Question Intel Q2 Results - Terrible

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Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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I will be very surprised if AMD hits numbers like they did in Q1 2022. It would be great if they’re impervious to the market forces that are hurting Intel, but I’m not holding my breath.
Well, in about 24 hours we will know quite a few answers. I will not comment further until that happens.
 
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maddie

Diamond Member
Jul 18, 2010
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That was the narrative spun in Q1. It fell apart in Q2. Gartner and IDC have both been slashing their estimates.

From Apple's breakdown in earning (Apple, doesn't make Chromebooks) :

  • Mac: $7.3B, down from $8.2B in year-ago quarter
A lot of people are going to be predicting the future after it has happened. ;)
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
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That was the narrative spun in Q1. It fell apart in Q2. Gartner and IDC have both been slashing their estimates.

From Apple's breakdown in earning (Apple, doesn't make Chromebooks) :

  • Mac: $7.3B, down from $8.2B in year-ago quarter

Tim Cook said that they were capacity constrained for Mac and iPad because of lockdowns in Shanghai to the point where they couldn't "test demand" (his words)
 
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mikegg

Golden Member
Jan 30, 2010
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That was the narrative spun in Q1. It fell apart in Q2. Gartner and IDC have both been slashing their estimates.

From Apple's breakdown in earning (Apple, doesn't make Chromebooks) :

  • Mac: $7.3B, down from $8.2B in year-ago quarter
It's different for Apple. First, they had huge Macbook Pro supply issues. Customers were waiting 2 - 6 months for their Macbook Pro orders. Second, people held off on buying the M1 Macbook Air so they can buy the M2 Macbook Air which doesn't factor into Q2.

I think if Apple didn't have any supply issues, they would have surpassed last year.
 

Doug S

Platinum Member
Feb 8, 2020
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Tim Cook said that they were capacity constrained for Mac and iPad because of lockdowns in Shanghai to the point where they couldn't "test demand" (his words)

Apple has already stated on more than one occasion that when parts were in shortage they were prioritizing iPhone manufacturing over iPad and Mac, so it makes sense that iPad and Mac were the products seeing the declines.

Presumably the same is true for capacity issues in shipping etc. caused by the lockdowns.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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According to this article, "Gelsinger was pushed out in 2009 after he was blamed for the failure of Larrabee, an Intel effort to create a GPU that every analyst said was doomed to failure and not his fault. He did a three year stint as COO of EMC before taking over VMware in 2012."

Yes so successor to Otellini was supposed to be Sean Maloney. Not an engineer but was responsible for beinging up the idea of WiFi and pushing it and he saw mobile as a future and also came with the idea of Ultrabooks. Then, it was announced that he had a stroke. Later you learn that he had to retrain one side of the brain. That's how we got Brian Kraznich.

Gelsinger was the youngest Inteler to become CTO but after the Larrabbe debacle he got fired. Corporate verbioge is always half truth but anyone who followed Intel closely enough knew otherwise. Like how no one who knows Intel believed the reason for Kraznich being fired.* The board was likely disappointed with him for some time, but the relation thing provided an excuse for them to fire him. The board was part of the problem and most of the problematic members are gone now.

Maloney then to Gelsinger would have been a natural fix for the company in an hypothetical reality.

*These companies provide lavish parties for their customers and partners after press conferences like CES and IDF, and often sexual in nature. So you have to be also naive to believe the CEO of a multibillion dollar company would get fired for private relations with an employee. Like the rumor is that with some elite clubs they entice you to try doing immoral things? They obviously have no such boundaries but if you succumb to it, the society won't look kindly upon you so they can use that fact later to blackmail you into submission.

Is the problem of making smaller manufacturing processes for semi-conductors so difficult, that maybe only a handful of people on the planet are capable of it and Intel doesn't currently have any of these people?

Sorry to be blunt but you are very mistaken. They had everything in the right place. They likely still have the puzzle pieces to do so again.

Like I say time and time again: It's not about technology and knowledge but people and relationships.

Your knowledge and the intellect you have is worth little if you can't talk to people and have good relationships with them. Their failures are all mismanagement, and culture related which are all parts of relationships. You won't get hired if the hiring guy doesn't like you, simple as that. Because with us humans it's about the spirit of cooperation where the magic really happens. At their peak they treated fabrication vendors like crap. So they started not wanting to work with them. Or the reports that neither Kraznich nor Murthy could hold their temper and their screams were heard from a neighboring campus.

Your morale, spirit and thus the will to do better will fall very quickly.

Intellectual property, tools, patents, and ideas are perishable. It's people that make and create them.
 
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mikegg

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Jan 30, 2010
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Apple has already stated on more than one occasion that when parts were in shortage they were prioritizing iPhone manufacturing over iPad and Mac, so it makes sense that iPad and Mac were the products seeing the declines.

Presumably the same is true for capacity issues in shipping etc. caused by the lockdowns.
Lockdowns were a bigger factor. If you are in any Mac forums, you'd see people complaining about how their Macbook Pro orders are sometimes 4-6 months out in Q2. I don't think Apple records the revenue until actual shipment so they can't claim the revenue for Q2.
 

mikegg

Golden Member
Jan 30, 2010
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Has this been your observation, that people wanted Macbook Pros and Macbook Airs that they couldn't find?

Hasn't been mine.

People, especially CEOs, say things.
Yes. Anyone who ordered any Macbook that wasn't the base model would have had weeks to 6 months delay in shipping in Q1-Q2.

Base models were easy to find. Custom models were not. It's much better now though since China eased lockdowns.
 

shady28

Platinum Member
Apr 11, 2004
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Macro forces are driving 80% of the decline in sales across discretionary sectors, it shows up every day. Any high cost high volume discretionary category is getting hit. In my experience the masses \ media \ analysts won't recognize the trend change until it's hit bottom, at which point the cognitive dissonance and inertia of the narrative will work in the opposite direction (thinking it's going to get worse when it's actually going to get better). We clearly aren't there yet.

Some recent news of import to the PC industry. Who are TSMCs three biggest customers? Apple, AMD, and Nvidia.


"It states that TSMC’s three biggest customers are backpedaling on future orders for wafer capacity. Apple has already begun production of the iPhone 14, but has already cut its “first wave” order of 90 million phones by 10 percent. AMD reduced its order for 7/6nm by 20,000 wafers for the fourth quarter as well. However, it states order volume for 5nm wafers for PCs and servers is unchanged. "




"...$1.64 billion in sales, a roughly 28% decrease from $2.3 billion in sales in 2021. "
 

pakotlar

Senior member
Aug 22, 2003
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Again, I will be pleasantly surprised if AMD’s quarter is any good. From all evidence channel inventory is backed up, which means fewer orders from customers. Maybe that impacts them next quarter instead, we’ll see. Keep in mind that in order to justify its valuation, AMD needs to show rapid year on year growth. It’s taking share from Intel, but is that enough to counter market reality post pandemic? I doubt it.
 

Doug S

Platinum Member
Feb 8, 2020
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also came with the idea of Ultrabooks.


You mean the Ultrabook concept that Intel announced in 2011, THREE YEARS after Apple introduced the Macbook Air, for which Apple had to ask Intel to create a different CPU packaging form factor just for them?

My impression at the time was that it was OEMs who wanted to sell thin and light laptops to compete with the Air who pressed Intel to create a platform for them, not some guy at Intel coming up with the "concept" and creating the market.

The Ultrabook is a great example of Intel leading from behind, and having no clue what consumers want but having to be pushed into the future kicking and screaming.
 

Captante

Lifer
Oct 20, 2003
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I sure wish less customer had wanted that though, as thin and light has led to all kinds of straight-to-landfill anti-consumer and anti-repair things like soldered RAM, glued in batteries and soldered SSDs (the latter madness is thankfully mainly an Apple thing for now).

Hey, but everything is fine, apple.com/environment/ says so.


Also super-whiney loud fans on tiny pathetic heatsinks and the potential to put scorch-marks on your lap!
 

Roland00Address

Platinum Member
Dec 17, 2008
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You mean the Ultrabook concept that Intel announced in 2011, THREE YEARS after Apple introduced the Macbook Air, for which Apple had to ask Intel to create a different CPU packaging form factor just for them?

Since we are talking Macbook Airs

1st Generation was a Failure and was announced Jan 2008 at Macworld. It was a failure due to price and not having a SSD on any model till you paid an insane amount of money, while the 5400 rpm hard drive in a small chassis was extremely slow. There was a Generation 1.5 released 9 months later Oct 2008 with a Nvidia Chipset which with much better Graphics and other goodies.

2nd Generation of Macbook Air was Oct 2010 with a redesign chassis, a much better cpu, gpu (battery life wise), and a SSD on every model for the base model now has SSD. Enormous Success, can't even nail down how much it changed the industry for it became the industry over time. And while the industry changed Apple kept most of the profits of the larget marketshare, and the non Macbook Airs really became Macbook Airs but bigger over time such as the Macbook Pro with Retina Display starting in 2012, June for the 15" and Oct for the 13".

Ultrabooks were announced at Computex May 2011, aka 6 months later. OEMs and Intel were not ready 4 months earlier at CES but they waited till 6 months later for OEMs operate in quarter cycles to introduce new models.

Ultrabooks was a semi-successful thing, but also was kind of a disappointing failure at the same time. It was good to create a standard and try to shape a market moving towards SSDs but also it was an all or nothing for Intel wanted to create only 1 halo brand instead of 2 halo brands targeting the 600 to 800 market (decent) and the 1000 market for the price of SSDs in 2011 pretty much put everyone in the 2011 market. This is why Intel did revision on Ultrabook requirements in later years with Intel 3rd Gen, and 4th Gen processors, and while the revisions were good the OEMs were already frustrated with Intel by that time. Likewise Intel was subsidizing somewhat the OEMs where they get early adopter fees / rebate fund hoping to get them to build enough of these Ultrabooks that economy of scale will kick in. (This Intel Ultrabook Fund of $300 million did not start till Oct 2011.) This Ultrabook fund was 300 million spent over several years, the entire computer industry (including servers) was 260 billion in 2011, aka almost 1 in 900 but also a time mismatch for the Ultrabook fund was over several years not a single year.

-----

In sum I am Amibvalent over the Ultrabook concept, it was an important idea, and it had both successes and flounders, and the best Ultrabook success wise was the Macbook Air who did it first and was not officially licensed by Intel and thus could not use the name. [ and Apple did not care since they created the concept ]

Creating the concept Ultrabook was Intel trying to create a standard to say all devices with the name Ultrabook are good and not those slow netbooks from 2007 to 2012 which had damage the brand for Intel was not doing a good job separating in the customer's mind yes this runs Windows, and yes this is small and portable, but anything with the name Atom is slower than dirt, yet these Intel Core chips when they had a SSD and 4gb of Ram they are actually very nice. And yes we require all Ultrabooks to be thin even though this was the counterproductive part of the name definition (but Intel was trying to "sculpt" the market, with the thinness requirement.)

Likewise Intel was also trying to make laptops lighter for while thinness was not consumer demanded weight was so they were experimenting with metal chassis which were more expensive then (this changed over a period of 10 years for everyone switched over to this equipment, but it was super expensive at first when the Macbook Air did this with the 2nd generation in 2010.) Intel did figure out very light and cheap plastic cases that were sturdy but none of the OEMs took Intel up on these new designs besides a couple of test laptops for while these plastic cases were good, they were plastic and Human culture at the time associated plastic with inferior quality but also not something one would want to show off to others and thus this paragraph I am writting now Intel learned was not what consumers wanted and Apple was right to invest in those expensive unibody aluminum machines.

( I am agreeing with Doug S but also saying it is more complicated this time in the past )
 
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Captante

Lifer
Oct 20, 2003
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Intel may have the fastest/best desktop CPU's at the moment but as far as servers go it's still all AMD all the time especially if you take price vs performance into account.

To be fair to Intel keep in mind re the "loss" is that Intel still has a vastly larger market-share then AMD outside of enthusiast-circles.

Most non-tech folks have MAYBE heard the name AMD that's it.
 

pakotlar

Senior member
Aug 22, 2003
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The thing about AMD's growth so far is that its supply so far was dwarfed by the market demand, to the point AMD was essentially able to plan a steady high growth since it knew it wouldn't be able to satisfy all demand for quite some time to come despite all the growth. Now that market demand is going down, also for AMD, but when will AMD hit the point its supply matches or surpassed the actual demand? I think that's still off for some time, especially with the next gen of server chips being around the corner.

The hard thing for Intel is that it comes from the opposite end: It can't really gain market shares. It would need to expand the market itself. But the market is shrinking instead, while Intel is losing market share on top of it.

Agreed. Intel has a hard path ahead.
 

pakotlar

Senior member
Aug 22, 2003
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Looking more closely, not all positive. Net income and gross margin are down, net income by a wide margin. Much better than Intel, but not great. Down 5% after hours.

96A2826A-00DA-428D-B5E4-C3D13966CDEC.jpeg
 

Doug S

Platinum Member
Feb 8, 2020
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Since we are talking Macbook Airs

1st Generation was a Failure and was announced Jan 2008 at Macworld. It was a failure due to price and not having a SSD on any model till you paid an insane amount of money, while the 5400 rpm hard drive in a small chassis was extremely slow.


SSDs were not ready for prime time in Jan. 2008. The Intel X25M was the first SSD that didn't absolutely suck, and it came out a year later.

You might as well say the original iPod was a failure because it used a hard drive instead of flash. Yeah, it was a better product when it used flash, but that wasn't an option when it was introduced.
 
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eek2121

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Aug 2, 2005
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Looking more closely, not all positive. Net income and gross margin are down, net income by a wide margin. Much better than Intel, but not great. Down 5% after hours.

View attachment 65265

While this is certainly not the AMD earnings thread (so I hesitated to respond), you'll note AMD did not change full year guidance. This includes margins, so the margin dip appears to be temporary.