Intel Launches Skylake vPro With Intel Authenticate

Intel’s vPro technology has been around for quite a while now, and with every new processor generation they seem to always add more features under the vPro umbrella. For a comprehensive look at what is existing now, check out the vPro launch for…

AMD Reports Q4 2015 Results And FY 2015 Earnings

Today AMD released their quarterly earnings for Q4 of Fiscal Year 2015. AMD continues to struggle financially, and for Q4 they had revenues of $958 million, down 10% from last quarter and down 23% since a year ago. Gross margin for the quarter did increase to 30% after last quarter’s $65 million inventory write-down, and for the full year gross margin was 27%, impacted heavily by the write-down last quarter. For Q4, AMD had an operating loss of $49 million, and a net loss of $102 million, or $0.13 per share. For the full year, the operating loss was $481 million and the net loss was $660 million, or $0.84 per share.

On a non-GAAP basis, AMD reports an operating loss for the quarter of $39 million, and a net loss of $79 million. For the full year 2015, the operating loss of $253 million, down from a non-GAAP operating income of $316 million in 2014. This amounts to a per share loss of $0.53 using non-GAAP numbers.

Looking at the individual segments, the Computing and Graphics segment had revenue of $470 million for the quarter, up 11% since last quarter but down 29% year-over-year. AMD had more notebook processor sales compared to last quarter, but lower client processor sales compared to last year. This segment had an operating loss of $99 million, compared to $181 million last quarter and $56 million last year. The inventory write-down last quarter was the main reason for the improvement this quarter, and lower sales caused the year-over-year drop. One good nugget for AMD is that average selling price (ASP) increase sequentially for processors, although it is down year-over-year, but GPU ASP increased both sequentially and year-over-year.

The Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom segment had revenue of $488 million, down 23% from last quarter and 15% year-over-year. Operating income was $59 million, down from $84 million last quarter and $109 million last year. AMD attributes the seasonally lower sales of semi-custom SoCs as the reason for the drop from last quarter, and the year-over-year drop is due to lower game console royalties, and lower server and embedded sales.

The All Other segment had an operating loss of $9 million, an improvement over the $61 million loss last quarter, and a big improvement over the $383 million operating loss in Q4 2014. AMD has made some restructuring charges which affected them last quarter, and the year-over-year improvement was “primarily due to the absence of a goodwill impairment charge, lower restructuring and other special charges, net and a Q4 2014 lower of cost or market inventory adjustment.”

With a less than amazing 2015, for 2016 AMD is resting a lot of hope on their new 4^th generation GCN GPU, which they are calling Polaris. On the CPU side, they hope to execute their new Zen platform with a 40% increase in Instructions Per Clock. With AMD getting out of the fab business, they have now been relying on others to move forward on the process side, and we are finally seeing fabs other than Intel now producing FinFET based designs. Clearly AMD has a lot of work to do to not only launch the products, but execute sales of them as well. VR could also be an area where AMD could find some growth, since the requirements for VR will likely drive some GPU sales over the next 12 months.

Intel Reports Q4 FY 2015 Results: Record Revenue For Q4

Today Intel announced their earnings for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015. The year ended strong, with record revenues of $14.9 billion. This is up 1% of Q4 of 2014, and up 3% over last quarter. Intel’s margins did drop a 1.1%, but are still a healthy 64.3% for the quarter. Operating income for the last quarter of the year was $4.3 billion, and net income came in at $3.6 billion. These results are down 3$ and 1% respectively, compared to Q4 of 2014. Earnings per share was flat at $0.74 per share.

For the full fiscal year 2015, revenues were $55.4 billion, which is down 1% compared to 2014. Gross margin was down 1.1% to 62.6% for the year. Operating income was $14.0 billion, down 9% compared to 2014, and net income was down 2% to $11.4 billion.

For the full year, Intel’s largest division, the Client Computing Group, was down 8% in revenue to $32.2 billion, but for Q4 2015 the group was down just 1% year-over-year. Intel is currently shipping 14 nm parts based on Skylake, and as of November, 14 nm parts made up over 50% of the Client Computing Group’s unit sales. The move to 14 nm has been pretty slow by Intel’s standards, and even many of the Skylake chips are in short supply still, but Intel did say that yields have improved to the point where they feel they have an oversupply at the moment so hopefully some of the high demand parts find their way to retailers for stock. With the drop in the overall PC market, it’s not too surprising that this group has dropped, but although total device numbers have dropped, average selling price has increased.

Intel’s record revenue came from the Data Center group, which had record revenue for FY 2015 of $16.0 billion, up 11% compared to 2014. For the quarter, Data Center revenue grew 5% year-over-year to $4.3 billion. The move to cloud computing is going to drive some growth here, and offset some of the weakness in the PC market for companies like Intel. Margins are generally better in this group, so it is less difficult to offset the PC drop with a high margin area like Data Center. Intel is pretty much unchallenged in this space for a lot of computing needs, at least at the moment. There was some struggle in China’s market, but the overall market was enough to overcome this.

Internet of Things also had record revenue for the fiscal year. For FY 2015, this segment’s revenue was up 7% to $2.3 billion. It’s still pretty small potatoes compared to the other segments of Intel, but this is one area where they are keen to not fall behind ARM like they did in the mobile space. There is a lot of room for growth here, although it’s going to be at a much lower margin than Intel is accustomed to. For Q4, this division grew 6% year-over-year to $625 million.

Software and Services, which consists of products like McAfee Antivirus, was down 2% for the full year to $2.2 billion. For Q4, revenues were down 3% compared to Q4 2014, coming in at $543 million.

The final segment is Non-Volatile Memory Solutions, and for 2015 this segment had record full-year revenue, up 21% compared to 2014. Unfortunately, Intel does not break this out individually, but it on the conference call they announced revenues of $2.6 billion for FY 2015. Intel announced their 3D X-Point memory, and shipments should start later this year.

For the full year, Intel paid $7.6 billion back to shareholders, with $4.6 billion in dividends and $3.0 billion used to repurchase stock. Intel has announced an increase in dividends to $1.04-per-share on an annual basis.

Intel also announced that they have completed the acquisition of Altera and they took on about $9.5 billion in debt to finance this.

Looking towards FY 2016, Intel is expecting mid to high single digit revenue growth as a percentage compared to 2015, which is an increase over their guidance issued in November. This increase is being attributed to the FPGA business which they have just acquired through Altera. Gross margin is expected to be 63%.

Source: Intel Investor Relations