Intel’s fourth quarter and full-year financials has the PC industry on edge. Sales and profits keep falling for the chip giant’s PC client business and there doesn’t seem to be an end to that trend in sight.

Revenue for Intel’s PC Client Group came in at $34.3 billion (£21.6 billion) for 2012, a 3 per cent decline from 2011, while the business unit’s fourth quarter sales of $8.5 billion (£5.4 billion) fell even more markedly, dropping 6 per cent from the same period the year before. Overall, sales of $53.3 billion (£33.6 billion) for the year were down just 1.2 per cent from 2011, but Intel’s net income of $11 billion (£6.9 billion) for 2012 dropped from $12.9 billion (£8.1 billion) in profits from the year before for a whopping 15 per cent year-over-year decline.

The cause for Intel’s misfortunes is well known and has been documented by numerous researchers, commentators and analysts. Mobile devices are on the upswing and PCs are yesterday’s news in the most lucrative global markets, Intel is simply on the wrong side of this trend.

It’s not all doom-and-gloom for Intel, as its Data Centre Group revenue is going up. Leading with its powerful Xeon brand of server processors, the company grew sales into the data centre by 6 per cent for the year and by 4 per cent for the quarter. The trouble for Intel is that Data Centre Group revenue of $10.7 billion (£6.7 billion) in 2013 isn’t even a third of what the company made with flagging sales of its chips for PCs, so if the PCmarket keeps shrinking this year, the company will have a tough time making up for it even if the server market continues to grow.

In short, the chip giant either needs to put the brakes on the growth of the ARM-dominated mobile device market with more attractive ultrabook and hybrid tablet alternatives running on x86 chips, start to really grow its share in smartphones after years of failing to do so, or probably both.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, figures that Intel has a good shot of accomplishing the first task this year but it could still be awhile before an Intel phone is more than just an edge product.

“To revive the PC market back to historical growth levels, Intel and its partners have to make the notebook more desirable than a 10in tablet. With what Intel has been showing, they have a decent shot with 9mm-thin, Haswell-based hybrids with prices ranging from $499 (£314) to $599 (£377),” Moorhead said.

Haswell is the code name for the 22nm chips Intel plans to bring out in the first half of this year as successors to its current Ivy Bridge generation of Core processors. At last year’s Intel Developer Forum, the company teased a Haswell-based processor drawing just 10 watts of power, which Intel figures will offer a very attractive combo of performance, small size and battery life-extending goodness for touch-enabled tablets and hybrids that combine laptop and tablet functionality, putting makers of ARM-based parts on their toes.

That won’t happen for a while but in the meantime, Intel and its traditional hardware partners have been showcasing Windows 8 tablets and hybrids running on Atom Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs). What’s more, newly minted hardware entrant Microsoft is scheduled to release the Core-based Surface Pro tablet later this month and Intel has also modified its x86 instruction set for the Android mobile operating system, showing that the chip giant has contingencies in place for cracking the tablet market.

Smartphones are a different story, Moorhead pointed out. Intel was talking up its Medfield-class Atom SoCs as competition for ARM all the way back in 2011. The chip giant did manage to get some Intel phones released in far-flung markets in 2012. Handset contracts should increase over the next 12 months, but the reality is that we may once again be looking at “wait-til-next-year” results in 2013, according to the analyst.

“In mobile, 2012 was a credibility year for Intel, which they built with handset and service providers,” Moorhead said.

“In 2013, Intel is tripling their offering, with a premium solution called CloverTrail+ and an entry-level solution called Lexington. These entries sandwich the mid-range Medfield offerings. Intel will be more successful in 2013 in smartphones, but 2014 is where it all comes together with a brand new architecture at 14nm.”

In the meantime, the growth of big data and its booming server business is helping Intel offset some of its difficulties in clients. Count the chip giant out? Of course not, but you have to wonder how, with all of its resources, Intel hasn’t yet been able to put together a simple smartphone chip the leading manufacturers wants.

by Damon Poeter,

He is set to retire after the computing company’s annual shareholders’ meeting.

“I’ve been privileged to lead one of the world’s greatest companies. After almost four decades with the company and eight years as CEO, it’s time to move on and transfer Intel’s helm to a new generation of leadership,” Otellini said in a statement.

Otellini, 62, has been CEO of the US chip manufacturer for the past eight years and was the fifth chief executive in Intel’s 45-year history.

“Paul Otellini has been a very strong leader, only the fifth CEO in the company’s great 45-year history, and one who has managed the company through challenging times and market transitions,” said Intel’s chairman, Andy Bryant.

The company is now considering his replacement among three existing executives, which include Intel’s software head Renee James, chief operating officer Brian Krzanich and chief financial officer Stacy Smith. Analysts predict that Smith is most likely to fill the position due to her well known status on Wall Street.

Intel made its name as the world’s biggest manufacturer of processors in PCs, making phenomenal profits after its partnership with Microsoft. Currently, 80 per cent of chipsets are based around Intel’s technology.

However, with declining PC sales and a rise in mobile technology, the firm has struggled to compete in the cut-throat market for smartphone chips, where it boasts a share of less than one per cent of the segment, trailing the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung, and Britain’s ARM.

Last week, there were reports that Apple may dump Intel based processors in its computing devices, in favour of more custom-designed ARM-based mobile processors, like the Apple A6 SoC found in the iPhone 5.

Image Credit: Flickr (qtschlepper)

by Monira Matin

According to Reuters, the two chipmakers are planning to jointly invest  around 30 billion yen (£236 million). Additionally, an unnamed source “familiar  with the matter” has said that Qualcomm and Sharp could agree on a deal by the  end of November.

Intel’s commitment is looking less assured, due to its own uncertain financial outlook. However, it is known to  be a keen admirer of Sharp’s super-sharp, power-saving IGZO technology, as it  responds to the ailing PC market by focusing more heavily on thin-and-light  ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones.

Sharp, which creates the screens for Apple’s iPhone 5 amongst other devices,  is looking towards manufacturing smaller displays in light of the TV industry’s  decline. Last month, it announced that the Aquos Pad SHT 21, the first tablet to incorporate an IGZO  display, will hit Japan in December.

The Japanese company recently secured 360 billion yen (£2.8 billion)  in loans from the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and Mizuho Corporate Bank,  which should keep the company running until at least March 2014.

Meanwhile, Sharp has forecast net losses of 450 billion yen (£3.5 billion)  for the year.

by Aatif Sulleyman

Chip giant Intel has announced that it is buying near about 190 patents from the Washington based software maker RealNetworks.

These patents, according to Intel, are part of the $120 million deal it inked with the company. In addition, the purchase also included another 170 patent applications, as well as an agreement to co-develop and co-own RealNetwork’s video encoding software.

Intel claims that this new deal will help significantly in allowing users to have an “exciting video experience” on devices running on its chips.

Experts are of the opinion that the new bunch of patents will indeed strengthen Intel’s stake in the industry wherein, hardly a week goes by before a new patent-war breaks out amongst two or more rival companies.

“The planned acquisition… includes foundational media and other patents, expanding Intel’s diverse patent portfolio and strengthening our focus on innovation in new markets,” a company spokeswoman said, as reported by BBC News.

RealNetwork’s CEO Thoman Nielsen said: “We look forward to working with Intel to support the development of the next-generation video codec software and related products”.

Tech website SemiAccurate claims the Macbook Air is currently running on ‘Plan B’ when Apple decided to use an Intel Sandy Bridge processor. The initial plan was to use AMD’s low-power Llano chip, which was low on CPU, but high on GPU.

According to the report, Apple decided to go with Intel instead because AMD was not able to meet Apple’s production expectations even after Apple provided it with a finished notebook to work on.

SemiAccurate’s sources, however, claim that Apple had other reasons to break away from AMD, but failed to specify the reasons. It was also revealed that Apple is still willing to work with AMD as soon as it releases 64-bit chips.

There might be some truth in the report because Apple Insider had earlier reported that top level Apple employees were meeting with AMD for a partnership as Apple was frustrated with Intel for not producing new chips and offering low power graphics chips.

Source: Erica Thinsen

The firm showed off the chip, dubbed Knights Corner, on a test machine at a supercomputing conference in Seattle.

Computer power on this scale is used to solve a range of problems in fields such as weather forecasting, molecular modelling and car crash simulations.

The chip pits Intel against rival add-on processors from Nvidia and AMD.

Powerful computers

The Knights Corner chip acts as a co-processor – taking over some of the most complicated tasks from the computer’s central processing unit (CPU).

It packs more than 50 cores – or individual processors – onto a single piece of silicon.

The chip offers “double precision” processing which allows numbers to be stored and calculated with greater accuracy – resulting in faster calculations.

Intel says the accelerator is also the first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification. The technology allows data to be transferred at up to 32 gigabytes per second to compatible devices – twice the speed of the previous generation.

“Collecting, analysing and sharing large amounts of information is critical to today’s science activities and requires new levels of processor performance and technologies designed precisely for this purpose,” said Rajeeb Hazra, Intel’s general manager of technical computing.

“Having this performance now in a single chip… is a milestone that will once again be etched into HPC [high performance computing] history,” he added.

Even faster

While Intel’s co-processor relies on the same instruction set architecture as its popular x86 processors, its rivals are taking a different approach.

They are offering chips known as graphic processing units (GPUs) which are designed to carry out the calculations necessary to draw, colour and shade objects on the screen at high speed.

They specialise in processes that can be broken down into several parts, where the output of one calculation does not affect the input of another. This makes them particularly well suited for other tasks such as speech recognition and image processing.

However, developers need to code their software in order to take best advantage of GPUs.

By contrast, Intel’s accelerator should be able to run existing applications at high speed without the need for further software development.

“Traditional supercomputers were built by putting thousands of processors in a room but in the last few years there has been a shift toward graphic processors,” said Martin Reynolds, a vice president at research firm Gartner.

“GPUs allow you to get results more quickly but will take longer to program so there is an interesting trade-off,” he said.

Nvidia specialises in GPUs and the chief executive of Intel’s rival, Jen Hsun Huang, talked up the technology at the Seattle conference.

He said that GPUs were less complex than other processors, wasting less energy in moving data across chips.

Speeding ahead

Computer power has come a long way since 1997 when Intel showed off its first one teraflops supercomputer, which required nearly 10,000 Pentium II chips and filled 72 computing cabinets. It cost $55m.

In 2008, IBM’s Roadrunner achieved petaflop speed, equal to 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Ten years on, in 2018, Intel hopes it will be able to deliver so-called exascale-level performance, which is more than 100 times faster than currently available.

Nvidia is not so sure. In his keynote, Mr Hsun Huang said he did not think exascale performance would happen before 2035.

Mr Reynolds thinks that Intel has the edge over Nvidia, at least for the next few years.

“Intel has a technology advantage because its manufacturing processes can make transistors half the size and more efficient but Nvidia will catch up,” he said.

ARM rivals Intel and MIPS are creating smartphone and tablet processors that will be able to support Google’s latest Android 4.0 OS (aka Ice Cream Sandwich), Computer World reports.

ICS already works on ARM processors which are found in most of the smartphones and tablets, but Intel, which has largely lost out in the mobile processor market, is planning to launch processors which support the platform.

The Ice Cream Sandwich OS, which was unveiled by Google at an event with Samsung in Asia, hopes to unify Android based smartphones and tablet devices. The first device to offer the platform, which comes with a face recognition based security feature, is the Galaxy Nexus that was also showed off at the Ice Cream Sandwich launch event.

Intel said that the mobile operating system was ready to be put on processors based on the x86 architecture and informed that the first mobile devices based on Intel’s processors will be dished out in the first half of 2012.

Meanwhile, MIPS, whose processors already support Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which was meant solely for tablets, also said that it was working towards offering support for the platform on its new range of mobile processors.

S

PCs equipped with Intel’s Thunderbolt data transfer technology will be introduced next year, the chip maker has revealed.

Intel has revealed during its developers conference that Asus and Acer will release the first ultralight and sleek Ultrabook PCs with Thunderbolt technology – which is significantly faster than USB 3.0.

The technology, which is about 20 times faster than USB 3.0 with transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps, is only available in Apple’s Mac desktops and laptops. But now, Windows compatible PCs will be able to offer the superior I/O technology as well.

Intel showed off an Ultrabook laptop running the Windows 8 platform as well as the new Haswell processor to be released in 2013. The new processor features a 20x reduction in power consumption which gives the Ultrabook a 10-hour battery life.

“Intel’s Thunderbolt controllers interconnect a PC and other devices, transmitting and receiving packetized traffic for both PCIe and DisplayPort protocols. Thunderbolt technology works on data streams in both directions, at the same time, so users get the benefit of full bandwidth in both directions, over a single cable,” Intel explains on the Thunderbolt page.