Tag: Brian Krzanich

Intel fails to shine

Posted on January 17, 2014 by - News

Brian KrzanichDespite getting swept up in hype over the internet of thongs, Intel’s predictions for 2014 are unlikely to bring much succour to its shareholders.

Reporting its fourth quarter results last night, its net profit rose 6.4 percent for the period ending in December but revenues only grew 2.6 percent.  Mind you, it still turned in a gross profit of 61 percent, which is no peanuts by any corporation’s standards.

CEO Brian Krzanich claimed the results were solid and the PC market is stabilising.

But its lucrative server market appears to be suffering with only a  one percent rise in its unit sales.  Krzanich said the firm had overestimated recovery in the corporate sector.

Intel is predicting a “flat” 2014 but Krzanich hopes that smartphone and tablet sales will pick up this year.  Both Intel and Microsoft have been outflanked by a change in habits from customers who prefer to swipe immediately rather than wait a good while for Intel-Microsoft tablets to boot up.

Intel thinks wearables will save its bacon

Posted on January 3, 2014 by - News

Brian KrzanichThe CEO of ailing chip company Intel has expressed the view that now the PC is at the end of the road, if it brings wearable technology out of its capacious hat it will be saved.

Brian Krzanich, the newly fledged CEO of Intel, told Recode.net that it would show off some technology at next week’s CES show in Lost Wages that would have people spinning in the aisles.

As well as showing off some wearable stuff, Intel will also tell the world about more Quark chips which are likely to wheedle their way into wearable gadgets, and, who knows, even end up in intelligent toothbrushes or condoms.

Krzanich acknowledged in the interview that Intel was identified as the PC company over the last 20 years and said the battle was worth fighting and winning. “But the market moved.”

What he means, of course, is that the market moved but Intel forgot to move so got overtaken by a heap of tablets and smartphones far divorced from X86 technology.

Krzanich doesn’t recognise that it has lost the smartphone and tablet market and claims Intel chips will be in 40 million tablets sold in 2014.

The chips won’t even be made in Intel fabs, he told Remote.net.

Intel’s Q3 shows a profit dip

Posted on October 16, 2013 by - News

Brian KrzanichA UK executive at Intel once pointed out to me that a billion of anything is a lot of something.

And Intel released its third quarter results late yesterday evening, turning in a net profit of $2.95 billion, down from the same quarter last year of $2.97 billion. The Q3 net profit is based on sales of $13.48 billion but turned in a gross profit margin of 62.4 percent.

Intel expects the fourth quarter to be flat, but claimed at an analyst conference after its results were released that there are signs of an uptick in the X86 market.

Its customers, including giants like Dell, HP and Acer, and industry analysts such as Gartner and IDC may beg to differ that the PC market is recovering.

Meanwhile the chip behemoth admitted that sales to consumers continued to be sluggish. Right now the firm’s strength seems to be in the server market, where margins are high.

Brian Krzanich, Intel’s CEO, needs to do something to address the company’s so far woeful performance in tablets and smartphones. Most handset makers use chips based on ARM technology which are far cheaper than Intel processors.

While Intel has been a leader in process technology, it is having trouble getting the right yields on 14 nanometre technology – and it admitted as much last night.

Intel becomes irrelevant

Posted on September 12, 2013 by - News, Opinions

The mighty dinosaur IntelIt was formerly a chip giant but pretty soon now some archaeologist will uncover the bones of Chipzilla as the lumbering dinosaur nears the end of its existence.

At the Intel Developer Forum this year, Intel’s newly hatched CEO, Brian Krzanich, attempted to breathe new life into the diplodocus he tends by warbling on about healthcare and tablets. He must realise, of course, that to somewhat mix metaphors, Chipzilla has missed the boat.

The writing was on the wall for Intel some years ago but because the company is such a giant, the tiny brain wasn’t getting messages from its extremities that it was slowly dying.

It is a climate change in the egosystem that will spell the end for Intel because, in the marketing babble of the present age, its business model is clearly “unsustainable”.

Intel could only continue to churn out new processes and chips as long as it had a virtual monopoly in the market.  A new fab costs billions to produce and profit is predicated on the fact that it essentially controlled the market.

The giant appears to have missed the fact that handset manufacturers didn’t and don’t want to be locked into the same model as the PC industry.  Now, anyone with a smartphone or tablet is toting around an extremely sophisticated computer and no-one in their right minds wants to spend thousands on a PC unless they’re forced to.  As recent market research has shown, the days of PCs are pretty much numbered and, of course, like its evil twin Microsoft, Intel forgot about the mantra it used to chant, that mantra called convergence.

It will take a while for Intel to die because it is such a lumbering creature, but a model that requires billions to develop new processes simply based on PC sales just won’t work anymore. And if Intel thinks that tablets or smartphones will save its bacon, then it is living in cloud cuckoo land.

In some ways, we must lament the coming death of Chipzilla.  It had some fine people working for it and its process technology was next to none.  But greed and its virtual monopoly meant that it was viewing the world wearing blinkers and its own momentum and size prevented it from taking vital decisions.

Intel promises sub-$100 tablets, has some convincing to do

Posted on September 11, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel hasn’t had much luck with tablets. Very few devices have Intel innards and most of the ones that do are low-volume Windows 8 tablets, accompanied by a nasty price tag. However, there have been some moves towards cheaper Intel tablets in recent months. A number of vendors has rolled out Windows 8 products powered by Atom parts with relatively decent prices.

Now Intel is taking it a step further by promising sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year. It sounds a bit like a general saying his troops will be home for Christmas and here is why. Intel just has a terrible track record when it comes to making any promises involving pricing. This is a relatively new thing for Intel, usually it tried not to make any predictions at all, but over the past couple of years it made a few, and they were all dead wrong.

It started a few months after the fist Ultrabooks were announced. The press pounced on Intel, demanding to know how it plans get a lot of traction on skinny, overpriced notebooks with prices starting at $999. Intel’s response was pretty clumsy. It promised to do its best to bring the prices down to $699 by the end of 2012, then $599, depending on who was on stage. Then it started making similar promises about hybrids and x86 tablets. All the promises had one thing in common – for all intents and purposes none of them came true. To be fair to Intel, some of them were quite vague. Saying $599 Ultrabooks will appear sooner or later isn’t much of a promise, put pinning down a date is.

Speaking at IDF, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company’s new Hallway tablet platform will “go below $100 by Q4 2013” and to be honest we are not sure we believe in Intel election promises anymore. There are practically no big brand Android tablets with anything close to that pricing at the moment.

There are however plenty of white-box tablets priced at $99 or less, but most of them are rubbish, as they feature antiquated chipsets, low resolution screens and simply don’t have a lot going for them. It is relatively easy to come up with interesting products in the $130 to $180 range, but going down to sub-$100 isn’t as easy. A quick glance at the BOM of low end tablets reveals that there’s really not much room to cut corners and pinch pennies without seriously compromising the product, but let’s leave the geeky details out of this. Even if it practically gives away Bay Trail parts at cost, it is highly unlikely that hardware makers can come up with compelling designs at $99 or less.

The other problem with Intel’s promise is that it sounds pointless on another level. Chasing others to the bottom doesn’t really sound like something the world’s leading chipmaker should be doing, unless it considers MediaTek, Rockchip, Allwinner and other low-cost SoC makers as direct competitors. It just looks bad and if some partners really come up with dirt cheap Intel based tablets they will just hurt Intel’s brand, because they are bound to be terrible. With today’s component prices, the only way Intel could come up with truly good sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year is if it subsidizes them, quite heavily. However, that would cost plenty of money and it would not address the primary concern – what on earth is Intel doing in that market segment to begin with?

Intel’s post PC strategy is faltering

Posted on August 23, 2013 by - Opinions

Intel-logoEver since Intel got a shiny new CEO, we’ve been hearing talk of an aggressive mobile push, of a more dynamic Intel that will eventually steer clear of trouble and trample the ARM gang with Brian Krzanich at the helm.

This of course will take time, if it is possible to begin with, so Intel’s first order of the day was to talk about mobile rather than do anything about it, and talk it did.

Intel spent much of the last quarter talking about 2-in-1 hybrids, touch enabled Ultrabooks and now it’s outlining its smartphone strategy, complete with LTE. So far it’s been all talk and almost no action.

Earlier this week Intel shed more light on its first LTE chipset, the XMM 7160, which is supposed to launch by the end of the month. It is a multimode chip and currently Intel offers only a single-mode LTE solution, which is obsolete.

Worse, even the XMM 7160 is a discrete solution, it’s not an integrated option like Qualcomm’s LTE. Intel wants the world to think that it’s serious about LTE, but in reality discrete LTE chips are a thing of the past. It’s all about integration now. Intel’s next generation XMM 7260 LTE chipset is set to appear next year, with LTE Advanced support. Intel’s first integrated LTE solution might appear in the first half of 2014. This is very slow indeed and as a result Intel is highly unlikely to score any big phone design wins next year. It can go after second-tier devices, but they’ll probably be scooped up by MediaTek, Qualcomm and other ARM players.

To be blunt, Intel simply won’t do much better on the smartphone front next year. It will gain market share, but we are still talking about low, single digits.

It won’t do much better in other segments, either. It appears to be pinning its hopes on hybrids, which seems very risky at this point. Hybrids, or 2-in-1s, are supposed to combine the portability and practicality of tablets with the productive prowess of proper notebooks. The trouble is that they’re just not there yet. Windows RT is on life support, Windows 8.1 will still be big and bloated. As a result Windows 8.x hybrids will cost a lot more to produce than Android and iOS tablets, margins will be tight and vendors won’t be very happy. The OS itself is another problem. An x86 tablet with legacy support for tons of Windows applications sounds very good, if you’re Dr Who and you can travel back in time to 2009. The market has moved on and legacy support just isn’t what it used to be a few years ago – and it’s losing relevance fast.

The failure of Intel’s Ultrabook push and touch-enabled notebooks is another concern. Ultrabooks were too pricey and they didn’t offer much in the way of new features. Simply slapping a touchscreen on top of them did not address the original shortcomings of the concept, so touchbooks are failing as we speak.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Intel ditched Atom based netbooks in favour of pricier designs. At about the same time it culled CULV to make way for Ultrabooks. Intel wanted more high-margin silicon in the market, but now it’s focusing on Atom once again. The first Atom based hybrids are starting to show up and they are practically what the netbook would have evolved into had Intel not killed it. In the meantime, cheap tablets and Chromebooks ate its lunch, along with cheap ultraportables based on AMD’s low-end APUs.

As for tablets, Intel dropped the ball years ago and now it’s facing a much tougher market, a market it desperately wants to get back into. Intel recently launched a couple of unimpressive education tablets, running Android. Samsung also tapped Intel for the Galaxy Tab 3, which is equally disappointing spec-wise. Intel now says it wants to do more on the Android front, but it is simply too late. Intel’s x86 support is irrelevant in the Android world and most Android tablets are powered by dirt cheap ARM SoCs. High-end Android tablets, which seem like the obvious choice for Intel chips, aren’t selling well – so even if Intel gets back into the game, it doesn’t stand to make much on Android tablets.

It’s only ticket into the Android universe are high-volume devices, like flagship phones. It will not get them anytime soon. Next year’s Android flagships will still be based on ARM chips and unless Intel pulls off a miracle, it won’t get any in 2015, either. Samsung makes its own Exynos chips and doesn’t really need Intel’s Silvermont. Motorola has also cooked up a custom chip based on Qualcomm’s Krait core, which means Google is also pursuing a custom in-house approach. Apple already designs custom ARM cores and this won’t change. And then there’s Qualcomm. And MediaTek, and Nvidia, and LG, and just about everyone else with an ARM licence under their belt.

Intel talks up hybrids, again

Posted on August 21, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIf we didn’t know any better, we could be forgiven for saying that Intel is starting to lose the plot and panic over its less than impressive showing in mobile.

Just a few quarters ago the chipmaker was making next to no noise on tablets and smartphones, but with the appointment of new CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel changed its tune in a matter of weeks.

Its last earnings call was practically all about Atom. The company barely mentioned Haswell, which launched during the same quarter. Then came a lot of talk about hybrids, 2-in-1s, tablets and touch enabled Ultrabooks, which we like to call touchbooks around the office.

Speaking at a UBM Channel event in Washington earlier this week, Intel’s North American Channel Manager Todd Garrigues said the PC is “not dead yet” and went on to deliver some “good news” for solution providers selling desktops and notebooks. Quite predictably, the “good news” was all about 2-in-1s and hybrids. He then proceeded to show the crowd a couple of such devices, like the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix, reports CRN.

It appears that Intel execs can no longer leave the office without bringing a sample 2-in-1 hybrid with them for some sort of demo. Just a few days ago we had a chance to see Intel President Renee James showing off a Sony Vaio hybrid during an interview with the Wall Street Journal. In the interview James said Intel is now treating Atom and Core equally, which wasn’t the case in the past.

Garrigues also talked up hybrids, saying they combine the portability and ease of use of a tablet with the productivity of a traditional PC. That is the official line at least. We are not sure they do – hybrids will remain a lot pricier than tablets and unless they end up a lot bigger than tablets, they won’t be that great for productivity. It basically sounds like a carmaker promising to develop a new vehicle, part supermini, part pickup. Just because it can be made doesn’t mean it should, and it doesn’t mean it will bring the best of both worlds to the end user.

Garrigues used the opportunity to mention the XP phase-out. He said there are millions of antiquated PC running XP out there, so it’s time for an upgrade.

“Bottom line: There are 500 million PCs out there in the world that are four years or older,” Garrigues said. “So there’s a great opportunity.”

It might be a great opportunity, but it is also a figure that should keep Intel execs awake at night. There’s no better proof that the PC is mature than half a billion people working on ancient 4+ years old PCs and refusing to upgrade. No amount of swanky hybrids will change this.

Intel in Atomic damage control mode

Posted on July 18, 2013 by - News, Opinions

Intel-logoIntel reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and the general consensus is that the numbers were weaker than expected. Net income was down 29 percent, while sales of PC chips, which make up about two thirds of Chipzilla’s revenue, were down 7.5 percent. Sales fell five percent to $12.8 billion, missing analysts’ forecasts by $100 million.