Tag: intel

AMD faces Nvidia threat

AMD, SunnyvaleNvidia is ahead of AMD on the graphics front and it won’t be until next year that the Sunnyvale firm catches up.

That’s according to financial analyst Sean Chandler, who works for Seeking Alpha.

He said in a note to his clients that the Nvidia “Maxwell” architecture has put AMD under heavy pressure in the consumer graphics arena.  And that’s worry investors and taking its toll on the AMD share price.

Chandler said that while AMD’s restructuring are widely seen as positive, the firm “still needs to release competitive technologies to remain relevant”.

Nvidia Maxwell, he said, means “monumental advancements” in both efficiency and performance.

Nvidia’s 60watt 750Ti is comparable to AMD’s 150 watt R7 260X, he said.  And Maxwell also outforms AMD in performance efficiency per die size.

He added that the rumour mill suggests AMD may respond with 20 nanometre chips now chip foundry TSMC has got the shrink down pat.

He suggests to investors: “AMD is almost certainly not out of the game, but be cautious and don’t pour all of your eggs into one basket.”

Intel readies server shifts

intel_log_reversedRoadmaps seen by sources close to chip manufacturer Intel say there’s a series of sea changes for server chips to be released in the second quarter of 2015.

According to reporters at Taiwanese wire Digitimes, Intel will release processors for servers based on Haswell-EX  as it readies other products for workstations too.

It is scheduled to introduce Skylake Xeons in the third quarter as well as Broadwell Xeons during the third quarter of next year.

That means – as is the tradition at Intel – we’ll see several processors phased out including Xeon Phis, Itaniums and other microprocessors, according to the wire.

Meanwhile the same media says that Intel will manage to ship a milllion units of its so-called “Education Tablets” this year.  The machines are largely aimed at developing markets.  Shipments will exceed three million units in 2015.

Intel revises its pay outs for vendors

Intel-logoIt looks as if Intel will stop providing pay outs – in euphemistic terms – subsidies, for people making mobile phones using its technology.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, while Intel had an apparently sparkling set of financial results recently, it is going to restrict these payouts to all but the biggest players

It is significant that despite these sparkling results, Intel’s mobile unit, as we reported yesterday, was a loss making venture.  Intel beancounters don’t like making losses.

Digitimes said that Intel is concentrating on reducing costs for the bill of materials making up smartphones.  The writing on the wall for Intel has been clear to the chip giant for quite some time.  Vendors using ARM chips and non-Windows operating systems feel a little bit freer to pursue their own path.

According to the same report, Asustek, one of the bigger Taiwanese vendors, ordered over seven million Intel Atom processors but the level of rebates remains unclear.

Asustek will almost certainly continue getting pay offs from Intel because it’s estimated it will soak up at least fifteen million processors during the calendar year 2015.

Chromebooks put pressure on Microsoft

winbookThe success of Chromebooks has forced Microsoft to drop its licensing fees on Windows 8.1 notebooks, in a move that is forcing down prices on the products and is good news for buyers.

According to financial analysts at Seeking Alpha, Samsung has decided to use an X86 processor for its Chromebook 2 – a win for Intel in the X86 stakes.

HP and Acer are already selling Windows 8.1 notebooks for less than $200 and that is likely to create something of a frenzy in the run up to the holiday period.

Seeking Alpha points out that Intel’s mobile chip unit posted an $1.04 billion operating loss for its financial third quarter, despite selling chips for 15 million tablets during that quarter.

Intel is attempting to make “significant reductions in contra revenues next year”, but the financial analysts say X86 mobile chips will carry on losing money.

Samsung has dropped using ARM based processors for its Chromebook in favour of Intel, but the bad news is that most market research shows that sales of tablets are slowing, particularly in mature markets.

Seeking Alpha said: “Intel is losing big money in its quest to sell 40 million tablet chips this year.”

Moore’s Law offered glimmer of hope

Intel-logoResearchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have thrown Intel a lifeline in the shape of self assembling molecules.

Alexander Liddle, a materials scientist at NIST pointed out that Intel has just gone into production on a 14 nanometre generation of chips.

Liddle explained that at these sizes the problem is creating multiple masking layers and optical lithography “is simply not capable of reliably reproducing the extremely small extremely densie patterns. There are tricks you can use such as creating multiple, overlapping masks, but they are very expensive,” he said.

He said two pieces of research by NIST, by IBM and by MIT show a way to deposit thin films of a polymer on a template so that it self-assembles into precise even rows 10 nanometres wide.

“The problem in semiconductor lithography is not really making small features – you can do that but you can’t pack them together,” he said.  “Block co-polymers take advantage of the fact that if you make small features relatively far apart, you can put the block co-polymer on those guiding patterns and fill in the small details,” he said.

He’s optimistic that the NIST model will give him accurate results.

Microsoft waves goodbye to Nokia

nokia-lumiaThe Nokia brand name can’t be worth very much because Microsoft is going to ditch it from its line of phones.

It originally planned to use the Nokia name for as long as 10 years but freshly fledged CEO Satya Nadella is obviously revisiting just about everything ex-CEO Steve Ballmer had committed to.

Microsoft bought Nokia for a rather expensive $4.6 billion but the former Finnish mobile phone unit had already seen its fortunes wane.

Microsoft already had a mobile phone division so plenty of people scratched their heads and wondered why it even bothered to pay that much money for a firm that had seen its day.

Microsoft is currently going through a gigantic culling exercise which will see over 12,000 people lose its jobs.

Microsoft, like its long time partner Intel, has never really hit it big in the mobile phone market.

Future phones will be sold under the name of Microsoft Lumia, it appears.

Notebooks to become cheap as chips

notebooksThere is a long held adage about buying notebooks and that is don’t buy them in the fourth calendar quarter.

Intel always release new chips  in the New Year and it’s always wise to wait for that to happen rather than get all excited before Yule.  But just because chip prices will come down in early 2015, don’t rush to buy a new notebook because there is, of course, trouble on the Windows 8.1 scene.

Personally, I need a new notebook and would have bought one by now but for the fact that it’s very hard to buy one with the reasonable operating system Windows 7 any more.  This is because Microsoft, as usual, is behaving like a headless chicken.

Microsoft has a sound track record of getting operating systems and operating environments wrong every other time it releases one.  Just as Vista was a dog, so Windows 7 was pretty good and therefore Windows 8.1 was certain to be a dog.

It has decided not to bother with Windows 9 and its next operating system will be called Windows 10 – a bit of a cause for concern because Windows 9, compared to Windows 8, was probably going to be pretty good but now it’s calling Windows 9, Windows 10, that is a bit of a worry.

There’s other good news on the scene if you’re up for a new notebook, because Taiwanese based market research company Digitimes Research reckons that first tier vendors’ 8GB tablets are going to drop to $99 or less. It claims major Chinese vendor  Lenovo is starting this particular price war.

Bleak outlook for notebooks – report

notebooksThings continue to look less than rosy on the notebook front with shipments worldwide expected to drop in the fourth quarter of this year.

That’s according to Digitimes Research, which said the downward movement is in spite of Intel and Microsoft applying subsidies in a big to boost demand.

The report suggests that global notebook shipments will drop 4.4 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The fourth quarter always used to be a buoyant period for the PC industry, but those rules now seem to be things of the past.

Digitimes Research said that Lenovo and Asustek will do better than the rest of the pack and are expected to show growth in the quarter.

Acer will see a hit, it reports while Lenovo appears to be having some success in Europe, shipping 10 million units in the quarter.

It appears that at the consumer end of the market few have been convinced that Windows 8.1 is the bee’s knees.

PC shipments still shrinking

A not so mobile X86 PCWhile Intel turned in remarkably buoyant financial results last week, the news remains somewhat gloomy on the PC front.

Figures released by IDC showed that shipments to consumers in the potentially lucrative Asia Pacific region in the third quarter of this year fell by five percent compared to the same quarter last year.

Sales were up compared to the previous quarter by eight percent and totalled 26.6 million units.

China and India showed better than expected shipments in the quarter.

Handoko Andi, research manager for client devices at IDC said: “[Windows] XP migration helped boost commercial PC spending earlier this year.  But in recent quarters, we have seen Microsoft add a lot to the entry level segment by launching the Windows 8.1 with Bing programme.”

Lenovo is numero uno iin the region, followed by Dell, HP, Acer and Asus.  HP showed a decline of 16.1 percent in shipments in the region compared to the same quarter last year, while Acer showed an 11.2 percent decline.

AMD Cuts Workforce – Sea Change 101 for Sailors?…,

AMD LayoffsJust one week and a day after assuming her new roll as AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced a reduction in force amounting to seven percent of the AMD’s current workforce of 10,149 employees.

The fallowing of ~700 people follows two rounds of layoffs under Rory Read’s three year tenure.

AMD did not provide any information about where the cuts would be made – the company recently split into two divisions “Computing and Graphics”, and “Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom”. Contacts indicate that “Computing and Graphics” will receive a majority of the “hits”.

Last Thursday’s warning by Microchip Chief Executive Steve Sanghi that a correction will spread more broadly across the industry in the near future sent shares of chipmakers lower last Friday.

Microchip is a broad spectrum supplier into the Chinese and Asian marketplace, booking revenue only after it is shipped by distributors – a closely coupled supply chain that quickly indicates impending sea changes. AMD shares a similar situation in China, the company’s biggest market, substantiating Microchip’s warning. Whether this is the beginning of a prolonged downturn or is merely another “noise blip” on the radar is entwined in controversy.

Strangely enough, AMD’s arch nemesis Intel, reported rather glowing results on Tuesday indicating that AMD might be suffering from Intel’s competitive resurgence in Asia. The fact that Intel is devoting resources to system level integration at the SoC level may now be having an effect on both competitors.

AMD’s experienced a 65% drop in quarterly profits and is expecting the current quarter to be 13% lower than the period ended in September. The company’s share price fell 6% to $2.49 in after-hours trading. The share price has dropped 43% in three months as of close Thursday.

Su went on to assure analysts that the company was moving toward customized chips for applications beyond videogames hinting at two customers that had the potential of bringing in $3 Billion in additional revenue over the next three years.

TechEye Take

The first time I saw Rory Read perform in front of analysts was somewhat of an embarrassment. He became so animated on stage that an additional two flaps of his arms per minute would have gotten him airborne (I heard that he fired his stage coach soon thereafter). His resignation came as no surprise, only late by three years. Lisa Su was the only stand-up with credibility and has remained so since.

Can we expect Dr. Su to right the AMD ship? She’s very smart and well experienced in the land of semiconductors and if anyone can accomplish the miracle required to make AMD a player she’d be my pick…,

Workers reject Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe

courtroom_1_lgEmployees suing Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe over running a hiring cartel have asked an appeals court not to approve a $324.5 million settlement in the case.

Plaintiff workers accused Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe in a 2011 lawsuit of conspiring to avoid poaching each other’s employees. The companies agreed to a $324.5 million settlement earlier this year.

US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California rejected the proposed class action settlement, saying the amount was too low. The companies appealed last month, saying she committed “clear legal errors”.

The workers said that although they believed the $324.5 million deal originally warranted approval, the judge had the proper authority to reject it and they would “defer to Koh’s sound judgment about how best to oversee this litigation”.

Tech employees alleged that the conspiracy limited their job mobility and, as a result, kept a lid on salaries. The case was interesting because it appeared to be another conspiracy organised by Steve Jobs.  Jobs also conspired with book publishers to keep the price of eBooks artificially high.

Plaintiffs based their allegations of conspiracy largely on emails circulated among Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs and former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt.

Koh repeatedly referred to a related deal last year involving Disney and Intuit. Apple and Google workers got proportionally less in the latest agreement compared with the one involving Disney, Koh said.

To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal “would need to total at least $380 million,” Koh said.

Intel makes profit

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASemiconductor firm Intel gave a current-quarter revenue forecast well above what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had predicted.

Intel posted third quarter net profits of $3.32 billion compared with $2.95 billion in the same financial quarter last year.

Third quarter revenue was $14.6 billion, up eight percent from same quarter last year, and the company said it expects fourth quarter revenues of $14.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million.

Wall Street expected third quarter revenues of $14.44 billion and fourth quarter revenues of $14.48 billion.

The company said its supply chain was in good shape ahead of the holiday season and demand for PCs had recovered as enterprises finally started replacing their aged PCs.

Intel said in a statement on Tuesday that demand for its chips was in good shape.

“The worldwide PC supply chain appears to be healthy, with inventory levels appropriate in anticipation of the fourth quarter retail cycles,” Intel said.

The recovering PC industry has helped push Intel’s shares 24 percent higher in 2014, making it the top performer in the Dow Jones industrial average.

The results are an apparent poke in the eye to comments from Microchip that weak demand in China  would soon become visible across the chip industry.

Intel said its gross margins would slip to 64 percent in the current quarter from 65 percent in the third quarter.

Intel said its mobile and communications group had an operating loss of $1.04 billion on revenue of $1 million, reflecting subsidies Intel has been paying to persuade tablet makers to use its chips.

Shares of Intel were up 2.05 percent in extended trade after closing up 2.13 percent at $32.14 on Nasdaq.

Intel suffers from industry nervousness

Intel-logoChip giant Intel puts out its quarterly results tomorrow but its shares dropped last Friday after Microchip issued a revenue warning.

Microchip said it was ready for another industry correction and, according to financial analysts at Seekingalpha.com, “the entire semiconductor space was reeling on Friday”.  That applied particularly to behemoths like Intel.

But other things may help Intel’s share price, according to the financial analysts.  There were reports that Apple will delay its 12.9-inch iPad to 2015 and that will give Intel a window of opportunity to steal market share on its chips, if the reports are true.

Intel will report its third quarter earnings tomorrow afternoon, US time.

Analyst Bill Maurer at Seeking Alpha said the fact that Intel planned to buy back a cool $4 billion worth of shares will have an impact on its bottom line – a positive one, that is.

As a result of Microchip’s revenue warning on Friday, Intel (ticker: INTC) lost over five percent on the stock exchange.  Intel still makes huge gross margins and had predicted when it released its second quarter earnings that gross margins would be 66 percent, and revenues $14.4 billion or so.

McAfee dabbles in democracy

McAfee HQ in Satan ClaraSecurity company McAfee, which is a subsidiary of the Intel Corporation, has given us its thoughts about how we could vote online or e-vote in the future.

Online voting isn’t particularly new – Baltic country Estonia held national elections using an e-voting system.  Other countries including India, France, Brazil and Australia have introduced electronic voting machines.

Yet Michael DeCare, president of McAfee said that wasn’t quite enough.  He said: “A greater emphasis on security could empower a new era in digital democracy.  People need to have trust and confidence in the process. Pilot programmes could be the route to earning public trust on a small scale.”

He claims obstacles to online and e-voting are largely hard to overcome and has little public acceptance.

People, he said, are worried about hacking and “lost votes cannot be regained”.

He doesn’t seem to have an answer to this question of public trust. But as people are wary following the thousands of security breaches that take place every year, it’s down to vendors like McAfee not to pose such questions but to provide the answers.

Intel backs misogynistic gaming Taliban

taliban-1Intel has stuck two fingers up at all women everywhere by bowing to a misogynist campaign to silence women who complain about sexism in computer gaming and the IT industry.

Intel has pulled an advertising campaign from video gaming website Gamasutra after it dared to back a campaign calling for better gender representation in video games.

A group called Operation Disrespectful which normally targets writers, journalists, and developers who fail to agree that women should be sex objects, apparently leant on Gamasutra’s advertisers – in this case Intel. Operation Disrespectful supporters have been linked to campaigns of harassment against prominent women in the industry – calling for them to be raped or beaten up.

Operation Disrespectful called on its supporters to contact companies that advertise on video game-focused websites such as Gamasutra and Kotaku in order to complain about five specific articles that suggested the concept of the “gamer” as an identity was fading away.

Now the group has claimed a victory now that Intel has pulled its advertising from website Gamasutra.

Intel has confirmed the move in a chat to Recode. “We take feedback from our customers very seriously especially as it relates to contextually relevant content and placements.”

So in other words, if the majority of gamers are sexist idiots who want to treat women like scum then Intel does not want to hack them off.

Intel called a serious of articles by Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander “controversial.” Her article argued that the games industry has now ballooned that it had outgrown its niche origins, making a gamer’s image – that of a spotty Herbert playing in his mother’s basement and never seeing a real girl no longer correct.

But the piece quickly drew flak from those who are still living that image and are particularly resentful of “feminist gamers” who want a more realistic depiction of women in games.

Operation Disrespectful was born from the #GamerGate hashtag which was first used by anti-left actor Adam Baldwin when he made reference on Twitter to independent game developer Zoe Quinn. Their antics have the backing of US right-wing groups such as the American Enterprise Institute.

Intel admitted it was difficult to work out how pervasive support for #GamerGate is in the wider gamesplaying community, but it is clear that it does not want to take any risks.

Gamasutra, which will presumably lose income because of Intel’s decision, is an outlet that caters to video game developers, hosting diaries from industry professionals and maintaining job listings for those who make games for a living.

However, it is clear that Intel failed to understand that the #GamerGate “movement” is exactly the sort of thing which is keeping the gaming community in the dark ages. While women are increasingly playing games, they have to deal with an industry which sees women as sex objects to be bullied by men. If women want to play computer games it is probably better that they use gear from AMD, Nvidia and ARM and see the Intel inside logo as a symbol of all they hate about the gaming community.

In backing a campaign like #GamerGate, Intel has insulted women gamers, and indeed women everywhere. Since half of Intel’s customers must be women, maybe it is time for them to boycott a company which supports pressure from those who treat them in the same way as the Taliban.