will have eight physical cores by default and "revolutionary" power saving features. Another key feature of this new architecture will be the FMA (Fused Multiply-Add), which will allow terms to be multiplied and added simultaneously. |
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