We're gonna bounce back, says Intel's Gelsinger: Don't worry, most of our chips will be made by us... in 2023 Intel beat Wall Street’s expectations in its latest financial earnings on Thursday amid a rough year in which the semiconductor giant reached out to rival fabs for help in meeting demand for its silicon – and felt the pressure from AMD and others. The figures were released a little earlier than scheduled on Thursday after …
Chip sales were given a double boost in 2020 by all the extra kit orderd for home offices, but also by stockpiling in China ahead of US sanctions. Data centres continue to expand, but so does their use of non-Intel (and non-x86) hardware. And Intel is still nowhere in the embedded market. Still, the company still has excellent engineers across the board and lots of cash so there is no reason to see why it shouldn't continue to be successful, though some restructuring is inevitable.
Things were a little cheerier for its PC arm, the Client Computing Group. Here, Q4 revenues reached $10.9bn, an increase of nine per cent year-on-year, and brought in $40.1bn in sales for the year, up eight per cent.
I understand that the pandemic has increased sales of laptop/desktop CPUs; but I'm curious why anyone would go for Intel over AMD at the moment.
The average person doesn't care, they buy based on stuff like price and screen size, and the performance differences between chips (whether i5 vs i7 or AMD vs Intel) are either unknown or ignored by them. Corporations usually have long term deals with big suppliers like Dell, and are conservative in their choices (i.e. "nobody ever got fired for buying Intel")
Have you tried to buy any of the Ryzen 5xxx CPU's? Outside of a very few 5600X CPU's just within the last week, your options are "out of stock" or buying at way over MSRP on Ebay or similar. For obvious reasons, Intel CPU's are much more available and you can actually find them at MSRP or slightly discounted.
This is the best of time for computer nerds (great CPU's and GPU's at decent MRSP), and the worse of time (out of stock or price gougers). Ugh.
I needed to source a replacement for an ancient Fujitsu that was simply not up to the job we needed now (8 years old with about 1 hour battery life and increasingly dodgy keys). Other than the really low end "web book" type of things (HP Stream, Chromebooks) there is very little choice at the low to mid range. Only once you get up to the £800 and higher does the choice become better, increasing with price. This is purely based on on price, anything in the £350 to £700 range has been hoovered up.
This is all well and good assuming that you want to spend £800 to £1500. Do you really need 1TB nvme drives, i7 CPUs, bonkers screen resolution? No, that is why there is a huge dearth in the sweet spot. It takes so long for inventory to get through the manufacturing and supply chain it is not going to change in the short term. Add in all the problems with containers heaped up in UK ports, dramatically increased shipping costs and the new fangled customs issues this shortage could be longer.
On the plus side, devices that are less than 2 years old will be fine if they were decent to start with. My feeling is the shortfall is driven by all the schools doing online teaching. Those parent's that can afford it will have just bought what was needed to try and ensure their kids get some sort of education.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
