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THE DAY of Intel's earning results, CEO Craig Barrett delivered an up-beat report to all the firm's employees, via a Webcast and through its internal organ Circuit News.
Barrett told the staff that Intel has a "plan and product roadmaps" which will allow the company to be successful despite "several highly publicised setbacks" in the recent months.
And competitors like AMD will find it very hard to follow Intel, because of its size, its resources, and its worldwide sales coverage. It has 180,000 system integrators worldwide.
Multicore products will leverage features in the Centrino brand, and that will include better heat dissipation. Those features will include low power, more slender types of PC, and wireless.
He said that the firm's last results were broadly in line with Intel's expectations apart from higher than expected sales of mobos and chipsets and lower sales of high margin CPUs.
Intel had always had setbacks but a booming PC industry masked that.
The areas Intel needed to address are competitiveness and Operational Excellence, which the firm acronyms up as OpX.
The company will be "incredibly competitive" in the future, he told Intel staff.
Senior staff at Intel decided that the Managing with Excellence program is needed to improve communications throughout the organisation. And Intel business groups will have to perform a self-assessment, including planning, platform orientation and decision making. The planning team will be headed by Pat Gelsinger, the platform team by Paul Otellini, and Barrett will head up the team making decisions.
Barrett admitted there are challenges ahead, including the ability to increase flash fabs to operate at 100 per cent use. Intel has had problems supplying the right building blocks for cellular handsets and had to compete better with TI and Qualcomm.
He said that Intel - despite reports in the press [that's us, Ed] - held a consistent position in the market for the last five years. He claimed Intel was doing well now as five years ago, and Centrino has put the firm in the best position it's ever been in.
It's moved half of its fabs to 90 nanometres and will move to 65 nano process technology in the second half of next year.
Multicore processors will provide very high performance but dissipate less heat and that will help Intel get round the thermal problems it's had.
While some press said that Moore's Law is flagging, it's alive and well and living in Santa Clara. The firm will be able to scale down but the big challenge will be leakage current and power dissipation.
He ended by saying that none of Intel's competitors will "go away" but the firm could "outrun them".
Source:
The INQ!
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