Intel Q2 profit surge

DESPITE its ongoing corporate restructure, chip-maker Intel second quarter profits have jumped 44 per cent to US$1.3 billion (A$1.5 billion), the company said.

Intel said revenue climbed to US$8.3 billion. The results included an US$82 million restructuring charge taken for the uarter.

“Intel's operational execution continued to strengthen, resulting in an outstanding product roadmap and solid year-over-year revenue growth,” Intel president and chief executive Paul Otellini said.

“We're pleased that our efforts to streamline the company are delivering profit growth in excess of revenue growth,’” he said.

And Intel said it expects continued strong growth in the third quarter on the back of a healthy global IT market. The company has forecast revenue growth to US$9 billion to US$9.6 billion, with gross margin up marginally to 52 per cent.

Intel has enjoyed strong sales growth for its quad-core Xeon server processors, but has suffered a slowdown at the low-end of the PC chip market through stiff price competition.

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AMD confirms Quad-Core for August

CHIP giant Advanced Micro Devices has confirmed it will ship its first Quad-Core Opteron “Barcelona” processors in August – scotching rumours that it planned to delay the launch.

There had been industry speculation that AMD would put the launch date back because of unspecified manufacturing problems. The processors are code-named “Barcelona”.

AMD said it would start shipping both standard and low-power versions in August. The company said it was the first time AMD had ever made standard and low power versions of a product available at launch.

With the new processors shipping in volume in August, the company said it expects hardware partners to start shipping system products based on Barcelona in September.

Barcelona is the first x86 processor to integrate four processing cores onto a single piece of silicon. AMD says the development would deliver significant performance and performance-per-watt enhancements over existing architectures.

“More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance,” AMD’s Server and Workstation Division corporate vice-president Randy Allen said.

“With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option.”

“AMD has prioritised production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen.”

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