It looks like Intel, after 21 years of profitability is about to start loosing money. According to Intel, it may report a loss for the first time since the Information Technology industry’s equivalent of the Pre-Cambrian era.
“We are not going to wake up in six months with everything rosy again. After 87 quarters of profit, the first quarter is too close to call,” said chief executive officer Paul Otellini to employees last week in a private internal memo obtained by Bloomberg News.
AMD have yet to report their own financial results, but considering that Intel have left them several product generations in history,.
Intel’s core business in the manufacturing of processors has always been strong, their “Tick Tock” strategy of annual releases alternating between evolving their current products and re-developing new ones has seen them pull clear of their nearest rivals, AMD by several product generations; it looks like AMD processors may be turning into modern day fossils, although AMD still do provide good “value” and energy efficient processors for some applications like the Home Media/Office Server I showed you all how to build last year.
Personally, I’m using an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (45nm) processor in my desktop workstation, over-clocked from 3.0ghz to 3.6ghz, and Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (65nm) @ 2.2ghz in my laptop, while I have an Intel E6600 (65nm) in my second desktop and an AMD Athlon 64 X” 4000+ “Energy Efficient” in our custom-built office server and one of Intel’s new 1.6ghz “Atom” processors in my Acer One 150 Netbook (review coming soon!). My company, Evolved Software Studios Ltd is also an Intel Software Partner. All this, after over five years of professionally reselling and referring almost exclusively AMD components for both personal and business use. I hope AMD survive the downturn.
In any case, Intel’s strategy continues, their latest “Tick” – the Intel Core i7 is not compatible with the Socket for the now older Core 2 Duo’s, so if you want the latest and greatest you’ll need new motherboards. And you may as well take advantage of improvements in DDR3 on-board RAM and soon we’ll have PCI-Express 3.0 coming with double the data rate of PCI-Express 2.0. Unless you’re after the latest and greatest, I’d stick with the current outgoing generation for a while yet.
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4ghz | Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.0ghz | Intel Core i7 940 @ 2.9 ghz | |
Sandra 2008 Processor Arithmetic (higher is better) | 15288 | 22006 | 66045 |
AVG Antivirus 8 (lower is better) | 213 | 165 | 77 |
3DMark Vantage [games] (higher is better) | 9907 | 10126 | 10126 |
Although gamers will probably be holding onto their current investments, high end users (like software developers, artists, multi-taskers, science and mathematics) look like they could gain massive improvements from upgrading to Intel’s new platform.
One person who might not be upgrading this year is this guy, Jack Van Impe. I saw this rather hilarious video on YouTube earlier today.
“Those new computers will do a thousand trillion operations per second”. Someone should call him and let him know that just one Intel Core i7 chip will do 763 thousand million instructions per second. Server farms will do a heck of a lot more.
Time now to activate my Windows Azure cloud processing account. Everyone prepare to meet thy god.
