This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Intel-Chipset

Intel announced its Q4 2022 and full year 2022 earnings, in what has to exist one of the higher-profile earnings calls the company has ever done. For the by three weeks, Intel has taken unrelenting oestrus for the Spectre and Meltdown flaws. On the one paw, it's true Intel is easily the almost exposed of any CPU vendor, fifty-fifty ARM (which has far more CPUs in the field), and Intel's initial fixes had to be yanked for beingness buggy and causing frequent reboots. On the other, some of the more than grandiose predictions we've seen on the potential ramifications of the 2 flaws are misguided or by and large incorrect. Still, information technology's a serious problem, and investors accept been waiting to hear what Intel is going to exercise almost information technology.

Almost secondary to this is the question of how Intel performed throughout 2022 and how AMD's mobile and desktop Ryzen launches might have impacted the company's full year results. Luckily, nosotros've got info on all three topics.

General Earnings

Intel's full yr revenue was $62.8B, a record for the company, and driven by the growth of its IoT, information center, and cloud computing business organization segments. Full-year revenue grew ix percent year over year, driven past 11 per centum growth in information center income, 20 per centum in IoT (nonetheless a comparatively small chunk of Intel'southward earnings, at $iii.2B for the year), 37 pct growth in non-volatile memory sales (Optane, NAND, $3.5B for 2022), and xiv percent growth in programmable solutions (FPGAs, $1.9B for 2022).

Intel-DCG

The only less-than-bright spot in Intel's 2022 was weakness in the consumer market, but nosotros'll speak to that later.

10nm, Meltdown, and Spectre

Intel confirmed on its conference call that it began shipping some 10nm products very late in Q4 2022 and will continue ramping towards volume product in the latter half of this year.

One interesting point worth highlighting here is how much the dialog around procedure node ramps has changed within Intel. Five to six years agone, Intel would quickly betoken out that one major deviation between itself and rival foundries like TSMC was the way it talked about new process nodes. It was not (and is not) unusual for TSMC to declare it has hit book manufacturing milestones half dozen-9 months earlier products really striking store shelves. This is a consequence of the foundry-customer human relationship, in which products go through boosted lengthy verification steps before ever going on sale.

TSMC'southward messaging practices haven't changed, but Intel'south take. Once upon a time, "book manufacturing" was something Intel announced a calendar month or 2 before products were available for purchase. Now, the visitor is talking about a Q4 2022 early ramp, with actual commercial availability in Q3 or Q4. New process nodes are hard, and Intel's 10nm is essentially equivalent to the 7nm nodes at GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and TSMC, but there's no denying that the company's introduction times have diffuse.

As for the in-silicon patches for Spectre and Meltdown, hither'south what CEO Brian Krzanich had to say:

We're working to incorporate silicon-based inverse to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware. And those products will begin appearing afterward this yr.

This indirectly confirms Intel knew about these flaws long before they became mutual knowledge. Typically, a new CPU blueprint is frozen at least a year before products ship for revenue. For Intel to have hardware mitigation strategies fix to go this rapidly, it must have had time to bake those improvements into Water ice Lake before that CPU finished tapeout. Intel besides plans to launch some new 14nm products this year, but there was no word on what those might be.

What About AMD?

All twelvemonth, AMD fans and enthusiasts accept wanted to know what impact Ryzen and Ryzen Mobile would accept on Intel's market share. AMD's earnings accept fabricated it articulate Ryzen delivered substantial acquirement improvements, but revenue gains and market share gains don't e'er cleanly runway each other, and Ryzen commands far meliorate prices than Piledriver e'er did.

Intel-CCG

For total-year 2022, Intel'southward notebook platform shipments rose by 5 per centum, ASPs (average selling prices) and ASPs rose 2 percent. Given that Ryzen Mobile only barely shipped in 2022, this is non especially surprising.

Intel never mentioned AMD by name in its conference call, simply information technology's hard not to run across the company'south hand in Intel's desktop functioning. Desktop sales fell 5 per centum in 2022, a much steeper drib in that segment than forecast for the yr, and the pass up in desktop ASPs from Q4 2022 to Q4 2022 could also exist indicative of increased competition from Squad Dark-green. Intel fabricated generic reference to increased competition, but otherwise blamed these declines in standing weakness in the PC market. It's non at all articulate that'due south true, and we should know more than next week when AMD reports its own 2022 results.

Will Meltdown, Spectre, Evidence a Benefit or Liability?

The final point we desire to impact on is whether Meltdown and Spectre will actually harm Intel at all, long-term. Data centers and servers are the hardest hit by the software patches that mitigate the bugs. Just some analysts recall this could piece of work to Intel's advantage, increasing the chances that customers volition bound for early refresh cycles once new 10nm chips are available that aren't susceptible to this vulnerability.

Whether this works out in Intel's favor may depend on how much momentum AMD is able to build for its Epyc server family, and how much of a performance whack its ain chips take (AMD's exposure on some of these issues is different than Intel'south). It's likewise non hard to see how customers might experience burned past Intel and look to AMD as a result, but Lisa Su has previously stressed that the Epyc ramp would be a deadening, gradual one — and AMD had prior noesis of Meltdown and Spectre equally well.

Of course, it'south possible both outcomes could happen. Meltdown and Spectre fixes in-silicon could spur many companies to upgrade early on, while some customers might opt to consider not-Intel solutions afterwards getting burned by Chipzilla. Whether those sales accumulate to Qualcomm's Centriq server division, AMD's Epyc, or some other vendor is something nosotros'll scout in 2022.