UPDATE 20 July 2006 5:30 pm ET
Round Rock (TX) - For AMD's planned price drop for its dual-core processors to enable the company to regain its aggressive price/performance competitive position against Intel as it has promised, the company would have to reduce its existing Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon FX prices by between 38% and 56% for its various models, with cuts averaging about 51%.
Cellphone manufacturers have posted yet another successful quarter. According to an IDC report released today, Nokia & Co. shipped 237.8 million phones in Q2, which represents a 2.1% increase over Q1 and a whopping 22.5% increase over Q2 of last year.
UPDATE 12:00 pm ET 20 July 2006
Santa Clara (CA) - Intel has confirmed this morning that Sean Maloney, currently one of Intel's co-general managers, has been anointed with the newly constructed title of "chief sales and marketing officer" when the company announces its complete reorganization plan, perhaps during its third quarter financial guidance call. Maloney's co-general managers, Anand Chandrasekher and Eric Kim, are being repositioned to lead the UMPC and Digital Home groups, respectively. The changes are effective immediately.
Montecito processors will likely account for around 80% of Itanium 2 shipments by the fourth quarter of this year, Intel said at a press event in Taipei.
Micron Technology, has risen to the number one position in the 2006 Patent Scorecard for the semiconductor industry, an annual qualitative appraisal of patents by the independent technology analysis firm ipIQ.
Apple Computer started focusing on the "Computer" part of its name during its fiscal third quarter 2006 earnings call this afternoon, reporting quarterly profit up 47% annually to $472 million from $320 million. Revenue was up 24% over the fiscal third quarter of 2005, to $4.37 billion - about 54¢ per share - and Macintosh accounts for more than half the reason, executives said today.
Web auction leader Ebay Wednesday posted quarterly results that matched Wall Street estimates but confirmed fears that growth is slowing as the company hewed to its conservative outlook.
Intel today reported sales $8.0 billion and a net income of $885 million for the second quarter of this year. Compared to the second quarter of last year, revenue is down 13% from $9.2 billion, while the firm's profit dropped 57% from $2.0 billion.
espite a slight sequential decline in overall hard drive shipments in the first quarter of this year, Seagate managed to post solid gains and an increased market share, which now stands at 29%, according to market research firm iSuppli. Count in Maxtor's shipments, which Seagate recently acquired, and the company shipped four out of ten hard drives in the Q1.
Notebook makers are facing poor order visibility for the second half of the year, as clients are reluctant to place long-term large-volume orders amid a price war between Intel and AMD, according to industry sources.
Motorola generated revenues of $8.99 billion in China's handset market in 2005, accounting for 24.4% of the company's global revenues for the year, the Chinese-language website Sina.com reported recently.
Last week Intel announced that it would lay off 1,000 managers, but its job cutting may not be over. Donald MacDonald, vice president and general manager, told Ben Ames of IDG that the company is looking to cut some more redundant positions and added that, "Nothing is off the table."
Microsoft today announced that it enlisted the help of communication technology powerhouse Nortel to drive its "unified" communications platform forward.
Tiburon (CA) - At the upcoming Siggraph conference in Boston, the Khronos Group and OpenGL ARB plan to announce merger of the two groups. The union between the Khronos Group and the OpenGL ARB may come as little surprise to the people who know both organizations. And in fact, even for those who have not labored long in the vineyards of graphics, the news might just be chalked up as one more mysterious move by those equally mysterious standards bodies that periodically erupt with some agreement that affects the industry.
Intel will cut prices of its 865G chipset in the fourth quarter of 2006, in an attempt to accelerate inventory clearance prior to the push of Microsoft Vista-compliant chipsets, sources at Taiwan motherboard makers indicated.
Samsung Electronics trimmed its forecast for 2006 NAND flash supply bit growth by 10 percentage points to 171% because of the delayed ramp of its 8Gbit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash during the first half of this year, according to company semiconductor business unit senior vice president Il-ung Kim at a July 14 investors conference.
As Intel and AMD introduce next-generation platforms in the coming weeks and months, reduced prices for current generation CPUs will lead to increased purchasing budgets, so DRAM prices should stop their decline. This is part of iSuppli's near-term DRAM forecast today. There's also something interesting about a little thing called the "PlayStation Portable 2."
Aiming to counter pressure from the launch of Socket AM2 Sempron processors by rival Advanced Micron Devices (AMD), Intel plans to further cut the prices for the complete line up of its entry-level Celeron D processors in late October following a planned price reduction for the majority of the lineup on 23 July, according to sources at Taiwan motherboard makers.
