10nm woes, CPU supply shortages, competition from AMD... What? Sorry? Intel can't hear you over the cash register going bonkers

Intel on Thursday reported $20.2bn revenue for the fourth quarter of 2019, a gain of eight per cent year-on-year, and $72bn for the full-year, a two per cent increase. Analysts had been expecting something less, around $19.23bn and $70.98bn on average, and the results lifted the chip giants stock in after-hours trading. CEO …

[chuckufarley]

Google translate does not support CorpSpeak...

...So I will have to try to do this manually:

"One year into our long-term financial plan, we have outperformed our revenue and EPS expectations."

That must mean they can make more money by making less chips and then selling them auction style instead of the old fashion method of making lots of chips and selling then at a fixed price point. Oh, yeah, and they made more money without fixing Spectre-Meltdown-L1FT-Zombieload-et-al.

[diodesign]

Spectre-Meltdown-L1FT-Zombieload-et-al

I've heard rumblings that a chunk of the data center sales are or were due to banks and cloud builders replacing processors with those with mitigations built in.

But it's mainly Intel auctioning off chips to hyperscalers ordering 1m parts a year, I reckon.

C.

[Kobblestown]

Re: Spectre-Meltdown-L1FT-Zombieload-et-al

Another possibility - the mitigations bring performance down so you need more cores just to keep the same level of performance.

[theblackhand]

Re: Spectre-Meltdown-L1FT-Zombieload-et-al

"the mitigations bring performance down"

The software mitigation's reduce performance - the hardware mitigation's found in Cascade Lake generation chips address Meltdown/Foreshadow in hardware and the remainder of currently known Spectre issues to a similar level as other x86/non-x86 SMT platforms.

While OS/software fixes are still required (and may impact performance) to fully address issues, that isn't an Intel exclusive issue.

[chuckufarley]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8ukak8P2vY

[Schultz]

"the company realized $3.8bn in AI-based revenue"

Is that rebranding of existing business, or is there any actual, palpable 'AI-based revenue'? My not-so-artificial intelligence wants to know...

[Charlie Clark]

Re: "the company realized $3.8bn in AI-based revenue"

It's basically Mobileye.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "the company realized $3.8bn in AI-based revenue"

I suspect it's probably rebranding

Most of the revenue ($2.5bn+ of the $3.8bn?) will likely be attributed to Xeon processors with "Deep Learning boost" allowing them to utilise AVX512VNNI and bfloat16.

My guess is the vast majority of the customers purchasing Xeons with DLB will never use those functions but I might be wrong if they mostly went to cloud customers.

[cb7]

Meh. It took me 3 months to get hold of a couple of NUCs after pre-ordering 3 times, only to get let down each time with no stock appearing after the stock due date.

It beggars belief that a company the size of Intel can balls things up this bad.

Thank fuck AMD's been getting its act together or we'd be up the proverbial creek.

[jelabarre59]

Meh. It took me 3 months to get hold of a couple of NUCs after pre-ordering 3 times, only to get let down each time with no stock appearing after the stock due date.

So I guess there's been an advantage in my habit of using only used/cast-off x86_64 (and a few straight x86) hardware. I think the last time I had brand-new x86 kit was a homebrew Athlon64 back in 2004. Now, Arm and Atom-based hardware is a different story (yes, I know Atom is technically x86, but I'm considering "mobile" as a separate animal)

[Mage]

Translation?

"In 2019, we gained share in an expanded addressable market that demands more performance to process, move and store data,” he said. "One year into our long-term financial plan, we have outperformed our revenue and EPS expectations."

Is "expanded addressable market that demands more performance to process, move and store data":

expanded = The market is growing

addressable = The market will buy Intel parts

demands more performance = The vulnerability mitigation of bad designs in the past means we have to supply more powerful CPUs.

process, move and store data = The market is computers

Do these guys get the obscene pay levels because they can talk like this, which would give 0 out of 10 in a high school English exam?

[jelabarre59]

Re: Translation?

Do these guys get the obscene pay levels because they can talk like this, which would give 0 out of 10 in a high school English exam?

I think they'd have have trouble competing with this lobbyist's game of Bullshit Bingo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd3Qa9tlA3o

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see what happens this year now that Zen 2 will be hitting the laptop market that Intel has so far had pretty much to itself, by the gods we've needed some decent competition in that market as prices at the moment are just ridiculous.

[Charlie Clark]

Seeing as most of the money is made in the Data Centre Group they down seem to care about the declining revenues in the PC and notebook segment.

[theblackhand]

Datacentre is DCG and is currently $7.2bn/quarter or $23.5bn/year

CCG (desktops/laptops) is $10bn/quarter or $37bn/year

Even if AMD are unsuccessful in obtaining mobile market share in 2020, they will likely impact revenue as Intel will need to reduce prices/margins to maintain volume.

Intel could easily see a 10%-20% decline in CCG revenue...

Intel care more about DCG revenue because there's a very slim channel to support so better margins than CCG plus DCG is a growth area whereas CCG is flat at best.

[jelabarre59]

Power-ful

Seems here's an opportunity for the re-ascension of Power. All those cloud centres could be running OpenStack on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Power-ful

Lets see:

- ARM sales? Booming across all sectors

- x86 sales? Limited only by production capacity for both Intel and AMD

- POWER sales? Slow sales numbers and no noticeable growth

Yes....any day now....POWER will start to rise because of.....*shrugs*

[rav]

An earnings beat from world wide layoffs.... seriously?

Intel lays off thousands world wide in order to post an earnings beat!! More to get the ax next month. Gotta keep the 1st quarter earnings upbeat!