Inside or Outside: Intel is Everywhere

Unbelievable but true to its core, is what the biggest chipmaker Intel Corp. has to say. Intel Corp. shipped 5 million of its new dual-core processors (Core 2 Duo) in the first two months of its sales, amid signs of strong demand for laptop PCs this quarter, company executives said on Monday.

Intel reached the sales mark for the new Core 2 Duo, which use a pair of processing cores on a single chip, within the first 60 days of their going on sale on July 27, Thomas Kilroy, vice general manager of the digital enterprise group, said at a developers' forum hosted by Intel in Taipei.

Kilroy also focused on some negative aspects such as the Sony battery recall issues which hampered the overall temperament for buying laptops to a considerable extent.

Intel gave the sales figure as other executives forecast a strong fourth quarter for notebook PCs. "We believe that notebooks will be strong in the fourth quarter," said Mooly Eden, general manager for Intel's mobile platforms group.

The Core 2 Duo chips will account for only a small fraction of the nearly 200 million processors Intel is expected to sell this year. The Core 2 Duo by no means is the biggest seller at this point because statistics related to older version chips have not been synchronized with the sale statistics of Core 2 Duo chips.

Irony is Core 2 Duo isn’t the last thing coming from Intel this year. Intel has already pre-planned the launch of “the next big thing”. It will start selling quad-core chips on 13 November.

Currently, Intel is in the middle of a major overhaul of its products as it seeks a sleeker product line to compete with rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which has gained a steady market share in the last few quarters.

The quad-core chip will appear in a new line of Hewlett-Packard workstations that will most likely use Intel's Xeon 5300 chip, designed to run high-end applications like seismic analysis and visualisation software. The launch would mean that Intel beats AMD for the time being.

Multiple-core chips can accelerate processing tasks in desktops and servers without drawing more electricity and generating extra heat. They can also handle more than one instruction set at a time, allowing computers to multi-task more efficiently.

In its reply AMD plans to release its own quad-core chips in the middle of 2007, and claims its monolithic design is superior to Intel's, which essentially glues two dual-cores chips together.

But the sad part on AMD’s part is that, around the same time as AMD's quad-core chips hit the market, Intel also hopes to start shipping 45-nanometre versions of its latest microprocessors. At the moment, Intel produces the majority of its Core 2 Duo microprocessors using the larger 65nm technology, and the smallersize will improve chip performance by 20 percent, the company claimed.

In a comparative financial study, Intel's share of the personal-computer processor market fell to 72.9 percent in the second quarter from 82.2 percent a year earlier, according to Cave Creek, Arizona-based Mercury Research.

Asia accounts for the largest share of Intel's sales at 50 percent, based on second-quarter income, followed by the Americas with 21 percent.

Shares of Intel have declined 13 percent this year, compared with an 18 percent drop in Advanced Micro's stock. The S&P 500 Index climbed 9.4 percent in the same period. Intel's shares rose 0.5 percent to $21.60 in New York on Oct. 13.

Intel in September announced it would cut 10,500 jobs, or about 10 percent of its work force, following a three-month top-to-bottom review of operations.

Analysts have said the firm needs to take drastic action to reverse sliding profits and halt steady market share erosion. This move might bother the employees , but should never bother the Corp. as it already had workforces in buffer.