Components & Peripherals News
Intel’s Earnings ‘Collapse’ And Its Comeback Plan: 7 Things To Know
Dylan Martin
The semiconductor giant’s latest earnings report has investors concerned that Intel has a steeper hill to climb to return to growth and higher profitability as part of CEO Pat Gelsinger’s comeback plan. CRN rounds up seven important things to know about Intel’s fourth-quarter 2022 earnings report and how it plans to recover.
How Intel Expects To Recover
The biggest way Intel hopes to make a financial recovery is by executing on Gelsinger’s ambitious comeback plan. The plan, unveiled a few months after Gelsinger became CEO nearly two years ago, calls for Intel to introduce five new advanced manufacturing nodes between 2021 and 2025.
On Intel’s earnings call last week, Gelsinger said the company remains on track with its aggressive cadence of introducing new manufacturing nodes.
“We are at or ahead of our goal of five nodes in four years,” he said.
This began last year with Intel 7. The node, which was formerly known as Intel’s 10-nanometer Enhanced SuperFin process, is being used for the company’s Alder Lake and Raptor Lake chips on the client side and for Sapphire Rapids on the server side.
The next process, Intel 4, formerly known as its 7-nanometer node, is ready for manufacturing, according to Gelsinger. The node will be used for a next-generation client processor, code-named Meteor Lake, which will begin production in the second half of this year.
Meanwhile, Intel 3 is on track for this year, Intel 20A for early 2024, and Intel 18A for late 2024, the latter of which is ahead of the 2025 timeline the company originally gave.
As the company introduces new chip designs on these nodes, Intel hopes to become more competitive against AMD and other rivals, which, in turn, will ideally boost the chipmaker’s revenue.
The progression of Intel’s process road map will aid the company with another major goal in Gelsinger’s comeback plan: making a competitive contract chip manufacturing business. Called Intel Foundry Services, Gelsinger hopes the company will eventually make a big business out of manufacturing chips designed by other companies, not just the chips Intel designs in house.
While Intel Foundry Services revenue was under $1 billion in 2022, Gelsinger said the company has been seeing increased interest from potential customers.
Most recently, the company added a “leading cloud, edge and data center solutions provider as a leading-edge customer for Intel 3,” according to Gelsinger, on top of the company’s previously announced engagement with Taiwanese mobile chip designer MediaTek.
Intel also has “active pipeline engagements with seven out of the 10 largest foundry customers,” Gelsinger said. These foundry customers are companies that rely on contract manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung to fabricate their chip designs in high volumes.
As a result, Intel Foundry Services now has 43 potential customers lined up and more than $4 billion in “lifetime deal value,” when including the MediaTek and cloud provider deals.
