Intel executives knew that the bet on Intel Foundry was not working out as they had imagined, because it was the main culprit behind the company’s losses.
Why reduce them, a few weeks ago, before the presentation of the economic results for the second quarter of 2024, Intel sold all the shares it held in FirearmsMore precisely, 1.18 million shares, for which he received $147 million.
In this way, the $1.6 billion in losses it presented could have been almost $150 million more. The significant loss figures announced by Intel caused the company’s shares to fall by 33%, losing more than $20 billion in valuation.
Something is wrong at Intel
While it is true that Intel Foundry is the one to blame for Intel’s economic debacle, it is not the only one. The ongoing problems with 13th and 14th generation processors They forced the company to offer 2 more years of warranty and they are still trying to fix the performance issues based on patches, without providing any solution.
In addition, the market share, both in servers and in the domestic market, has also been reduced thanks to the good work of AMD, which improved both its market share and the revenue generated in the last quarter, quite the opposite of Intel.
The fact that Intel has divested its shares in Arm does not mean that it has not completely forgotten about this architecture, since everything seems to indicate that it will be the future, provided that Intel’s plans include not only the design of processors for PCs and that it wishes to extend its reach to processors for portable electronic devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
However, and although it works with Arm with which it designs the technology of the manufacturing process Intel 18AEverything indicates that once again it is late for the market.
At this rate, when we want to realize, the market of PC processors with ARM you will be dominated by Qualcomma company that already offers laptops with this architecture and is also late to the market, notably with a 4-year delay.
It should be remembered that Apple launched its first processor with ARM architecture in 2020, with the launch of M1 processor. Since then, it has only evolved and is currently in version 4, M4. Fortunately, even if Qualcomm arrived late, it has managed to be at the same level in terms of power, performance and autonomy as Apple processors.
What seems clear is that Patt Gelsinger, Intel’s current CEO, his days are numbered as a business leader, unless the numbers change significantly in the next quarter.