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Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well — instead, old Raptor Lake chips boom
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit: Intel Times are already tough for Intel, but now it turns out its new, heavily-promoted AI PC chips aren't selling as well as expected, thus creating a shortage of production capacity for its older chips. The news comes as the CEO announced looming layoffs and a poor financial report sent the company's stock tumbling. Intel says its customers are buying less expensive previous-generation Raptor Lake chips instead of the new, and significantly more expensive, AI PC models like the Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake chips for laptops. During the earnings call, Intel announced that it currently faces a shortage of production capacity for its 'Intel 7' process node, and the company expects this shortage to "persist for the foreseeable future." That's an unexpected shortage to have, as Intel's current-gen chips use newer process nodes from TSMC instead of Intel's older 'Intel 7' node. Intel is a master at production capacity planning, so its disclosure points to an unexpected surge in sales of the older 'Intel 7' products. Intel explained that the shortage of its 7nm production capacity is due to an unexpected surge in demand for its "N-1 and N-2" products, a reference to its two prior-generation chip families. This trend is occurring in both the consumer and data center markets. "What we're really seeing is much greater demand from our customers for n-1 and n-2 products so that they can continue to deliver system price points that consumers are really demanding," explained Intel's Michelle Johnston Holthaus. "As we've all talked about, the macroeconomic concerns and tariffs have everybody kind of hedging their bets and what they need to have from an inventory perspective. And Raptor Lake is a great part. Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake are great as well, but come with a much higher cost structure, not only for us, but at the system ASP price points for our OEMs as well." Bernstein Research's Stacy Rasgon pressed Holtahaus about the implications for the company's upcoming Panther Lake chips, which are set to launch at the end of the year, especially given that the looming tariff disruptions have not yet occurred. Holthaus said the Panther Lake launch remains on track and the company expects continued success in the commercial market, which she said typically precedes broader consumer adoption. Notably, she did not directly address the company's expected next-gen AI PC adoption for consumer laptops. Regardless, the company also continues its expansive work to promote and cultivate a growing developer ecosystem to unleash the power of its AI wares.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Tariffs Are Impacting Intel in an Unexpected Way
While there are some ways semiconductor giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) could benefit from the Trump administration's tariff policies and push to bring manufacturing back to the United States, the company is unlikely to be a trade war winner. Economic uncertainty could push down demand for PCs and lead data center operators to pull back on capital spending, bad news for Intel's core CPU business. Intel's guidance for the second quarter reflects the high level of uncertainty surrounding demand for its products. The company sees revenue coming within a wide range between $11.2 billion and $12.4 billion, down from the $12.7 billion in revenue produced in the first quarter. CFO Davis Zinsner noted in the first-quarter earnings call that the risk of a recession was growing amid the trade turmoil. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue » One surprise that came out of Intel's first-quarter report was a shift in demand in the laptop market to models powered by Intel's older products. In the consumer laptop market, the company is seeing an uptick in demand for Raptor Lake systems and a weakening in demand for Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake systems. Intel's Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake chips are more efficient and enable longer battery lives than their predecessors, but systems built around these chips also have higher price points. Intel noted that OEMs are focusing on lower-priced systems to counter the uncertain economic environment. There's a silver lining to this shift in demand to older laptop CPUs: A boost to the gross margin. Intel's Raptor Lake chips are manufactured in-house on the mature Intel 7 process node, which is derived from Intel's 10nm technology. In contrast, Meteor Lake uses the newer Intel 4 process, the ramping of which hurt margins as the company moved production to Ireland. Lunar Lake is even worse for the bottom line because it's largely outsourced to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and includes integrated memory. The downside is that Intel only has so much Intel 7 production capacity. Running those production lines at full capacity makes the company's foundries more efficient and helps with the gross margin, but Intel just can't produce enough of its older Raptor Lake chips to meet demand. Zinsner expects Intel 7 capacity constraints to persist "for the foreseeable future." Laptops with Intel's newer chips are doing better in the commercial PC market, where the end of Windows 10 support is driving demand for new systems. The company expects this strong demand to eventually flow into the consumer market, but the state of the economy is a wildcard. How this demand dynamic in the consumer market impacts the upcoming launch of Panther Lake remains to be seen. Intel plans to launch some of its Panther Lake SKUs before the end of the year, built on its new Intel 18A process node, with the rest coming in early 2026. Panther Lake is meant to be both powerful and efficient, and it will benefit from Intel's most advanced manufacturing process. Since Panther Lake will shift more production in-house, the gross margin situation should be improved compared to Lunar Lake. However, the gross margin for the product will also depend on how well the Intel 18A ramp goes and the yields the company is able to achieve. If economic conditions deteriorate in the lead up to Panther Lake's launch, Panther Lake-based systems will need to be able to span a wide range of price points to succeed in what will likely be a tough consumer PC market. While the increase in demand for Intel's older laptop CPUs is helping the bottom line, the company needs Panther Lake to be a success as it tries to turn around its products business and make its nascent foundry a success. A lot is riding on the Intel 18A process node, and the Trump administration's tariff policies are making Intel's turnaround more difficult. Before you buy stock in Intel, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Intel wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $594,046!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $680,390!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 872% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 160% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of April 28, 2025 Timothy Green has positions in Intel. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: short May 2025 $30 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Tariffs Are Impacting Intel in an Unexpected Way was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Intel's elderly Raptor Lake CPUs are still selling surprisingly well and the reason is simple: They're cheap
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Given they're over two and half years old and plagued with reliability concerns, you might be surprised to learn that Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs are selling like high-temperature baked comestibles. That's according to Intel itself in its latest earnings call for investors. Raptor Lake refers to Intel's 13th and 14th Gen CPUs for mobile and desktop. Michelle Johnston Holdhaus, CEO of Intel Products, explained that cost is the driving factor behind the ongoing success of these chips, which first went on sale in October 2022, a relative age ago by the standards of computer chips. "We're not pushing the old parts based on margins. What we're really seeing is much greater demand from our customers for N minus one and N minus two [referring to the two previous generations of CPUs before Intel's current Arrow Lake, meteor Lake and Lunar Lake processor families] products, so that they can continue to deliver system price points that consumers are really demanding. As we've all talked about, the macroeconomic concerns and tariffs have everybody kind of hedging their bets in what they need to have from an inventory perspective. And Raptor Lake is a great part," Holdhaus says. She also emphasised that Intel's newer Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs, "come with a much higher cost structure." While Holdhaus didn't say so specifically, calling out Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake, which are both exclusively offered in mobile format, but not mentioning Arrow Lake, which is available as both a desktop and a laptop CPU, suggests that it's Raptor Lake chips for laptops that have been selling surprisingly well, late into the generation's life cycle. That said, it's worth remembering that Raptor Lake's long sales tail isn't entirely novel. When a new generation of CPU is launched, it doesn't immediately replace its predecessor in its entirety. At any one time, Intel will be manufacturing several generations of chips in parallel. As a new generation arrives, it will gradually ramp up in volume, while numbers produced of its predecessors may be maintained for a time before eventually tailing off. That's especially true if the latest generation is based on a new silicon node, which itself needs to be ramped up before sufficient volumes can be produced to fully replace older generations of chips. To put this all into context, Intel is in fact still producing CPUs from the even older Alder Lake generation, which went on sale in November 2021. Intel stopped taking orders for Alder Lake CPUs in January, but said production would continue until 23 January 2026. So, you might expect Intel to keep making Raptor Lake CPUs until early 2027. Of late, that ramp-and-replace cadence has become more complex thanks to Intel moving some of its production to the Taiwanese chip foundry TSMC. Raptor Lake is built on Intel's internal Intel 7 node and built from a single chip or silicon die. Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Arrow Lake, by contrast, are all chiplet designs made of multiple dies, or tiles in Intel parlance. Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake logic chiplets are made entirely by TSMC, while Meteor Lake CPUs are mostly made by TSMC, but with the Intel 4 process used for the die containing CPU cores. Your next upgrade Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and gaming motherboard: The right graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest. Certainly, if you browse the websites of many big laptops brands, you'll still find plenty of laptops with Intel H series Raptor Lake CPUs, such as the Core i7-13620H. It tends to be mainstream products offered at lower price points which use the older chips, just as Intel implies. Laptops with higher price tags that offer either extreme performance or ultra-slim form factors are more likely to use the latest chips, which deliver either more grunt or better efficiency. Likewise, if we are indeed talking about laptops exclusively, then the well-documented issues suffered predominantly by desktop members of the Raptor Lake generation are by definition less relevant. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What Intel's Breakup Would Mean for TSMC and Broadcom
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) might be split up and sold to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM), also known as TSMC, and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), according to the latest rumors. The chipmakers haven't responded to those reports, but such a deal could shake up the semiconductor industry. The most recent report from The Wall Street Journal claims Intel held "informal" talks to sell its foundry business to TSMC and its chip design business to Broadcom. Both rumored deals would likely face intense regulatory scrutiny, but we should discuss how Intel got here -- and what its breakup and sale might mean for TSMC and Broadcom. Intel is still the world's largest designer and manufacturer of x86 CPUs for PCs and servers. However, it missed the leap to mobile chips and ceded that growing market to Arm's power-efficient chip designs, and its foundries fell behind TSMC and Samsung in the "process race" to manufacture smaller and denser chips. As Intel struggled with shortages and delays, its smaller x86 competitor, AMD, pulled ahead with a stable supply of cheaper and more power-efficient chips by outsourcing its production to TSMC. Instead of catching up to TSMC, Intel repeatedly shifted its short-term strategies under three CEOs over the past decade. Under Pat Gelsinger, who served as Intel's CEO from 2021 to 2024, the chipmaker tried to expand and upgrade its foundries to catch up to TSMC and Samsung. But those capital-intensive efforts coincided with the broader slowdown of the PC market, and it struggled to ramp up its production of its Meteor Lake CPUs to fend off AMD. Its CPUs also became less relevant than Nvidia's GPUs as companies scrambled to upgrade their data centers to handle the latest artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Intel won't go bankrupt anytime soon, but it's clearly being left behind in the semiconductor race. That's why it isn't too surprising that the chipmaker, which still lacks a permanent CEO, might be mulling a sale to TSMC and Broadcom. TSMC is already the world's largest and most technologically advanced contract chipmaker. The top fabless chipmakers -- including Nvidia, AMD, and Apple -- all outsource the production of their smallest chips to TSMC. TSMC controls 64.9% of the global foundry market, according to TrendForce. Samsung ranks a distant second at 9.3%, while Intel only holds 1% of the market. Therefore, buying Intel's foundries would only slightly increase TSMC's market share, but it would snub Intel's fledgling efforts to pull away some of its fabless clients. Taking over Intel's U.S. foundries could also accelerate TSMC's efforts to diversify its manufacturing base beyond Taiwan and reduce its exposure to the Trump administration's tariffs. However, such a deal would likely be challenged by TSMC's investors, who might think it's unnecessary to inherit Intel's weaker foundry business, or antitrust regulators. TSMC also doesn't need to increase its exposure to the sluggish x86 CPU market when high-end data center GPUs (mainly from Nvidia) are driving most of its growth. Broadcom already sells a wide range of chips for the mobile, wireless, networking, data storage, and industrial markets. It also significantly expanded its infrastructure business by acquiring CA Technologies, Symantec's enterprise security division, and the cloud software giant VMware over the past seven years. If Broadcom acquires Intel's chip design division, it could develop its own x86 CPUs and discrete GPUs. That would complement its own growth in the data center market, where it's experiencing robust sales of networking, optical, and custom accelerator chips for AI-oriented data centers. In fiscal 2024 (which ended last October), its sales of AI-oriented chips more than tripled to $12.2 billion and accounted for 24% of its top line. If Broadcom bundles all those chips together, it could simultaneously challenge AMD, Nvidia, and more diversified chipmakers like Texas Instruments. But just like TSMC, Broadcom would need to clear a lot of regulatory hurdles to seal that deal. Moreover, AMD holds a multi-decade cross-licensing deal with Intel, which grants it the power to veto any sale of Intel's x86 design business. Such a deal would also contradict Broadcom's previous strategy of inorganically expanding its infrastructure software business to reduce its exposure to the cyclical semiconductor market. These potential deals are generating a lot of buzz, but investors should be skeptical of these rumors. Even if TSMC and Broadcom are interested in carving up Intel, it could take years for those deals to be approved. It also seems more likely that TSMC and Broadcom could simply invest in those businesses instead of buying them outright. So instead of buying these stocks based on those potential deals, investors should focus on them as stand-alone investments. Intel will remain the penalty box for the foreseeable future, but TSMC and Broadcom are both stable long-term investments. Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you'll want to hear this. On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a 'Double Down' stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you're worried you've already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it's too late. And the numbers speak for themselves: Nvidia: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2009, you'd have $348,579!* Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you'd have $46,554!* Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you'd have $540,990!* Right now, we're issuing 'Double Down' alerts for three incredible companies, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.*Stock Advisor returns as of February 24, 2025 Leo Sun has positions in Apple. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Texas Instruments. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom and recommends the following options: short February 2025 $27 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. What Intel's Breakup Would Mean for TSMC and Broadcom was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Yahoo
Intel Core Ultra 7 255H lands 32% faster than the 155H in PassMark's single-core benchmark
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Intel's Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 7 255H appears to have been tested in PassMark, where it outperformed its Meteor Lake equivalent by 32% in single-threaded tests (via x86deadandback at X). Across a wide variety of metrics, the 255H is roughly 15% faster in CPU Mark, which is PassMark's proprietary metric for gauging a CPU's performance. Intel revealed its Arrow Lake-H family of processors at CES, shortly followed by a user review at Bilibili, which left much to be desired from these CPUs. Dubbed Core Ultra 200H, these processors employ Intel's Arrow Lake architecture featuring Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores. What separates them from desktop chips, apart from the power envelope, is that these CPUs feature an LPE (Low Power Efficient) core cluster on the SoC Tile, a feature reused from Meteor Lake. Unlike Lunar Lake which uses Battlemage (Xe2) graphics, Arrow Lake-H is armed with up to eight Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist+) cores with support for XMX. As the SoC Tile remains unchanged, Arrow Lake-H's NPU is capable of dishing out just 13 TOPS of INT8 performance, versus 45 TOPS on Lunar Lake. What is similar to Lunar Lake is the process node: TSMC's N3B, a step-up from Intel 4 used with Meteor Lake. The Core Ultra 7 255H in question packs 16 cores, divided into six P-cores, eight E-cores, and two LPE-cores with 16 threads in total, as Arrow Lake lacks hyperthreading support. The Core Ultra 7 155H on the contrary is equipped with a similar layout but 22 threads. In PassMark's single-core benchmark, the 255H blazes past its predecessor, scoring 4,631 points compared to the 155H's 3,500 points for a 32% lead. This is a direct result of the updated Lion Cove P-cores and N3B process, allowing a 300 MHz bump in boost clocks. When aggregated, the CPU Mark rating puts Arrow Lake ahead by around 15%. Relatively speaking, efficiency remains the Achilles' heel of these chips, as the 16-core Core Ultra 9 285H failed to beat the 10-core Ryzen AI 9 365 when limited to 50W of power. While Arrow Lake-H offers an updated Compute Tile and a slightly modified Graphics Tile, the SoC, and IOE Tiles are largely carried over from Meteor Lake. It all comes down to how these laptops are priced since Strix Point devices still have an entry price of around $1,000. On that note, it is important to mention that the 15W variant of these Intel chips, Core Ultra 200U, is reported to be based on Meteor Lake with Redwood Cove+ P-cores and Crestmont+ E-cores fabbed on Intel 3, a node once reserved for Intel's server counterparts. This will allow Intel to extract higher margins with possibly lower prices for us, though we haven't exactly found affordable Arrow Lake laptops to be abundant, at least not yet.
