Question Intel Q4 Results

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Just Benching

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Sep 3, 2022
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If your only performance metric is performance in games, then yes sure.
If other metrics are also part of the equation then things are far less clear cut.
Intel P cores are fast but huge and guzzle power in a P4 type way.
Certain workloads really do not like the hybrid P & E cores architecture (my new Alder Lake work laptop runs some SQL queries over twice as slow as the previous Haswell laptop, turning off the E cores helps but it's still
slower and with the E cores turned off other tasks are slower).
There is a good reason why despite how conservative data centre customers are, Intel are doing very poorly against AMD there.
That Intel are able to sell 13 CPUs competitively by sacrficing margins and have the advantage of being able to use DDR4 does not mean things are rosy for them.
*Such a blanket statement is obviously false. Each architecture has its strong points and cherry picking data at the extremes adds nothing to discussion.

Even if we take the statement at face value, ALD sold and still sells poorly compared to Zen 3.

Zen 4 and RPL are also selling poorly. Zen 3 sales are basically more than all the others combined.

Nonetheless, bad times ahead for corpo profits. Can't fight the macroeconomic environment. Two years of demand was pulled forward artificially. Winter... is coming.
Don't think this is the thread for that discussion, but since you mentioned it, before amd started doing pricecut after pricecut ALD was winning on every single price bracket, and not by a small margin (think 12600kf vs 5600x etc, 12700f vs 5800x etc.).

Besides the price comparison, ALD was a better desktop product, by a mile. A desktop needs to be fast and snappy in live workloads (live editing, gaming and the likes). The 5950x was the only product with an edge, but that edge is putting your machine in a warehouse crunching numbers 24/7, which is just not desktop usecase. Intel can easily fit a billion gracemonts with 0 Pcores and deliver MT performance for crunching numbers 24/7, but that product would in no way be a better desktop CPU and I wouldn't want to use that for my day to day tasks instead of the normal P + E configuration.
 
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maddie

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Jul 18, 2010
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No sympathy needed.
(In Millions, Except Par Value; Unaudited)
Dec 31, 2022
Dec 25, 2021

Property, plant and equipment, net
80,860
63,245

Retained earnings
70,405​
68,265​

They spend 17bil for FABs
put 2 more bil under the mattress
and they still made 8bil net income for the full 2022...
They are doing fine.

They are not taking the money for the expansions from the mountain of gold but from the running business which is why it looks bad if you are only looking at the main numbers.
They are doing fine.

Nominated for statement of the year.
 

gdansk

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Feb 8, 2011
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Intel has its own manufacturing. Being able to out produce AMD is one of their competitive advantages that they achieve at great expense to the business.

I do not see this "dumping" by Intel to be a bad thing. It's simply being competitive by having a lot of parts available at better prices.

It only becomes a problem if they keep doing it until AMD is also losing money. But I think it is a temporary consequence of lower than expected demand.
 

gdansk

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Feb 8, 2011
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AMD's client business lost money last quarter.
But AMD's doing fine overall. Offering a better value product (ADL, RPL) in a few segments does not constitute anticompetitive behavior on Intel's part. It's plain old competition.

What are their fabs supposed to do when they'll only be shipping a million Sapphire Rapids?
 
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ondma

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Mar 18, 2018
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Huh? Every single part of the supply chain have their inventory management. They optimise the level of the inventory.

Aggresive prices??? That is competition. Consumers benefit from that.

BTW as a consumer I do not care about Intels decreased profits at all. I care about the products and prices you can get them for, and for example i5 13500 or 13600K CPUs is the best value consumers can get at this moment.

Intel struggles a bit? Their margin decreases?

GOOD!!!

THAT IS WONDERFUL NEWS FOR CONSUMERS.
Well, it may be "wonderful news" unless it becomes so bad that Intel can no longer ship competitive products because of lack of funds for research, development, and fab procurement and production. Then we would be back to a single competitive supplier, which would be very, very bad for everyone except AMD stockholders.
 

ondma

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Mar 18, 2018
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I have zero smpathy for Intel. For years they were the top dog and made zero effort to increase performance of their CPU's, the ten years prior to Ryzen was a crap decade for performance. This is what happens when you sit on your ass and let the competition catch up. They get momentum and end up surpassing you.
So now if AMD becomes the top dog, you think they will somehow magically become a friend to the consumer?? :You think they wont raise prices and let up on new products? In fact we have seen this already. Zen 4 was initially overpriced, and prices were decreased because they were too high relative to RL.
 

desrever

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Nov 6, 2021
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Only going to get worse for Intel. Not cutting dividend shows how inept the leadership still is. This is why nobody wanted to be CEO of Intel and they had to pay Pat >$100m salary to take it.

Pat is a terrible CEO that is all talk and no execution. Only a matter of time before he is kicked at this point. Maybe they'd be able to get someone competent then.
 
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maddie

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Only going to get worse for Intel. Not cutting dividend shows how inept the leadership still is. This is why nobody wanted to be CEO of Intel and they had to pay Pat >$100m salary to take it.

Pat is a terrible CEO that is all talk and no execution. Only a matter of time before he is kicked at this point. Maybe they'd be able to get someone competent then.
The job is to provide returns to shareholders on a quarterly basis. How many investors today think for the long and even the medium term? All that products & us exist for, is to put what's in our account into theirs. These people don't care which company lives or dies, only that they make more money. They all believe that can get out before it crashes by selling to the greater fool. Really stupid if you think about it. Traditional management/investors, by and large, had a deeper and more balanced view of the business world and in my opinion were better human beings. Most who have the jobs now are rabidly predatory, blinding them to act as a virus killing the host, instead of being a symbiont. Where do they really think this ends? Early days still.

We waste time discussing symptoms, not causes.
 

jpiniero

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Oct 1, 2010
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Only going to get worse for Intel. Not cutting dividend shows how inept the leadership still is. This is why nobody wanted to be CEO of Intel and they had to pay Pat >$100m salary to take it.

Pat is a terrible CEO that is all talk and no execution. Only a matter of time before he is kicked at this point. Maybe they'd be able to get someone competent then.

I figure they won't cut the dividend because they assume the US Gov will bail them out (if it comes to that) as long as they continue with the fabs.
 

turtile

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Aug 19, 2014
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So now if AMD becomes the top dog, you think they will somehow magically become a friend to the consumer?? :You think they wont raise prices and let up on new products? In fact we have seen this already. Zen 4 was initially overpriced, and prices were decreased because they were too high relative to RL.

It's not only AMD vs. Intel now. ARM competitors are coming. Even if Intel falls off the face of the Earth, AMD has no choice but to compete with Qualcomm and the cloud providers to ensure they are competitive.

The only reason AMD dropped Zen 4 pricing was that Intel sold their own chips at a low price to gain market share. Zen 4 costs more to make than Zen 3 because of 5nm. Intel needs to keep their fabs running to stay afloat. AMD needs to pay TSMC a large margin.
 
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maddie

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It's not only AMD vs. Intel now. ARM competitors are coming. Even if Intel falls off the face of the Earth, AMD has no choice but to compete with Qualcomm and the cloud providers to ensure they are competitive.

The only reason AMD dropped Zen 4 pricing was that Intel sold their own chips at a low price to gain market share. Zen 4 costs more to make than Zen 3 because of 5nm. Intel needs to keep their fabs running to stay afloat. AMD needs to pay TSMC a large margin.
Don't ignore RISC-V, potentially the biggest competitor.
 
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TheELF

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Dec 22, 2012
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It's not only AMD vs. Intel now. ARM competitors are coming. Even if Intel falls off the face of the Earth, AMD has no choice but to compete with Qualcomm and the cloud providers to ensure they are competitive.
Don't ignore RISC-V, potentially the biggest competitor.
ARM and RISC-V aren't competition, if they ever reach a performance potential that equals intel and amd then intel and amd can just produce their own versions of it, being the known names in CPUs they are going to be selling better than others.
Intel already has a risc-v board on the way.

For the time being ARM/RISC are only competitive in markets that can be catered to by all other options as well, namely GPUs and small core x86 arrays, both of which intel is increasing their involvement in.
 

turtile

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Aug 19, 2014
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Intel raised prices actually. It just may be that they raised it a lot less than AMD did, and AMD (tried to) raise prices a lot because of TSMC.

The prices are about the same for 12900K and 13900K. The 13900K is a larger die so it cost more to make. Yes, the yields might be slightly better but I doubt it's that big of a difference. Then consider that inflation is over 9% which adds another $60 to equal out the price in a year.

If the cost of producing the product costs more, they need to charge more to remain profitable and invest in future products.


ARM and RISC-V aren't competition, if they ever reach a performance potential that equals intel and amd then intel and amd can just produce their own versions of it, being the known names in CPUs they are going to be selling better than others.
Intel already has a risc-v board on the way.

For the time being ARM/RISC are only competitive in markets that can be catered to by all other options as well, namely GPUs and small core x86 arrays, both of which intel is increasing their involvement in.

I am not talking about ARM itself but the fact that there is real competition now because large companies can make their own CPUs. There needs to be a good reason to spend more to buy an Intel or AMD CPU.

Amazon -> Graviton
Apple -> Almost everything, basically taking a good chunk of the premium laptop market
Qualcomm -> Nuvia acquisition
Microsoft -> Future ARM chip
 

TheELF

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Dec 22, 2012
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I am not talking about ARM itself but the fact that there is real competition now because large companies can make their own CPUs. There needs to be a good reason to spend more to buy an Intel or AMD CPU.

Amazon -> Graviton
Apple -> Almost everything, basically taking a good chunk of the premium laptop market
Qualcomm -> Nuvia acquisition
Microsoft -> Future ARM chip
Do you mean for home users or for servers?

For home users ARM isn't on the performance level yet, other than apple users that are ok with anything as long as it's apple. Everybody else already has a smartphone and isn't going to buy a laptop that is that but bigger but only in dimensions.

For servers...was intel, and AMD for that matter, ever a huge player in those markets to begin with?!
Intel did decent business and AMD does some now, but didn't those companies mostly get servers from IBM, cray or whatever the big companies are in that market?
 

blckgrffn

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For servers...was intel, and AMD for that matter, ever a huge player in those markets to begin with?!
Intel did decent business and AMD does some now, but didn't those companies mostly get servers from IBM, cray or whatever the big companies are in that market?

In my experience, those other players are niche and ever shrinking. HP, Dell, etc. do massive x86 volume with Intel and AMD chips. Amazon and Azure clouds use tons and tons and tons of x86 as well. Arm is coming but slow, looking at Linode & Vultr among others and it's all x86.

The big revolution in hosting is still storage speeds, imo. As more and more flash has become standard that has shifted the bottleneck, it used to be you needed so many spindles to get the iops needed for dense hosting, now you can really stack ram and dense CPUs along with flash and consolidate a lot.

My experience = working for a large defense contractor, working for a large ERP company supporting essentially all platforms including Itanium and as a small business owner now.

For the last however many years, cloud hosting companies have been eating all the server chips that could be made, essentially as many business moved to cloud hosting for their major infrastructure build outs and put less focus on self hosting.

My bad if you are talking about custom SoC's for servers.

In my estimation the reason that Amazon et al have to go through those hoops is that there is no established player that makes off the shelf ARM servers that meet their particular application profiles and generally the lack of per core performance makes them a bad fit if not ruining a tuned ecosystem.
 
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maddie

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I am not talking about ARM itself but the fact that there is real competition now because large companies can make their own CPUs. There needs to be a good reason to spend more to buy an Intel or AMD CPU.

Amazon -> Graviton
Apple -> Almost everything, basically taking a good chunk of the premium laptop market
Qualcomm -> Nuvia acquisition
Microsoft -> Future ARM chip
Good point. This was the implied point in my mentioning Risc-V. Roll your own. The ability, especially with the rapidly evolving AI enhanced tools, that will allow smaller and smaller companies, over time, to design their customized designs.

Edit:
A video was suggested by https://forums.anandtech.com/members/coercitiv.341496/ on computing by Jim Keller and his understanding about Moore's Law & AI and it's ability to revolutionize the design process. You'll need a much smaller team in the future to produce successful designs. This a a big danger to all present large design firms. He sees a step change happening.

 
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scineram

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It's not actually 39%. It's actually lower, like 36% because Intel changed up their accounting practices for this particular earnings report to elongate their depreciation schedule on older fabs from 5 years to 8 years, which means they take less of a depreciation hit per year, thus inflating their operating margins.

I really do think Intel is truly at a do-or-die moment now and they no longer have the COVID surge in all things semi to save their ass. It's going to be a really dark tunnel ahead of them and it will be exceptionally painful going through it.

Those fabs, as many have said on these forums over the years, must be feeling real heavy by now, like an albatross around Pat's neck. They said during the call that they plan on keeping a "competitive" dividend, but in my opinion the dividend needs to be cut. If the stock price drops as a result, so be it. We're talking about the survival and long-term health of the company here. But alas, Intel are keeping the dividend and instead cutting employees to reduce operating costs. The issue is that Intel needs engineers more than ever these days, as evidenced by the fact that it was a shortage of pre-silicon validation that tanked their server business. Their decision making is truly short-sighted and it's becoming more obvious that Pat cannot turn the Titanic quick enough. Hell, I'm not even sure he's trying to turn the rudder based on some of his decision making.
It was incredibly wise that Devinder chose an unspecified buyback program instead of regular dividends.
 
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Vattila

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I just think intel will be in a better place Than AMD in 5 years from now, not because Pat is better executing than Lisa, but because of the advantages that foundry will eventually have over designers, i dont expect any other foundry to sprout from nowhere in the next 10 years that will be able to compete with the few big fabs, intel atleast have a chance to improve its fab, whereas AMD have a much smaller chance to take more market share against both challengers, intel's competition on X86, and the Risc-V inevitable bite in servers, + ARMs bigger bites in desktop (in the form of apple or soon Qualcomm and perhaps MediaTek as well).

Intel has little room to fall from here, SPR is definitely inferior to AMDs products, Pat confirmed that several times in the past, but, since everyone is aware about it and its priced in the stock price, this might actually be a good investment opportunity for those who belive that foundry will deliver on its promise, I am in the believer camp but it will take atleast another 18 months to playout.

Thanks for your perspective! Intel stock may be a rewarding long-term play, if they execute their turn-around well. However, they are facing difficult times, and if you start investing now, you should be prepared to average down for many years (I did in AMD for over a decade, after their fall from grace in 2006). Big changes in the industry are coming, and Intel may look quite different in 3-5 years.

Although I am an AMD investor, I actually wish Intel Foundry Services well — I hope we'll see an AMD chip manufactured by Intel in USA or Europe at some point — while at the same time, I wish the Intel chip design divisions will face fair and wide competition and consequent market share erosion (just as Intel ex-CEO Bob Swan realistically envisioned). No incumbency advantage, no more!

Here is current Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on Yahoo Finance, defending their execution, roadmap and long-term strategy:



PS. And here is a longer interview with Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon on Intel's situation:


Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya has good commentary as well:
 
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