Intel's Sales Down, Current Gen of Products Weak 249
DoctorBit writes "According to an article in EETimes, Intel's processor sales dropped 52 percent this April as compared with April one year ago. Unit sales dropped 21 percent and prices dropped 40 percent. The article concludes with an industry analyst's assertion that 'Intel has obviously given up on making any money on their current generation of processors and has started a price war with AMD.' The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Intel has just put several of its money-losing communications businesses up for sale and notes that 'it remains to be seen what Intel will do with its other money-losing businesses, Itanium microprocessors and flash memory chips.' The article quotes an industry analyst saying 'If you look at Intel today, it's hard to find a trace of the technology or the people that they spent more than $10 billion on.' Ouch."
This will change (Score:4, Funny)
No it won't. (Score:2)
Re:This will change (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This will change (Score:2)
Re:This will change (Score:2)
buy low, sell high (Score:5, Funny)
Falling for their own hype (Score:5, Informative)
OTOH, if Conroe really performs well, we might actually see the first big step upwards in performance for any mainstream desktop CPU in the last year or so.
Re:Falling for their own hype (Score:3, Funny)
Marketshare (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketshare (Score:2)
Re:Marketshare (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, useful competition simply means having someone nipping at your heels. One does not have to be neck and neck with a competitor to spur innovation.
Why April sales fell. (Score:5, Insightful)
Question - when did Intel hire SpongeBob and Patrick to start naming their processors?
Re:Why April sales fell. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why April sales fell. (Score:2)
Re:Why April sales fell. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why April sales fell. (Score:4, Funny)
Conception Bay, Dildo....
Naming (Score:5, Insightful)
Their naming convention needs to be more user friendly. The average consumer has no idea what a Pentium D processor is but they could understand that a Pentium 4 was better than a Pentium III. It's all about marketing to the masses in this over-saturated market.
Re:Naming (Score:2)
Re:Naming (Score:2, Funny)
hmmm... wonder what those cores will be optimized for...
Re:Naming (Score:4, Funny)
.
.
.
and by that, i mean that you'll be able to do word processing, internet browsing, solitaire & audio playback. they will not be optimized for gaming or 3d rendering.
Re:Naming (Score:2)
No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the real problem is that Intel is accustomed to a market where you sell specific processor brands direct to consumers, which is crazy. In a world where a $500 PC is going to be able to do 99.9 percent of anything that the average home user wants to do, that home user doesn't give a rat's ass what kind of processor is in there. Pentium M, Celeron M, Core 38 Double-D ... who cares? If their friend tells them AMD is a little better, then fine, they're going to buy AMD. Either way, all the same. All the shiny Intel Inside stickers in the world aren't going to make a bit of difference.
People see an Intel commercial on TV and they tune it out. A guy in a weird space suit? OK, whatever.
Gamers still care what kind of chip is in there, but gamers also have the option of consoles. Plus, the CPU matters a lot but the video card is the really sexy component for them. On the other hand, people who run servers might care about CPUs, but those kind of people are going to want to see real-world benchmarks.
Intel needs to get over it ... and it is getting over it. Notice how Apple Macs all have Intel chips in them now. Dumb luck? I doubt it. Intel made the kind of deal it needs to keep making to stay on target, deals that are based on a simple old-fashioned idea: You're a component manufacturer. Sell components to manufacturers of consumer goods and let the consumer-goods manufacturers do the selling to consumers. If your product delivers the performance the manufacturer needs with a good integrated suite of products around it (e.g. chipsets, drivers, compilers) at a price point that the manufacturer can afford, then the manufacturer will buy your components.
In a way, the last thing Intel needs is semi-informed consumers starting flamewars over this component vs. that component, Brand X versus Brand Y. A lot of the engineering decisions that get made in the CPU world aren't things that can be easily explained to consumers, so what you end up with is a bunch of FUD and name-calling. Intel's better off receding into the background and letting its engineering do the talking (if it's still got it).
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD started it (Score:2)
If there were a way to claim duos had processor speed x 2 as their clock speed, Intel woul
Re:AMD started it (Score:2)
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:2)
On that note, I want to know when the promised System On A Chip computers will be hitting Walmart, etc.
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:2)
On that note, I want to know when the promised System On A Chip computers will be hitting Walmart, etc.
Oh, man, where have you been all of this time? The system-on-a-chip has come and gone already, in at least the form of the Cyrix MediaGX series of processors. It integrated graphics, audio, memory and PCI controllers into the CPU die. Compaq sold a few machines with them, IIRC, but they sucked badly since users could not upgrade the soldered-on-the-motherboard processors. I've not seen any other devices
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:2)
I've heard this argument before, but in the world you're talking about, average home users aren't given nearly enough cool software. I know a lot of average Mac users will gobble the extra Intel horsepower up using the free included software, doing multi-person iChats with high compression, iMovie+iDVDs, Quartz Compositions, etc. The world where the average home user does no video codecs or
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:2)
I wonder. I just got back from a client's shop where they're still on Windows 2000. At lunch, my clients girlfriend called him, because her computer running Windows 98 is acting funny. LOTS of people in the USA still don't watch TV or Movies on their computer.
It is probably more correct to say "The world where they trie
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:2)
Re:No, the problem is marketing chips (Score:3, Insightful)
As an aside to this, most companies I've work for would get a better return on their investment if they spent (more) money on training people in basic computer skills, than on buying shiny new computers. I think over the years Joe Sixpack has acquired a little more computer savvy, but not in proportion to the power of today's hardware. Alas, hardware is sexy an
Re:Naming (Score:2)
Blame slashdots UI for part it.
It drives me nuts. If the input gets set to html, and you don't explicitly put in <p> or <br> then it ignores paragraph breaks as whitespace and condenses everything into one paragraph. It drives me nuts... I've had a few of my posts get mangled by it; because I usually post in plain-text, but sometimes slashdot defaults to html for some reason
Re:Naming (Score:2)
If I bought a pentium 3 a few years ago, I expect to be buying at least a pentium 5 this year. This is marketing, NOT engineering. It doesn't have to make technica
Itanium (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Itanium (Score:2)
Just because Itanium was a failure and presscot was cr
Not so modern. (Score:5, Informative)
Second the PentiumM and the CoreDuo are a step back to the PentiumIII.
Yea the Core Duo may be a new winner for Intel but it all seems to point to one thing. Intel is a one trick pony. Every time they try and replace the X86 line it turns out to be a total failure. The 432 was supposed to be the next big thing way back when. Then came the i860 CPU which Intel pushed as a Cray on a chip. Now we have the Itanium. At some point the X86 will just run out of steam. At that point Intel will be in major trouble.
Re:Not so modern. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not so modern. (Score:2)
I like to call it Centrino. It's a better name.
Second the PentiumM and the CoreDuo are a step back to the PentiumIII
P4 was like it was for a reason. They clearly _wanted_ to be able to clock the P4 that high from the start. I'm sick of reading that P4 is crap - P4 "crappiness" is what has allowed Intel to continue selling CPUs. Indeed, P4 is crap compared with AMD but it'd be _much_ worse if intel wouldn't have design
Re:Not so modern. (Score:3, Informative)
There is every reason to think that Intel wanted to replace the X86 with the Itanium. They said so when the Itanitum was first announced. The Itanium was going to be a family of chips and would be in everything from desktops to supercomputers. If you can find any press releases from that time you will find your proof.
I don't think that Intel is stupid. Just too that they have been too successful. The PC is their bread and butter. If a chip doesn't run the current software stack faster it is dead on the PC.
Re:Not so modern. (Score:2)
no (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not the weakness of Itanium that's the problem, it's apparently their ability to make any architechture fast and not just the one they want.
Re:Itanium (Score:2)
Some of us remember your "modern Intel" from the days of the iAPX-432 [wikipedia.org]. Has it really been 30 years? Tempus fidget.
Intel is a victim of success (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, this effect happens to all large companies. They stop innovating. They instead focus on shoring up their stock and capital to keep investors happy, lowering risk, and start focusing on acquisitions to bring in new ideas and new blood. Intel is no different than any other company.
There is a solution: skunkworks new ideas. Throw time, effort, money, and brainpower at innovation, with NO guarantee of returns. Then, when new products are created, don't squash them under a controlling corporate culture. Let them grow internally, with support. Intrapreneurship does not look at org charts or worry about the bottom line as much as the next 5 years.
Welcome to commoditization.
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:2)
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:3, Informative)
Errr, no, it was not a "new idea at Intel." It was an idea that had been festering at HP for awhile under the moniker PA-WW [clemson.edu], and had acquired a thoroughly pervasive case of Kitchen Sink Syndrome. It ended up at Intel through a combination of factors, probably not the least of which was Intel's growing realization that x86 was getting hard to scale. (Intel may have been emboldened by the Mac 68K to PPC switch as well, given that had happened just before Intel joined forces w/ HP.) Thing is, when they to
Um, no. (Score:2)
Refocus on their core business, that is what they need to do.
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:5, Informative)
Intel had profits last year of almost $8 billion versus a market cap of $106 billion.
AMD had profits of about $370 million on a market cap of about $15 billion.
That means Intel is giving about three times the return on investment.
Oh, and their newest chip pretty much squashes everything on the market, including their own current "Extreme Edition" offerings.
AMD has no viable laptop chips, while the Core Duo has been out for months. Did I mention that laptops account for the majority of new computers purchased? And that they're far more profitable that desktops?
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:3, Informative)
I could buy 100 shares of AMD at $30 for $3000 today. If the stock goes up to $40/share in a year and I sell, I've made $1000 for an investment of $3000. In the meantime, AMD might have actually lost money that year (yes, companies can lose money and still gain market cap). So in this scenario, even though AMD lost money, I as an owner of that stock, had a return on investment of 33% in one year.
The numbers I'd be more intere
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:2)
Of course their focus has not been on the x86 desktop market for some time..
Intel is a victim of itself (Score:3, Informative)
AMD had profits of about $370 million on a market cap of about $15 billion.
Note which direction AMD's profits are going [yahoo.com]. Their stockholders' equity [yahoo.com] is growing very nicely too. Current assets are up, long-term debt is way down.
Now look at Intel. Profits plummeted last quarter [yahoo.com]. Stockholders' equity [yahoo.com] is down, thanks to their cash balance plummeting from $11B to $5B over the past year.
You can make Net Income say whatever you
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:3, Insightful)
No. And that is part of the problem.
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:2)
they also made their customer the enemy (Score:3, Insightful)
Objects telling their OWNERS they refuse (this is more than just software suggesting that an action may be a violation of law) to do something because they think it might be illegal and secretly send private info to a mothership. What kind of BS is that? Clearly only fools would buy such a device unless they hadn't other options. And intel misbetted that customers had other options.
It's basically untrusted computing
Re:they also made their customer the enemy (Score:2)
What's contradictory?
Re:Intel is a victim of success (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I think the problem at Intel was they innovated too much and in the wrong direction. They poured billions in to Itanium and its horrible for any volume market, its really only good in the tiny supercomputing niche. They really took their eye of the commodity market, where their profits come from, fiddling with that monster.
They also innovated too much on Pentium 4 and it ended up with an excessively complex, hot expensive processor that didn't perform well, and its not go
I like competition above anything else (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:I like competition above anything else (Score:2)
Though there wasn't much to the article, and it repeated itself. However, it gave indications that we have very healthy competition: "The average price of a PC processor in April was less than half what it was in March[...]". Intel, last I heard, still has a commanding majority of the processor market. Even if they falter a bit for a product generation or two, they have bi [yahoo.com]
Waiting to pull the rug out? (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD overextending itself in an attempt to grab lots of market-share from Intel could prove very damaging when Intel 'gets it right again', such as with the Conroe exploding all expectations. An Intel offering that relies on sheer quality, rather than extortionate market dealing, could wreck AMD's edge and turn all their forward-thinking investment into a Sisyphean debt load.
Re:Waiting to pull the rug out? (Score:2)
So, is AMD overextending itself and getting cocky?
Re:Waiting to pull the rug out? (Score:2)
Re:Waiting to pull the rug out? (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, AMD has been supply constrained lately, selling every single chip that they make. As a result, t
You bloated sack of protoplasm... (Score:2)
AMD overextending itself in an attempt to grab lots of market-share from Intel could prove very damaging when Intel 'gets it right again', such as with the Conroe exploding all expectations. An Intel offering that relies on sheer quality, rather than extortionate market de
If you look at Intel today... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's where Intel is focusing, and that's where Intel wants their customers to focus. I bet 80486 sales dried up pretty badly right before the Pentium launched too.
Re:If you look at Intel today... (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD currently has a lot of momentum though, when the Core2 is a huge success, it will take some time for people to realize it, and perhaps give enough time for AMD to come back wi
Re:If you look at Intel today... (Score:2)
Why would a user buy a Core2 machine when you can get a Pentium D for far less money?
They're both dual core, and the D is older slower and puts out far more heat. But for most people, paying several hundred dollars isn't worth getting the Core 2.
I'm amused that Intel is now competing with their old kludges.
Did you read the article? Do you see how much sales are down in the US? It's huge.
The whole market is hurting, it mentions that AMD won't see much of a change in their income.
Re:If you look at Intel today... (Score:2)
Re:If you look at Intel today... (Score:2)
And you seriously believe this is a selling point? Several dollars a month over several years vs. a few hundred dollars now?
Re:If you look at Intel today... (Score:2)
Intel had it coming (Score:2, Informative)
Now that it's coming back to bite them on the ass, I think it
Hope it turns around. . . (Score:2)
New Intel Logo? Not on Slashdot! (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot has been using the old Gnome logo for so long its becoming a running joke. They changed their logo in 2002. See the response from the Gnome foundation here. [slashdot.org]
Re:Hope it turns around. . . (Score:2)
Gnome updated their logo in 2003, and Slashdot still does not use it. Slashdot does not cater to corporate or marketing whim when choosing its logos - Slashdot liked the old one better, so that's the one it's gonna use!
After all, it's been years since Microsoft used the "Bill Gates is the Borg" logo for the company, since Star Trek is so out of vogue. And yet, Slashdot flat-out refuses to move to the new "Steve Ballmer is Darth Vader"
Imagine (Score:3, Funny)
Well Duh? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am also surprised that it has taken Intel so long to realize this. Even today, they are still flogging the P4 architecture. With the Duo Core CPU's out, you can't even buy this as a desktop system yet, and they are set to release the Duo Core 2 CPU's later this year. Intel should have scrubbed ALL products with the P4 architecture and simply moved forward to their Core architecture.
Anyways, I will once again be an interesting time in the CPU market as Intel releases their next generation products. Initial reviews seem positive that Intel has something that can compete against AMD, and this will only motivate AMD to produce new technology (AMD has been stuck in a rut as of late). A price war is necessary as CPU prices are staying far to high these days as neither company has really been in competitive form. AMD has locked the gaming market and Intel has the business market locked, these are two non-competing markets, and both companies have pretty much set their price lists accordingly.
I don't care who makes the next best CPU, I am neither an Intel nor AMD fanboy, I want a system that performs well for the money. Its been AMD for the last 5 years and if Intel finally puts their money where their mouth is and actually delivers a product that offers good price/performance/power features, I will switch back to the Intel platform. Just, its about time Intel started focusing on RELEASING their next generation architecture to the masses and stop talking about it.
Re:Well Duh? (Score:2)
Hmmm. The Intel iMac sitting on my desk seems to prove you wrong.
Intel has been #2 for a long, long time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, if their roadmap is to be believed, Intel may have just begun a genuine turnaround. They already have 65mn fabs running at higher capacity than AMD, and they are near to bringing 45nm fabs online, which AMD has not done. Also, for the first time in a number of years, Intel actually has a production chip that looks to be genuinely faster than AMD's best offering. (Although it costs an arm and a leg.)
The question really is, is it too little, too late? One thing's for sure, the competition is great for the consumers.
Re:Intel has been #2 for a long, long time. (Score:2)
Competition and Concurrent Programming (Score:2, Informative)
Probably not a price war, more likely fire sale (Score:2, Insightful)
The price cuts probably have little to do with competitve reasons and are more likely operational.
Oops, just relized the pun. Funny anyway.
What's Dual Core? Does Joe Public know? (Score:4, Informative)
Flash will never go (Score:4, Informative)
A bad transistor (or contact or whatever) on a microprocessor can be very difficult to track down. Pass/fail testing is pretty good on them, but actually identifying the source of the failure can be really tricky and time consuming.
Re:Flash will never go (Score:2)
Re:Flash will never go (Score:2)
Perhaps someone a little closer to the business would weigh in on this one?
Why Buy Now (Score:4, Insightful)
And seriously folks, why would you buy a 32-bit only, non-VT enabled, hot running, substantially slower Intel chip today if you can possibly delay until Conroe comes out?
Heck, even if you don't want a Conroe Core 2 Duo 64-bit VT chip, the prices on the old stuff are going to drop through the floor. Golly, they're already through the floor. How about drop to the center of the Earth.
An Intel PC -- including all Macs -- is just not a good buy today with the next generation so close at hand.
Current Gen of Products Weak... (Score:3, Interesting)
And their marketing and branding sucks. I still have no clue which Core Duo chip is supposed to be fastest or whatever. So I just don't buy.
Way to go Intel.
Core Duo = Duo Price (Score:2, Interesting)
I still stick with Intel procs in my servers (AMD X2 at home) for stability reasons (Troll me if you must) but NFORCE (IMO the only really stable AMD system)support for a 1U rack mount server using Linux has been a bitch for me to find.
I'm out buying up P4HT procs as fast as I can get them.
As Intel keeps jacking prices, I keep looking at AMD to be
Re:Core Duo = Duo Price (Score:2)
Offtopic (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Offtopic (Score:3, Informative)
Reading Slashdot news has become a pain in the *ss after somebody decided to use the ugliest and smallest fonts available.
It's a markup language, so fix it already. Specify your own CSS for the site, or just to always use +1 fonts sizes on this site. Another issue is that it looks like it uses a special style for IE to make up for the fact that IE breaks the font size conventions, so if you're using a decent browser, but identifying it as IE, you are probably getting smaller text than everyone else. That
Re:Offtopic (Score:2, Informative)
Tahoma was made specifically for small-font-size menus and titles, not for large blocks of text (see here [microsoft.com]).
Keep the left and right sidebars in small-size Tahoma, but please please pleas
I for one am enjoying it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Moore's Law? (Score:3, Interesting)
Multipl cores are nice but really need software to evolve more before they will hit their stride. Multithreaded programming separates the men from the boys and an entire segment just doesn't "get it". IMO that's because a well-designed multithreaded program can't be developed by sitting down and banging on the keys. It is no longer enough to say "the documentation is in the code" because there are architectural aspects of the code as it relates to multiprocessing and multithreading that don't lend themselves to being documented that way.
Outside of server apps can anyone point to a software package that really needs more than one processor? Even my 2-year-old P4 has 2 logical processors inside it but I recall there is more than one software package out there that won't run properly unless that feature is turned off. Nice job.
Re:Moore's Law? (Score:2)
Interestingly, dimini
Ah intel (Score:4, Insightful)
Waiting on Conroe... (Score:2)
I had been mulling an upgrade for a few months but now that I know Conroe will be out in July and have seen some of the benchmarks people are making public I'm going to wait until I can get a Conroe.
I know Superpi is a pretty artifical benchmark, however, my current P4 2.8 does 1M in around 50-52s. IIRC a Conroe at 2.67 Ghz does it in something like 16-18s. Considering how good
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Support Your Claim (Score:2)
The signal-based, synchronous model is already proven. It is the same model use by hardware logic circuits. In fact, the counterintuitive claim of Project COSA is that a COSA program's design cosistency increases with complexity! The reason is simple: the number of temporal constraints in a COSA program is proportional to complexity. The writing is on the wa
Re:Dropping sales means customers are better educa (Score:2)
Since then, I haven't bought a Intel and been using AMD because I can get similiar performance for around a hundred-two hundred dollars less than an Intel. I always read the reviews, and watch the performance charts, then decide which is the better product for the $.
Apparently you haven't been watching too closely lately. Intel is currently winning the price/performance comparison in several segments, including most of the laptop market. I usually only do comparisons before I'm going to buy something, bu
Re:Dropping sales means customers are better educa (Score:2)
The original Pentium had the floating point error. If memory shows correct. And at that point in time and several years into the future intel reigned supreme. The k6 was not the best competitor when it came out.
Puto