Intel’s top executives knew that the bet on Intel Foundry was not going as they had thought, and this was the main culprit of the losses generated by the company.
To reduce these, a few weeks ago, before the presentation of the financial results for the second quarter of 2024, Intel sold all the shares it had in Arm Holdingsspecifically 1.18 million shares, for which he obtained 147 million dollars.
The $1.6 billion in losses it reported could have been almost $150 million more. The huge loss figures announced by Intel caused the company’s shares to fall by 33%, losing more than $20 billion in value.
Something is wrong at Intel
While it is true that Intel Foundry points to being the main culprit of Intel’s financial debacle, it has not been the only one. The continued problems with the 13th and 14th generation processors They have forced the company to offer an additional 2 years of warranty and it is still trying to fix the performance problems with patches, without providing a solution.
In addition, the market shareboth in servers and in the domestic market, has also seen a decline thanks to the good work of AMD, who has improved both its market share and the income generated in the last quarter, the opposite of Intel.
Just because Intel has divested its stake in Arm doesn’t mean it has completely forgotten about the architecture, as everything seems to indicate that it will be the future, as long as Intel’s plans include not only designing processors for PCs but also wanting to expand its reach to processors for portable electronic devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
However, and although it is working with Arm with which it is designing the manufacturing process technology Intel 18Aeverything indicates that, once again, it is late to the market.
At this rate, before you know it, the market for PC processors with ARM will be dominated by Qualcomma company that already offers portable equipment with this architecture and that also arrives late to the market, specifically 4 years late.
It is worth remembering that Apple launched its first processor with ARM architecture in 2020, with the launch of the M1 processorSince then, it has only evolved and is currently in version 4, M4. Fortunately, although Qualcomm has arrived late, it has managed to be on par with Apple’s processors in terms of power, performance and autonomy.
What does seem clear is that Patt Gelsinger, the current CEO of Intel, has its days numbered as the company’s top executive, unless the figures take a significant turnaround in the next quarter.