

Intel profit leaps to $3.2 billion, crushes estimates   - anya
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20055353-64.html?tag=topStories2
Intel posted blockbuster first-quarter net income of $3.2 billion, up 29 percent over the same period last year. Revenue came in at $12.8 billion, up 25 percent year-over-year.Earnings per share were 56 cents (and 59 cents non-GAAP). Analysts had been expecting 46 cents a share.
======
hollerith
>PC shipments worldwide should reach almost 400 billion units this year

Although professional journalists do it all the time, bloggers and other
amateurs never mistake million for billion like this.

------
6ren
Digital was making great money just before PCs took over their minicomputer
business.

The smartphone and tablet categories have most growth currently and forecasted
- and ARM is well on top of both. What growth areas is Intel in?

I'm interested, because Intel has a unique history of keeping ahead, and they
are well aware of the danger, having done it to others themselves (and Andy
Grove even had a blurb on the cover of _The Innovator's Dilemma_ ).

~~~
ippisl
ARM's profit last year was 170 million pound last year, that $68 million per
quarter vs intel's $3.2 billion.

There are of course the big chip manufacturers ,but also they don't make much
money. Qualcomm made around $200 million per quarter.

It would take a huge amount of growth for this markets to become financially
meaningful to intel. probably not gonna happen.

As for future growth , i think there could be plenty of long term growth in
servers, alot of growth in robotics and maybe some in netbooks/desktops for
the third world. With the move to the cloud, almost everything would be done
on the server, and i don't see some limit to the need to new valuable
processor-hungry applications.

Intel's real problem is the future competition on the server, both from arm in
the form of microservers and multicore server chips, and both from others like
tilera and gpu manufacturers.

The main worrying point , is that usually whenever intel won against
disruptors, it was in markets when windows was valuable. now that windows is
becoming obsolete, can intel win ? can intel be profitable ?

~~~
6ren
I didn't realize ARM was so much less profitable than intel. It's partly
because ARM's model of development is shared with its licensees (e.g. Apple's
A5 is based on ARM, but customized inhouse, and I believe uses third-party
components); so a fairer comparison of the ARM "business" would include all
these designers, assemblers and distributors, as well as the chip
manufacturers you mention. The ARM model is "dis-integrated", both in stages
(design, manufacturing, marketing) and in components within a particular SoC.
Intel is "integrated" on all those fronts (even to consumer advertising -
those funky cleansuits, "intel-inside"). The other factor is that Intel is
stunningly profitable, due to the wintel franchise.

There's huge prediction issue here, of what will happen to the smart-phone
market, that reasonable people could disagree about. I believe it will disrupt
"PCs", just as PCs disrupted workstations/mini-computers, which disrupted
mainframes (the latter of each may still exist, but only in the most demanding
applications in the highest tiers).

The reason is that as it improves in performance, it will become good enough
for more and more applications (while the PC's improvement will make it more
powerful than most applications need); and also offer other benefits: size,
consumption, mobility (and multi-touch, GPS, camera). If you can plug your
smartphone into your HDMI monitor, mouse and keyboard, and have all your
information there, would you still use your desktop?

As for the server, it's widely reported that power consumption is the dominant
issue as they grow in size. SSD are of interest for this reason... and ARM
cpus will be also. The crucial dimension is processing power/power
consumption. Intel is not ahead on this score, only in raw performance per
power-hungry cpu. But the really amazing difference is that because the ARM
architecture is open to customization, it is possible to optimize silicon
performance for highly specialized tasks - instead of writing time-critical
code in C, or assembler, you write it in silicon. Or, more generally, you
write time-critical modules in silicon, like crucial parts of what key-value
stores are doing.

I think we may see the rise of startups integrated along silicon-software
lines - like Apple is. Oracle is trying to do this (with Sun's SPARC). Imagine
the performance advantage you could get with this! You would annihilate the
competition.

I totally agree with your last line about the windows franchise. Once webapps
and the cloud get their act together (I'm looking at you reddit/amazon), it
seems that windows could indeed be obsolete (as long-forecasted).

OTOH, incumbents traditionally win their markets, even through dramatic
technology changes, because they know their customers (they have trouble when
their customers change). But this is usually when the market demands more of
the same thing... In the server market, power consumption has become more of
an issue, over raw processing power, and Intel has already been adapting to
it. But they don't have ARM's experience in low-power consumption, nor the
flexibility of architecture to optimize for it.

The only difficulty I have is that my analysis predicts that ARM has already
won the server market...

There's also an aging factor, in that the firebrand startup founders that made
it all happen - andy grove, gordon moore, etc - have retired. Look at HP
without H and P.

~~~
ippisl
Another way to compare prices for intel vs. arm: Intel's tablet hardware cost
$75 for z670 cpu + $20 for chipset. this compare to $20 tegra 2. There doesn't
seem much of an incentive for intel to sell $20 systems on a chip.

And regarding the critical code sections becoming silicon: i don't think it's
becoming silicon , because of the huge volumes that are require to manufacture
silicon. but they might become FPGA code.

FPGA is basically a programmable hardware. it has been used in the past as
computer co-processor , in fields like biology, oil and gas and database
accelerators. but the main barrier is that programming them is complex and
it's hard to find FPGA programmers.

But i see improvements in these areas. convey computer claims that it has made
programming an FPGA as easy is c programming. it woud be interesting to have
convey computer offer via the cloud.

But let's return to the intel vs ARM servers: according to arstechnica , arm
would find it very difficult to offer high per-thread performance at low
power. but given a cheap enough arm server processor , and the help of
GPU's(and FPGA or other coprocessors) intel could be seriously threatened.

------
tcgore
In related news, their stock price is still nowhere near its year-high. Intel
was my first job out of grad school in '04, and the options I gave up when I
did a startup are still underwater today.

