Recession Hits Intel Where It Hurts
Well that didn’t take long. Intel after the close of markets today issued its fourth-quarter revenue forecast — something it had said it would do on Dec. 4 — and as expected, cut its guidance by some $1 billion, citing “significantly weaker-than-expected demand in all geographies and market segments.” The chipmaker now expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $9 billion, give or take $300 million, vs. a prior outlook of between $10.1 billion and $10.9 billion. The recession and drop in consumer spending are doing a number on the consumer electronics supply chain, and Intel is not immune.
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The Intel Dilemma: While developers want more and more powerful processors, their customers do not. Case in point: the dual-dual-core Q6600, which is *finally* about to be EOLed after a two-year stretch at the bottom of Intel’s quad-core CPU chain. (Note: during the Q6600′s overlong lifetime, two other quad-core processors from Intel have come and gone.) The Q6600 is a conundrum: too weak for servers (it originally launchesd as the XEON X3220), too hot for notebooks, and apparently too powerful for an entry-level CPU (it has a retail street price of no more than $200USD in single-unit quantities). What are customers buying? Dual-core and more dual-core (C2D, Pentium and even Celeron dual-cores, such as the E1200 and newer E1500), despite the Q6600 now undercutting Intel’s last major mainstream CPU, the Pentium 4 Northwood-C’s price at its heyday; in some cases, they are actually willing to pay *more* for a 45nm dual-core than for a Q6600 (even though that strikes *me* as Just Plain Wrong).