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Intel increasing CPU production
Vendor reveals that it expects to deliver more CPUs to ease some of the shortages that have been in the market
Intel has indicated that it has taken measures to ease some of the problems that have plagued the supply of CPUs over the last year.
The vendor has been sharing its second quarter results, that saw the firm deliver $16.5bn in revenues and $4.2bn in net income, down 3% and 17% respectively compared to last year.
There was 1% improvement in the PC centric business year-on-year, and the firm indicated that it had taken steps to solve CPU production issues.
The PC market has struggled with shortages at a time when the commercial segment has been growing with many customers taking measures to migrate away from Windows 7 before support ends for the OS in January next year.
In a conference call with analysts Intel's CEO Bob Swan made it clear that the supply issues were easing.
"PC demand continued to improve particularly in the commercial segment. We now expect the PC total available market to be up slightly for the full year," he said.
"While small core supply improved we were not able to fully satisfy customer demand for these SKUs in the second quarter. Tariffs and trade uncertainties created anxiety across our customers supply chain and drove a pull-in of client CPU orders into the second quarter," he added.
Intel has been taking action to remedy the situation and Swan was able to provide a more positive message for the second half of the year.
"We're also making steady progress increasing CPU supply. Through our investments, focused execution and tighter customer collaboration, we expect our PC CPU supply will be up mid single-digits this year," said Swan.
"We'll continue to work with our customers to meet their required product mix and ramp additional capacity to ensure we are not a constraint on their growth," he added.
The Q2 numbers were also accompanied by the announcement that the firm had sold the majority of it 5G modem business to Apple for $1bn.
Swan said that the firm was going through a transformation and had been clear about where it saw future revenues coming from.
"We are evolving Intel Inside from a CPU inside a PC to XPUs inside everything that processes stores and moves data. Big bets in 5G, AI and autonomous systems are an important part of this transformation," he said.
