Running contrary to industry expectations Intel has just posted record sales $13 billion in its last quarter.
Although demand has ebbed in its established markets of Europe and the United States this has been more than compensated for by the upturn in sales in countries such as Brazil and China.
In addition, apart from buyers in the new markets who are buying PCs for the first time, Intel claims that the advent of smartphones and tablets has not had the impact on sales that many observers would have thought.
According to Intel CEO, Paul Otellini, customers still see these device as additional purchases rather than outright replacement for their PCs.
Here’s a little detail from my own research. With the global increase in demand for services such as VoIP and streaming video, data centres are choosing to increase their density by adding 42U racks crammed with IBM blade servers – there can be 56 individual servers (mostly dual / quad core) in a single rack – giving an average of 168 Intel chips in a single (full) rack. The most popular Intel Xeon chips retail for $330 but IBM are buying them in bulk @ approx $100 each. Conclusion: our friends in Leixlip are raking it in at a rate of $16,800 per rack. Don’t ask me how many racks have been installed globally in the last fiscal year but I’d say it’s somewhere in the region of lots and according to the Intel ‘Earnings Call’ transcript from yesterday, the DC market was worth $2 billion last year. Conclusion – no surprise 🙂
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No surprise Mark and the growth will have a continued and direct effect on the growth of cloud computing, data centres and chips far into the future….
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