Intel dropped a bombshell during its Q2 2015 conference call today. The company’s sales were in line with reduced expectations, at $13.2 billion revenue, down 5% year-on-year. Revenue rose 3% compared to Q1, with slightly better gross margins compared to previous expectations (62.5%, above the expected 56%). PC sales revenue fell 14%, but Intel’s tablet business shipped 9.9 million devices, up 11% year-on-year. Profits in the data center group also rose significantly, to $3.9 billion (up 10% year-on-year).
What most are likely to notice, however, is the announcement that Intel’s 10nm hardware will be delayed. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told investors the following: “The last two technology transitions have signaled that our cadence today is closer to 2.5 years than two.
To address this cadence, in the second half of 2016 we plan to introduce a third 14-nanometer product code named Kaby Lake, built on the foundations of the Skylake micro-architecture but with key performance enhancements. Then in the second half of 2017, we expect to launch our first 10-nanometer product, code named Cannonlake. We expect that this addition to the roadmap will deliver new features and improved performance and pave the way for a smooth transition to 10 nanometers.”
Investors obviously had a number of questions on this point, but Krzanich held his ground, noting that this 10nm delay was fundamentally similar to what Intel had done with 14nm. Krzanich put much of the blame on the intrinsic difficulty of the 14nm to 10nm transition, particularly the lack of EUV or a new lithography technology. Krzanich doesn’t want to label this a deviation from Intel’s vaunted Tick-Tock model (one analyst referred to it as Tick-Tock-Tock), but Intel continues to claim that it will deliver a 10nm process before any of its competition.
No comments:
Post a Comment