Intel is seemingly in limbo right now as there are both good and bad news facing the multinational technology company recently.
First, Intel’s financial results for 2023’s first quarter have been revealed, and the figures do not favor the company.
While Intel brought in $11.7 billion, this is a drop of 36 percent during the first quarter of last year. Because of the decline in revenue, the technology company lost $2.8 billion, touted as the biggest loss throughout its history.
Three months ago, Intel predicted its first-quarter revenues would be between $10.5 to $11.5 billion.
Intel has been making efforts, too, in order to address these losses. For instance, it has done layoffs, cut pay for executives and managers, and recently canceled some of its products lined up for launch, such as its Blockscale series of Bitcoin-mining ASICs.
The financial losses are also brought together by the spending habits of technology products consumers. For one, there has been a considerable overall decline in the consumer PC business since people prefer to still use the equipment they have acquired during the pandemic.
In addition, analysts at the global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation say PC shipments are down almost 30 percent from the same time in 2022.
But Intel is not alone. Other big technology firms like Samsung, NVIDIA, Micron, and Apple are also encountering declines in their revenues in recent quarters.
Nevertheless, the top-ranking officials at Intel are optimistic, such as Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who said in a statement about the company’s Q1 2023 financial results, “We delivered solid first-quarter results, representing steady progress with our transformation. We hit key execution milestones in our data center roadmap and demonstrated the health of the process technology underpinning it. While we remain cautious on the macroeconomic outlook, we are focused on what we can control as we deliver on IDM 2.0: driving consistent execution across process and product roadmaps and advancing our foundry business to best position us to capitalize on the $1 trillion market opportunity ahead.”
New branding for Intel’s Meteor Lake
And Gelsinger has more reasons to remain optimistic. For instance, he has also announced that Intel’s next-gen Meteor Lake CPU is already in production, adding it will launch sometime during the second half of this year. Is this enough to cover up for the first quarter’s losses?
The company has also confirmed a new branding for its Meteor Lake “Core” CPUs and beyond. However, official details about this will be unveiled soon.
But there’s a caveat
“Yes, we are making brand changes as we’re at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our #MeteorLake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks! #Intel,” tweeted Intel’s Director of Global Communications, Bernard Fernandes.
Yet, there’s a caveat. Unlike its current Raptor Lake chips that scale up to 125W TDP, Meteor Lake processors will just be until 65W. Some experts say this is to manage the expectations of buyers. Also, the Meteor Lake desktop processors will only be marketed as “Core i5” CPUs rather than going all the way up to “Core i9.”
