Hardware freaks flocked to San Francisco last week to hear Intel talk about microprocessors, the electronic brains in PCs. But Advanced Micro Devices made some pretty brainy claims of its own.
Silicon Valley has been talking for 15 years or so about marrying TV and the Internet. For the most part, it’s still just talk; most people still use their PCs when they want interactivity, and rely on their TVs when they want to be passive content-watchers.
Shares of both Seagate and Western Digital are getting battered on fears that the hard-drive sector could once again soon find itself with a glut of supply.
At least in part, the Street is reacting to this morning’s downgrade of Marvell by Barclays Capital, which as I noted earlier was in response to indications from Taiwanese component makers of a slowdown PC demand.
Intel, which helped shake up the PC industry last year by promoting low-priced laptops called netbooks, is at it again. But there’s not such a memorable name this time.
The chip giant is expected to use the Computex trade show this week to discuss a category of portables that fall in a price band between netbooks–which can start at less than $300–and full-featured notebooks, which often cost more than $1,000.
Semiconductor luminaries honored at a black-tie ceremony in Silicon Valley Saturday night didn’t get a lot of time on stage. Most posed a few seconds for a photo with their award, said a few words about how honored they were, and left the stage. Andy Grove couldn’t resist doing a little more, including comparing commerce in patents to the actions that brought down Wall Street.
Now that we’re experiencing Q4 earnings reports in all their glory, the time has come to shift focus to Q1. That’s what Needham chip analyst N. Quinn Bolton did this morning. And the picture is not pretty.
He estimates that Q1 revenue will be down 15-20 percent compared to his previous estimate of 10 percent.
In an interview with Tech Trader Daily, Broadcom CEO Scott McGregor said that the company has developed a chip that will allow cellphone manufacturers to put HD video cameras in their handsets. The chips will be available later this year, although McGregor said that one manufacturer was displaying a prototype privately at CES. He didn’t say which one.
At Intel Corp.’s big developer conference this week, the chip giant was extolling the virtues of its newest little chip, called the Atom. The Atom has surprised both company executives and analysts with its popularity among hardware makers. The chip was introduced in March and is aimed at an emerging market of very low-cost mobile devices, especially in developing countries.
Good news for the memory sector: The players seem to be acting rationally for a change.
One clear message from the Applied Materials’ (AMAT) earnings call yesterday is that there has been a dramatic reduction in capital investment in the DRAM and NAND memory chip sectors.
Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design. Dazzled doesn’t translate to handing over a credit card, however–at least not yet, and not solely because it’s almost never a good idea to buy Apple’s (or anyone else’s) hardware immediately after its initial release.
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