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Intel rumours abound before earnings call |
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Jan 16, 2007 at 03:00 PM |
Intel Corp is yet again at the centre of rumours regarding business units directly before it reports its quarterly financials later tonight. Rumours have circulated from China that Intel plans a 300mm front-end fab in the country, which would make this its first. Intel has assembly plants in the country but does not have any fabs.
This is rather an old rumour and one bantered around ever since Intel set up assembly shops in the country. The difference this time is that Intel is under pressure to remain competitive in the microprocessor market more so than ever before.
However, it is also capacity constrained in relation to chipsets on older process nodes, and I wouldn't be surprised if a chipset device fab were announced soon. However, the real surprise would be MPU production. This would highlight that the price war with AMD is hurting and will continue to do so until Intel can reduce fabrication costs further, which could be a way for Intel to buffer itself against future price wars better than it is doing today.
There is also the issue surrounding skilled staffing shortages in North America and the relentless output of engineers from Chinese Universities. Timing seems much better this time round!
The second rumour concerns the possible sell/spin-off of Intel's NOR Flash memory division. News reports highlight an imminent announcement of plans from Intel and ST Microelectronics to merge their memory arms and sell them to a private equity group.
Scale is being touted as the key reason for doing this, coupled with the well-known fact that Intel hasn't made money on NOR for quite some time. Gartner, we reported last year, believed this division of Intel would not last 2007.
With Intel reporting financial figures for the last quarter later today and observers interested in seeing whether Intel has stopped the market share declines to AMD, there are quite a few interesting stories that could come out of the conference call.
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| Senior Technical Program Manager (Dublin, Ireland, 02/04/2008) | | Senior Embedded Design Support Engineer (Shannon, Co Clare, Ireland, 19/03/2008) | | Embedded Support Engineer (Intel Shannon, Co Clare, Ireland, 19/03/2008) | | Senior Component Design Engineer (Intel Shannon, Co Clare, Ireland, 19/03/2008) | | Principal Embedded Software Engineer (Wilmington, 05/09/2007) |
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