Intel reported its Q4 2021 earnings the other day, beating expectations but upsetting investors nonetheless. During the earnings call, company CEO Pat Gelsinger made some bold claims regarding the chipmaker’s performance and future prospects. Turns out Intel’s Xeon server processors had a phenomenal quarter. In fact, the Xeon shipments in December managed to exceed AMD’s entire yearly Epyc processor sales.
We had a record quarter for DCG, where we grew 20% year-on-year and where we continue to be the partner of choice for cloud and data center customers. We expect that our Xeon shipments in December alone exceeded the total server CPU shipments by any single competitor for all of 2021.
Talking about Intel’s foundry business, Gelsinger shared that the ramp of the 4nm node is going as planned, although, it’s a pricey investment. Team Blue plans on launching five new process nodes over the next four years, gaining performance parity by 2024, and fighting for process leadership by 2025.
As stated earlier, there are no delays affecting Intel’s upcoming 4nm, 3nm, 2nm, or 1.8nm nodes. The 4nm node which will power Meteor Lake (and Arrow Lake?) has already been taped out and should enter mass production later this year. The 3nm node will enter mass production in the second half of 2023, followed by the 20A/2nm node in 2024.
Turning from the ecosystem to Intel. We made incredible progress over the last year improving our execution in technology development, manufacturing and product leadership. With unprecedented transparency, we laid out an ambitious path to deliver 5 process nodes in 4 years and regain process performance parity by 2024 and unquestioned leadership by 2025. We are shipping Intel 7 in volume today. And as I was able to say last quarter and can reaffirm today, we remain on or ahead of schedule for Intel 4, 3, 20A and 18A against the time lines we laid out in July.
In the client segment, Intel’s Tiger Lake mobile processors have been a huge success, recording an all-time high in terms of shipments. Overall, the chipmaker has sold over 100 million units of Tiger Lake-powered devices, making it the fastest-ramping notebook in Intel’s history.
Via: SeekingAlpha
