Intel: server, notebook chip sales soar

SALES OF SERVER and notebook processors have sharply risen during Intel's fourth quarter and it now expects to turn in revenues between $9.3 billion and $9.5 billion, the firm said in its mid-quarter forecast.

That's driven by sales of chips for servers and notebooks, with desktop chip sales remaining rather flat.

The firm's chief financial officer Andy Bryant conceded in a conference call that there were shortages of some products. He didn't elaborate on where those shortages were falling, but notebook processors and chipsets for the CPUs are selling like hot cakes right now.

Earlier this quarter, several market research companies in Asia, in Europe and in North America reported that sales of servers were booming. The notebook market is also healthy.

Intel said in its conference call that it was continuing to mop up excess stock and by the end of the quarter will show an inventory decrease of several hundreds of millions of dollars.

Projected gross margins of around 56% disappointed financial analysts, although few IT companies would get upset by such healthy yields on products.

As we reported yesterday, while AMD sales of Opterons are beginning to creep up, it's made hardly a dent in the lucrative notebook business which Intel continues to dominate. µ

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