Intel Issues Revenue Warning For Q3 2012

By Wolfgang Gruener
published

Intel released a surprising revenue warning as the company's business is not holding up as initially expected.

The company has cut its forecast by $1.1 billion to a mid-point of $13.2 billion for the third quarter.

Intel said that the cut is due to its customers "reducing inventory in the supply chain versus the normal growth in third-quarter inventory." There is also "softness in the enterprise PC market segment; and slowing emerging market demand" while the "data center business is meeting expectations."

There is plenty of speculation in what these notes mean in detail, but there are now obvious questions about Intel's ability to ramp up 22 nm Ivy Bridge processor production as well as the implications for the launch of Windows 8. Apparently, PC makers are not are increasing their orders for the launch of the new operating system, or they simply use older hardware to support these new systems. There is also a good chance that the tablet business and the competition from ARM processor makers is an increasing problem for Intel.

Either way, Intel has always been an early indicator of trouble for the entire PC industry and that cannot be good news for AMD. We will get the entire story first hand when Intel reports its Q3 results on October 16.

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Wolfgang Gruener
17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • pacioli
    Uh oh...
    Well I guess a billion dollars less is just a minor oversight...
    Reply
  • lahawzel
    "Either way, Intel has always been an early indicator of trouble for the entire PC industry and that cannot be good news for AMD."

    Thank you for saying this, otherwise there'd be another worthless fiery battle of words in the comments section of this article involving many repetitons of the words "AMD", "Intel", "better", and "sucks".
    Reply
  • stingstang
    Oh nose. The Ceo of Intel can only afford 1 veyron this quarter instead of the usual 2. I'm sure they're hurting.
    Reply
  • bustapr
    from 14 billion to 13.2 billion in a quarter is still around 12 billion more than amd makes and theyre still holding up. this isnt really anything to panic about.
    Reply
  • nickchalk
    finleyjaynemy classmate's step-sister makes $79 hourly on the laptop. She has been fired for ten months but last month her payment was $20205 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read more on this site
    Is your classmate's step-sister showing her titties to other people through her laptop?
    Reply
  • thecolorblue
    dear intel, how about reducing the ludicrous # of variations on the same chip, not locking down any of your chips, lower your prices and sell all your chips fully unlocked at 1/2 the price

    maybe you'd have more customers if you didn't try to milk their wallets so hard
    Reply
  • milktea
    I've been waiting for i7 3770k with Z77 chipset to go mainstream for a long time. But most OEMs aren't pushing to have these out yet. I just don't know why ?!?!
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    thecolorbluedear intel, how about reducing the ludicrous # of variations on the same chip, not locking down any of your chips, lower your prices and sell all your chips fully unlocked at 1/2 the pricemaybe you'd have more customers if you didn't try to milk their wallets so hardthe # of kinds of chips are because they are trying to find ways to sell chips that would otherwise be thrown out, combined with their extreme measures they are taking to push against AMD and ARM in low wattage sectors.

    Keep in mind that all of that revenue is before expenses, and a good company tries to always spend a great deal of that expected money (minus a hefty rainy day acct). So think of it more allong the lines of you loosing 7.6% of your pretax income. It still hurts even when the budgets are so large, and it means that something is going to have to get delayed or taken off the table.

    Still, it is their own fault. We may not have been expecting that much extra performance out of Ivy Bridge compared to Sandy, but we were expecting a lot more features that really didn't pan out. The largest one being Thunderbolt, but also more SATA3 ports, and more USB3 ports, and to be honest we were expecting a little more than a 5% performance gain even though we knew it was only a refresh. Hopefully Intel will remember with Haswell that they are not in competition with AMD any more, they are in constant competition with themselves. We are (for the most part) OK with the speed of the chips we have, which means that if they do not innovate on features to upgrade to then we will happily stay where we are at.
    Reply
  • zeratul600
    why dont we start a kickstarter project for amd so they could match intel, that will bring the damn prices down!! an avanced cpu should cost 200$ not 340! they are just taking advantage because amd its down the mountain!
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    zeratul600why dont we start a kickstarter project for amd so they could match intel, that will bring the damn prices down!! an avanced cpu should cost 200$ not 340! they are just taking advantage because amd its down the mountain!
    If AMD had CPUs that performed similarly in most workloads (not just some) and with similar power consumption, they would probably have similar prices too (remember FX's launch prices?). The i7 pricing has little to do with AMD's current position and is more relative to the lower end i3 and i5 price/performance in the workloads that the i7s are intended for, but with a not too significant premium for the extra features and for being the highest performance option for the platform. It's not like the Extreme Editions that are so far overpriced that they're obviously nothing more than bragging rights about your latest money-wasting activity for most people.
    Reply