Intel Q2'16 Earning : Hitting Inflection point ?

Intel announced its Q2 2016 results yesterday. A few interesting facts to note.

Slightly low on the revenue -- $13.5 billion against expectation of $13.54 billion. Misses the target by a whisker.

Net income is $1.3 billion, a huge decline compared to Q2 of 2015 ($2.7 billion). This decline is mainly attributed to company wide restructuring Intel undertook from April this year. Layoff of close to 6000 employees. 

PC business is still driving Intel revenue, even though it is pretty much on down trend. Data centre server business is second in the line. IOT, Memory and FPGA business units  are way behind in revenue volume.

It is rumored that Intel will make a big foray into cell phone business by making an entry into iPhone7 as modem chipset. But that doesnot seem to be reflected in the projections for  coming quarters.

An interesting point to note on PC sales. PC shipment in US has shown an upward moment during first half of 2016. On the otherhand, Intel's revenue doesnot reflect that. Was it an inventory clearance ? On the other hand, global PC sales is still in downward trend.

Now, where Intel is going from here ?
It is expecting a few big ticket project wins -- iPhone modem is one such. Recently Intel announced  its big foray into autonomous car by having an alliance with BMW.

These initiative will take some time to bear the fruit.

1. As of now there is no clear cut business segment of Intel which is going to takeover from its PC unit. Declining PC sales would continue to be a worry.  Server  business could support for some time.

2. In IOT or cell phone or automotive business, Intel will never be in driver's seat, like it did  during PC era. It is one of the partners with stiff competition around.

Is Intel hitting its inflection point ?

Google Making its Own ASIC ?

When Google recently announced its TPU Custom ASIC, with imited details of chip per-se, it has ruffled the feathers of many players.  What Google has stated in a crisp note as part of their product line announcement,


"The result is called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law)."

 
A few points to ponder upon,

1. Can Google make a custom ASIC of that power and test and deploy  so quickly ?
2. It should have done this project in resource optimised way,  negotiating well with various vendors -- EDA, Foundry, Packaging and test house. Did it manage well the supply chain ?
3. Who is the loser in this in-house custom ASIC ?  --- NVIDIA with its Pascal GPU or Intel or any other top semicon company ?
4. Is it one-off kind of big effort and market leaders in semicon need not read too much ?
5. We may never come to know if it was  best hardware piece OR software running around it is giving  an edge in the performance ?
6. Finally -- Do other big vendors like Apple, Amazon, MicroSoft, etc. take this path of customised ASIC for their flagship products, instead of relying on beating around standard products ? If this is so, then it could be a paradigm shift in the industry.

Rambus is still persuing Fabless path

Rambus yet to prove as fabless player, is still continuing in that path. It is sticking to the decision with acquision of Infi's memory business.


http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330027


Interesting to watch ....