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Strategies & Market Trends : Technical analysis for shorts & longs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Logain Ablar who wrote (45146)	11/17/2008 8:10:12 AM
From: Johnny Canuck	Respond to of 71611

Chips Ahoy! Intel Swings For The Fences Elizabeth Corcoran, It has big new chip--and a fierce determination to make it through the downturn. Economies may wax and wane--but Intel plans to keep churning out the chips. On Monday Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) debuts its latest heavy-duty computation chip--its Intel Core i7, code-named Nehalem. Under development for five years, the design was intended to be Intel's answer to competitor AMD (nyse: AMD - news - people )'s successful Opteron chip, which won more than a few enterprise customers away from the market leader. Article Controls email print reprint newsletter comments share Yahoo! Buzz The Core i7 packs a breathtaking 730 million transistors on a tiny swatch of silicon. Its features measure a mere 45 nanometers (billionths of a meter). It is hardly just plain old silicon anymore, either: in order to keep ratcheting up the speed, chip designers have turned to a potpourri of elements, including the rare earth metal hafnium. The chip is aimed first at powerful servers although, if history is a guide, Intel will eventually apply the technology to a spectrum of other devices. (For a look at Intel's "ticktock" chip development, see "Intel Plots A Comeback.") In past years, the first crop of its cutting-edge chips has yielded a profit windfall for Intel. This year, however, racking up big sales will be tough: customers of all sizes are scrambling to cut spending. Last week, Intel scaled back by $1 billion its estimate of how much it would sell during the fourth quarter of the year. The company had offered analysts a rosier estimate only four weeks earlier. In an interview with Forbes.com, Sean Maloney, Intel's executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer, ticked off a few of the developments that have conspired in the past few weeks to depress the company and the industry: a reduction in credit around the globe; cutbacks, first by the largest corporations, followed by small and medium-sized businesses and finally consumers; the bankruptcy of electronics seller Circuit City. Related QuotesINTC - $13.32 0.00 AMD - $2.43 0.00 AAPL - $90.24 0.00 NOK - $12.59 0.00 HTCKF - $52.25 0.00 Get Quotes: "The good news is that industry is reacting quickly and keeping a close eye on inventories," Maloney said. In past downturns, buildups of unsold products or inventories often masked the real story going on within companies. "This time everyone is working hard to keep inventories lean so we can have a clear idea of what's taking place," he added. (See "Intel Looks Beyond Downturn.") Intel has also over the past few years built up a second strong line of microprocessors called Atom, aimed at a different class of devices: notebook computers and so-called netbooks. Within the past nine months, low-cost netbooks have emerged as one of the hottest-selling computer products. That's been a boon for Intel, whose chips are not used in devices for which the primary function is to make a telephone call, including Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people )'s iPhone. Comment On This Story But Intel is working closely with companies such as phone giant Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) and Taiwan's HTC Corp. (other-otc: HTCKF - news - people ) on other devices. Maloney showed off a phone made by HTC and sold exclusively in Russia that boasts a large touch screen and WiMax data transmission--which lets it vacuum up data at rates of 14 megabytes a second, fast enough to download an MP3 in seconds, asserted Maloney. Related Stories Broadcom Unveils New Multicore Chip Analog Rising Ten Must-Read Tech Stories Buffett: Coke Governance Sweet; Grinstein: Grim Delta plans; Eisner: To Leave Disney In 2006. Lessons Learned Stories Videos Those are the kinds of products that Intel is eyeing over the next 18 months--and that is the way that the chip giant intends to chart its way through this recession. "Companies recover from recessions with new technologies and new ideas," Maloney remarked. The current crisis is, in part, a "confidence issue," Maloney said. All the opportunities for putting new computer muscle to work--from finding cleaner sources of energy to administering health care more efficiently--still exist. "We need to take a few breaths and get on with it."