Intel Says It's Recovered from Missteps
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Intel Corp.  will  miss its 2004 product cost reduction targets because of a widely publicized string of product delays and problems, but those missteps are largely behind it now, the world's largest chip maker said on Tuesday.
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Taking stock. As 2004 winds down, Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) management isn&#39;t likely to grow nostalgic: The year saw a series of production glitches and delivery delays at the chip maker, and it
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By MATTHEW FORDAHL    SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- Contradicting fears that the semiconductor industry's pace of development is slowing, Intel Corp...
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Win some, lose some AMD lost market share to arch-rival Intel in 2006, but the smaller chip-maker nonetheless managed to make small gains in the desktop and laptop segments, the latest figures from market watcher Mercury Research reveal.â¦
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The chip maker finishes design work on Penryn, a chip that could be crucial in helping Intel to maintain a new-found performance lead
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Worldwide&#160;lawsuits against Intel&#160;and&#160;four straight quarterly losses&#160;have distracted AMD during its integration of ATI Technologies, but the merger remains on track, according to industry analysts.AMD&#39;s acquisition of ATI&#160;for $5.4 billion, announced in July 2006 and completed one year ago Thursday, was viewed as a potent weapon in AMD&#39;s attempt to dent Intel&#39;s domination of the x86 processor market.The lawsuits against Intel and&#160;financial losses&#160;came at a critical time, when AMD&#39;s management needed help in integrating the ATI acquisition and making ATI employees understand AMD&#39;s culture, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.AMD filed antitrust lawsuits alleging monopolistic behavior against Intel in the U.S. and Japan, and lodged complaints with the European Commission, the Korean Fair Trade Commission and Japan Fair Trade Commission.The distraction was compounded by the departure of key executives, including David Orton, former president and CEO of ATI, who resigned as executive vice president of AMD in July after only 10 months.AMD didn&#39;t have any internal problems, Peddie said, and Orton left on his own accord. &quot;A little redundancy will always occur in all organizations. It&#39;s not surprising to see people shift,&quot; Peddie said. However, outside speculation about the departure may have distracted AMD during the integration, he said.AMD also took an acquisition-related charge of $76 million, or $0.14 per share, in the third quarter of 2007 ending Sept. 29. That added to the quarterly net loss of $396 million.Despite the distractions, AMD is pulling its resources together to ensure the ATI merger goes smoothly.&quot;The merger has allowed AMD to merge its plans with ATI, which were very similar prior to the acquisition.&quot; Peddie said. Both companies wanted to amalgamate the CPU with the graphics processor, and the acquisition puts them in a position to do so.A successful merger could help AMD reach profitability in a few quarters and position it for success in the future, wrote Doug Freedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, in a research report.&quot;We believe ATI is turning the corner, which is likely material to AMD&#39;s quest for profitability,&quot; Freedman wrote.The acquisition of ATI hasn&#39;t shown an immediate benefit, but could help&#160;AMD in the long term&#160;when the company&#39;s &quot;Fusion&quot; project comes to fruition, Peddie said. Fusion is the code name for is AMD&#39;s next-generation processor design that is expected to combine high-performance graphics and CPU processing on a single die. The project was announced when the merger was completed. AMD is not prepared to talk about Fusion yet, but it is intended to bring the cost of PCs down and reduce power consumption, Peddie said.AMD also announced the &quot;Spider&quot; platform, which will include AMD&#39;s upcoming Phenom chips and high-end graphics processors to provide users with the &quot;ultimate visual experience&quot; in computing, said Dirk Meyer, AMD&#39;s president and chief operating officer, on the company&#39;s third-quarter earnings call last week.With all the attention focused on Phenom and Spider, ATI&#39;s involvement in other businesses gets sidetracked, said Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AMD. AMD&#39;s ATI unit is a big player in supplying graphics to consumer electronics, set-top boxes and gaming consoles, Hester said. ATI supplies graphics processing units (GPUs) for Microsoft&#39;s Xbox 360 and Nintendo&#39;s Wii consoles, Hester said.&quot;Discrete GPUs will continue to be a good business for us,&quot; Hester said. AMD&#39;s graphics segment revenue grew 29 percent to $252 million sequentially, driven by the success of the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors.However, ATI&#39;s market share in the discrete graphics market has been hit by manufacturing problems and bad timing in bringing chips to market, Peddie said. Competitors such as Nvidia and Silicon Integrated Systems stepped up by shipping graphics chips on a timely basis, taking market share away from ATI.&quot;Market share could begin to swing back towards ATI even if it introduced simply comparable products to Nvidia in the near-term,&quot; wrote Doug Freedman in a research report. ATI&#39;s RV670 graphics card is competitive in the mainstream market with current Nvidia products, Freedman wrote.But AMD still has work to do to make the merger a success. Its biggest threat remains Intel, which maintains a stranglehold on the chip market.&quot;AMD must rebuild its brand value in the enthusiast market in order to garner better mainstream adoption and consumer recognition,&quot; Freedman wrote.
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Intel Corp.&#39;s 65-nanometer process technology will not be very different from its 90-nanometer process technology, which should help make for a smoother transition between the
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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Intel's financial results for the fourth quarter fell short of analysts' estimates in part because of weak prices for memory chips.
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Intel Corp. , the largest maker of computer processors, posted a rise in second-quarter earnings on Tuesday but profit margins missed the company's target and its shares fell nearly 5 percent.
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Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, posted a 51 percent jump in its fourth-quarter profit Tuesday, but sales fell slightly below expectations and the company's shares dropped sharply in after-hours trading.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel may have lost some internal e-mails that the company is required to produce in aÂ lawsuitÂ brought against it by Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD), lawyers for the company said Monday. In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Farnan Jr., one of Intel's lawyers revealed that some internal e-mails were missing, despite the company's efforts to preserve documents related to the case. "Intel is taking this matter very seriously. It very much regrets this happened," wrote Richard Horowitz, a partner at Potter, Anderson & Corroon, which represents Intel. Horowitz blamed the possible loss of e-mails on human error. For instance, when Intel employees were instructed to retain e-mails on their hard drives, some employees did not move e-mails from their sent folder to the hard drives, assuming that the company's e-mail servers would preserve them. Instead, the e-mail servers regularly delete e-mails after a certain amount of time has passed, he said. Other employees wrongly assumed that Intel's IT department was automatically saving their e-mails, while some may not have saved all of their e-mails, Horowitz said. In addition, Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case, he said. The allegedly lost e-mails were generated "primarily" after AMD filed suit against Intel on June 27, 2005, but earlier e-mails could not be ruled out as among those missing, Horowitz said. In a related filing to the court, AMD blasted Intel's apparent failure to preserve the missing e-mails. "Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed," AMD said, noting that Intel continued to allow e-mails to be deleted from its servers after the lawsuit was filed. "Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong," AMD said. AMD and Intel are scheduled to discuss the document retention failures at a status meeting on March 7. AMD demanded in its letter to the court that Intel be required to give a full accounting of its document "preservation problems" no later than March 21. AMD's 2005 suit alleges that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to bolster a monopolistic position in the PC processor market. AMD claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including DellÂ and Sony, into using only Intel processors or discontinuing use or promotion of AMD products. The alleged threats include forcing manufacturers into exclusive relationships, or offering deep discounts or marketing subsidies in exchange for discontinuing the use of AMD products. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe. The suit was based in part on the findings of a Japanese anti-trust investigation, which found in March 2005 that Intel had abused its market position to restrain competition in Japan's microprocessor market. Â
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Intel creates a more powerful memory chip without increasing its size, confounding warnings that the firm had hit its technical limits.
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By Therese Poletti, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Mar. 6--Intel said it may not be able to provide all the electronic documents that rival Advanced Micro Devices is requesting in an antitrust lawsuit because of human error.   In a letter Monday to U.S.
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The chipmaker appears to have put its major problems in the rearview mirror. Plus: Intel's mobile Linux project.
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Computer chip giant Intel Corp. delivered the latest sign of a high-tech malaise late Thursday as management lowered the company&#39;s financial projections after concluding businesses and consumers aren&#39;t in a spending mood.
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Intel gave an upbeat forecast for the coming year, suggesting that the company was making progress in overcoming some of its production problems.