Intel's new CEO Bob Swan rips off the band-aid to reveal some of the chip giant’s issues Thursday

[poochyena]

Quote

Intel reported first-quarter earnings and revenue Thursday that exceeded some estimates, even amid a steepening decline in its important data-center business. But that business and more memory-chip price declines led Swan — in his first earnings report since being named the permanent CEO — to lower Intel’s revenue guidance for the rest of the year by a whopping $2.5 billion.

“The decline in memory pricing has intensified, the data-center inventory and capacity digestion that we described in January is more pronounced than we expected, and China headwinds have increased, leading to a more cautious IT spending environment,” Swan said on the company’s call with analysts

Quote

Intel’s shares tumbled about 7% in after-hours trading. So far this year, the stock is up about 25%, while the S&P 500 Index SPX, -0.04%  is up about 17% year to date.

Quote

“Over the last couple years, that focus has resulted in exiting McAfee and the wearables business, shutting down Saffron and divesting Wind River. And our spending as a percentage of revenue has gone from approximately 36% to about 30% this quarter,” he said. “By doing fewer things, we’ll execute better at the things that matter most.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-intel-ceo-rips-the-band-aid-off-2019-04-25

I didn't even realize they had gotten this new CEO.
Anyways, even though they slightly beat earnings estimates, their projected revenue was downgraded, causing a big dip in share price. They have been struggling for a few years now, and it looks like there is no hidden trick up their sleeve to turn it around immediately. If AMD and others pounce right now, it could put intel in an even worse position. With how much time and resources being put into GPU development, if their gpus aren't a big success, it could spell for very troubling times for them.

Edited April 26, 2019 by poochyena
fixed article link

[mr cheese]

3 minutes ago, poochyena said:

If AMD and others pounce right now, it could put intel in an even worse position.

Zen 3 has never had a better opportunity to sweep the market, not to mention how much EPYC is taking off in the business sector. Here's to praying AMD gets it right.

 

3 minutes ago, poochyena said:

With how much time and resources being put into GPU development, if their gpus aren't a big success, it could spell for very troubling times for them.

There's a lot of hype here and it's really really gonna be make or break. If it fails, it's over.

 

Intel's on thin ice. The market security is gone, time to see how they hold up.

[BigDamn]

I kinda hate the name Bob Swan tbh

 

Here's to hoping AMD gets it right so I don't have to buy from fuckin Bob Swan

[.Apex.]

2 minutes ago, BigDamn said:

I kinda hate the name Bob Swan tbh

[mr cheese]

6 minutes ago, poochyena said:

if their gpus aren't a big success, it could spell for very troubling times for them.

To add to this, AMD's 7nm Navi cards are about to launch. Intel is trying to enter a market where AMD is fighting NVIDIA for more market space after all these years, and NVIDIA is fighting to regain ground its lost to AMD. AMD is starting to aim for the mid-range price-to-performance market and NVIDIA is fighting to keep them out. Unless Intel can sweep away NVIDIA's high-end market with an incredible card, it's gonna be extremely hard to wiggle into a war zone. Timing doesn't make this arrangement good for Intel.

[schwellmo92]

12 minutes ago, poochyena said:

even though they slightly beat earnings estimates

Depending on which analysts you listen to they either barely beat estimates or were way under. I would call that a miss rather than a beat.

[TrigrH]

clicks link, CTRL+F "10nm":

Quote

High on the list of issues is “trying to accelerate 7nm as much as possible (and making sure problems seen at 14 and 10nm don’t repeat),” and how to make manufacturing a differentiator again, Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon said in a note to clients, after Swan’s selection. He believes Intel also needs to sort out its focus on a “hodgepodge” of growth initiatives, from autonomous driving, AI, discrete graphics and FPGA/accelerators.

intel might jump to 7nm?

[poochyena]

1 minute ago, DaJakerBoss said:

To add to this, AMD's 7nm Navi cards are about to launch. Intel is trying to enter a market where AMD is fighting NVIDIA for more market space after all these years, and NVIDIA is fighting to regain ground its lost to AMD. AMD is starting to aim for the mid-range price-to-performance market and NVIDIA is fighting to keep them out. Unless Intel can sweep away NVIDIA's high-end market with an incredible card, it's gonna be extremely hard to wiggle into a war zone. Timing doesn't make this arrangement good for Intel.

I will slightly disagree with this. Navi isn't an architecture change, so while it will obviously be better than their old stuff, I'm not really expecting anything amazing. And then Nvidia has had the weirdest GPU launch line in recent history with cards that aren't that much better than previous generations. I feel like its a good time for intel to launch a GPU. Better than any other time at least.
well, actually, during the mining craze would have been better I guess. Now i'm curious to know how well intel cards will be at mining. Its going to be interesting to see what happens.

[poochyena]

4 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

Depending on which analysts you listen to they either barely beat estimates or were way under. I would call that a miss rather than a beat.

typically the average is taken

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/25/intel-first-quarter-2019-earnings.html

• Earnings: $0.89 cents vs. $0.87 per share as expected by analysts, excluding certain items, according to Refinitiv.
• Revenue: $16.06 billion vs. $16.02 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

It was really more or less in line with estimate

[Arika]

now that they have a permanent CEO, hopefully that means that have a set path and vision to achieve instead of going through multiple temps and multiple pulls in different directions.

[Guest]

54 minutes ago, _Syn_ said:

 

That’s an ‘I can afford cocaine’ smile.

[mr moose]

Didn't this happen at the start of the year?

As near as I can tell since this news report their stock have basically only really gone up.

 

EDIT: OP did you link the wrong article? 

[schwellmo92]

3 hours ago, poochyena said:

typically the average is taken

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/25/intel-first-quarter-2019-earnings.html

• Earnings: $0.89 cents vs. $0.87 per share as expected by analysts, excluding certain items, according to Refinitiv.
• Revenue: $16.06 billion vs. $16.02 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

It was really more or less in line with estimate

Never mind I was looking at expected Q2 earnings. Q2 was expected to recover, but Intel forecasts are grim hence the drop. All good

[Humbug]

4 hours ago, poochyena said:

I will slightly disagree with this. Navi isn't an architecture change, so while it will obviously be better than their old stuff, I'm not really expecting anything amazing. And then Nvidia has had the weirdest GPU launch line in recent history with cards that aren't that much better than previous generations. I feel like its a good time for intel to launch a GPU. Better than any other time at least.

Navi absolutely is a micro architecture change. If Navi was just a shrink to 7nm there would be no reason for the massive engineering effort which AMD has put into it for the last few years.

 

In the same way that Polaris (rx 580) is a superior architecture to Southern Islands (HD 7970), and that's the reason why Polaris has full support for stuff like freesync and some vulkan/dx12 features in hardware which the older GPU did not.

 

It's just that they all have a GCN lineage.

 

Now Radeon 7 was not an architecture change, it was just a die shrunk Vega and all the performance uplift came from the resulting higher clocks and also increased memory bandwidth. Navi is different.

[mr cheese]

8 hours ago, poochyena said:

And then Nvidia has had the weirdest GPU launch line in recent history with cards that aren't that much better than previous generations.

this is true but cards like the 1660TI in a weird launch line are what really compete with AMD.

8 hours ago, poochyena said:

so while it will obviously be better than their old stuff, I'm not really expecting anything amazing.

even if that's true, and it's nothing so particularly amazing, it's something else to bring into a fierce budget to possibly even high end market. And no, Intel's definitely not going to shoot for the cheap low end because the used market and gt 1030 have already taken that spot.

[mr cheese]

8 hours ago, TrigrH said:

clicks link, CTRL+F "10nm":

intel might jump to 7nm?

Yes, they plan on it, but it's gonna be a while, much longer than AMD's already proposed release.

[GoldenLag]

8 hours ago, TrigrH said:

intel might jump to 7nm?

well there is still an issue with waiting for 10nm or 7nm from intel. and it is worrysome and i sort of hope it isnt real. 

https://www.planet3dnow.de/cms/45941-intel-keine-ryzen-konkurrenz-in-10-nm-vor-2022/

 

no 10nm for desktop.......... only mobile............

[porina]

17 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

well there is still an issue with waiting for 10nm or 7nm from intel. and it is worrysome and i sort of hope it isnt real. 

There was previous talk that 7nm was still on schedule as it was worked separate and is not directly impacted by 10nm delays, although I'm not sure they ever said what that schedule was.

 

Also due to differences in the way Intel specify their process compared to others, their numbers could be seen as one step offset e.g. Intel 10nm would be comparable to other 7nm.

 

17 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

no 10nm for desktop.......... only mobile............

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14274/intel-starts-qualification-of-10nm-ice-lake-cpus-raises-10nm-volume

 

Mobile 10nm towards end of 2019, 10nm server parts in 2020, no word on desktop.

 

Mobile part Ice Lake will be based on Sunny Cove microarchitecture, the first significant change since Skylake. It will be interesting to see how that performs even if we wont see it on desktop any time soon.

 

So, how many Zen 2 systems will I build in that time?

[ThePD]

14nm into 2021. AMD would be on what... 5nm with Zen 4 by that time based on the roadmap?

[GoldenLag]

35 minutes ago, ThePD said:

14nm into 2021. AMD would be on what... 5nm with Zen 4 by that time based on the roadmap?

If the thing is accurate. Which we dont know anything about. 

[Stefan Payne]

10 hours ago, DaJakerBoss said:

To add to this, AMD's 7nm Navi cards are about to launch. Intel is trying to enter a market where AMD is fighting NVIDIA for more market space after all these years, and NVIDIA is fighting to regain ground its lost to AMD. AMD is starting to aim for the mid-range price-to-performance market and NVIDIA is fighting to keep them out. Unless Intel can sweep away NVIDIA's high-end market with an incredible card, it's gonna be extremely hard to wiggle into a war zone. Timing doesn't make this arrangement good for Intel.

GPU Market mostly doesn't care about the quality of the Product, Brand Recognition is more important than how good a Product is.

And if there is something that Intel does not lack it is brand recognition...

 

So in GPU/Datacenter Market I see it bleak - for nVidia.

Because AMD already has announced that VEGA20 has Infinity Fabric - and PCIe 4.0 implemented. nVidia doesn't have anything. Also its rumored that AMD Rome supports CCIX and/or GenZ, wich is important for Accelerator Cards.

 

Intel has someething similar in development, wich I presume will also be implemented in their upcoming GPUs.

That leaves nVidia between two companies that have the ability to bundle their GPUs with their CPUs. Isn't Xeon Phi already midly successful in this area??

 

So that means that the only reason that people won't immediately switch is CUDA. But if AMD and Intel GPU support the same Programming model and can offer other advantages at well, that will not last too long...

 

 

So yeah, Intel will lose a bit on the CPU side but not as much because most people don't care about Performance, they care about Label, they will even buy the shittier product for more money because of that...

 

So it takes a couple of years until AMD can get a noticable Marketshare!!

 

The DIY Market is already in their hands. The High Performance/Big Company Server Market like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook will be in their hands as well because ROME is far more power efficient. That is important in that market.

Where they won't get a foot inside soon is the small business Servers. They don't care about Performance, power efficiency ant other shit...

 

Basically the same situation we had with Athlon 64 - wich was far better than the Netburst shit but people still bought the high power consumption Netburst shit in droves...

[Stefan Payne]

10 hours ago, poochyena said:

I will slightly disagree with this. Navi isn't an architecture change,

It doesn't need to be.

The Problem GCN Has is the Frontent and Color/Framebuffer Compression aka Bandwith and posssibly Cache Structure.

The Execution units are awesome - wich is proven by nVidia adopting GCN more and more.

 

10 hours ago, poochyena said:

I'm not really expecting anything amazing.

AMD movet all their developers from VEGA and other projects, canceled big Polaris to move them to Navi.

They always do that and concentrate on the next project to attack with.

So its more probable that NAVI will be amazing than VEGA.

 

10 hours ago, poochyena said:

And then Nvidia has had the weirdest GPU launch line in recent history with cards that aren't that much better than previous generations. I feel like its a good time for intel to launch a GPU. Better than any other time at least.

It doesn't matter what nVidia does for Intel.

They attack other areas first, where nVidia will be really losing money.

Wich is the High End Market and Datacenter.

 

10 hours ago, poochyena said:

well, actually, during the mining craze would have been better I guess. Now i'm curious to know how well intel cards will be at mining. Its going to be interesting to see what happens.

During the Mining Craze AMD Cards weren't available and AMD knew what to do -> NOT to increase the volume they manufacture too much.

That sucked for us but they increased the production for Tahiti with the first Mining craze, wich lead them to have far too many Chips in storage and even pushed the release of Tonga back.

 

Tonga was originally planned as 280 series - but couldn't be relased because the warehouses were full of Tahiti Chips.

You don't throw away hundreds of thousands, possibly Millions of Chips. You try to sell them.

[Stefan Payne]

1 hour ago, porina said:

Also due to differences in the way Intel specify their process compared to others, their numbers could be seen as one step offset e.g. Intel 10nm would be comparable to other 7nm.

Doesn't matter. Intel is behind.

AMD ships 7nm Products for months, has them for qualification for months.

Intel is months behind...

 

1 hour ago, porina said:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14274/intel-starts-qualification-of-10nm-ice-lake-cpus-raises-10nm-volume

Mobile 10nm towards end of 2019, 10nm server parts in 2020, no word on desktop.

there are already small amounts of 10nm Chips on the market - IIRC in the sub 35W market that's soldered to the Board.

But the IGPU is deactivated, the Chip is rather small.

 

But the Real Problem is that TSMC is miles ahead.

They have started 5nm Risk Production recently and announced an improved version of the 7nm Process called 6nm.

 

Here Infos about 5nm TSMC:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14175/tsmcs-5nm-euv-process-technology-pdk-drm-eda-tools-3rd-party-ip-ready

 

1 hour ago, porina said:

So, how many Zen 2 systems will I build in that time?

Many because they can deliver, what Intel has is unknown.

When Intel ships is unknown.

 

In the meantime AWS and the other big companies will order AMD Chips due to higher Power Efficiency, wich is very important in this area.

And there might also be changes to the VRM Controls. Maybe every Chiplet(pair?) gets its own Power Supply??

[porina]

6 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

Doesn't matter. Intel is behind.

AMD ships 7nm Products for months, has them for qualification for months.

Intel is months behind...

Months don't matter but the bigger the gap, the more pain there will be. The bigger problem for Intel is that is it might be a year or more behind in desktop CPU process, although they will cover a large part of the market if they keep mobile and server on track.

 

6 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

there are already small amounts of 10nm Chips on the market - IIRC in the sub 35W market that's soldered to the Board.

The 10nm discussed here is arguably the volume shipment, not the limited almost paper launches we currently had before.

 

6 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

In the meantime AWS and the other big companies will order AMD Chips due to higher Power Efficiency, wich is very important in this area.

At least for Zen and Zen+, I'm not convinced there is a significant performance per watt advantage for AMD. It's on my to do list of testing to prepare for when Zen2 comes as that will be very interesting. Obviously can't comment on Zen 2 until I can buy it.

[Stefan Payne]

20 minutes ago, porina said:

Months don't matter but the bigger the gap, the more pain there will be.

Months do matter.

You say that now.

But back when AMD was behind, people flamed AMD for beeing 6 Months or so behind.

Because that's 6 Months or so in that AMD has a serious disadvantage. Because in that Timeframe you don't have anything competitive to the other side...

 

Did you also defend Bulldozer back in the day? Because it was just 32nm while Intel moved to 22nm at the time.

Quote

The bigger problem for Intel is that is it might be a year or more behind in desktop CPU process, although they will cover a large part of the market if they keep mobile and server on track.

No, that all spreads out to other areas.

So if AMD is proven far better than others, that will spread to other areas.

 

The only thing where Intel might possibly have a strong grip on is the Notebook Market...

Especially since AMD might not offer 7nm Products for that area...

Quote

The 10nm discussed here is arguably the volume shipment, not the limited almost paper launches we currently had before.

It doesn't matter. They don't have no 10nm.

And if its ready we would hear more about it and not the "Marketing Propaganda" shit that's only to calm down the investors.

Its not more than that.

And when Intel gets their 10nm running, TSMC has 5nm for the public and AMD is working on their 5nm Chips as well.

Quote

At least for Zen and Zen+,

We ain't talking about Zen and Zen+, we're talking about Zen2, wich will be the part that's hard to counter without having a 10nm production line running.

 

Also are you really claiming that Intel will move their ~700mm² big server die to 10nm?!

What's the yield of such a chip?? 20%?? maybe 30%??

Right now AMD is talking about 70% Yield for the tiny Zen2 dies.

https://www.bitsandchips.it/english-news/11566-zen2-yelds-not-fantastic-as-zeppelin-but-very-good

 

Quote

I'm not convinced there is a significant performance per watt advantage for AMD.

You know about this, do you??

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13829/amd-ryzen-3rd-generation-zen-2-pcie-4-eight-core

 

You have heard the Demonstration about Rome?

one Rome vs. TWO Xeon 8180 - Rome Wins.

And that with lower Power Consumption as well.

 

Quote

It's on my to do list of testing to prepare for when Zen2 comes as that will be very interesting. Obviously can't comment on Zen 2 until I can buy it.

Yeah and with the Information we have right now, we're talking about something like 50% lower power consumption compared to Zen+ right now...

 

7nm is a serious disadvantage for Intel in the future...

Who will want a Xeon 8180 when they can get ~double the performance with potential slightly lower power consumption???