Intel year report, mixed bag

[Ace Pace]

Price wars are bad mmmkay?

On the bright side, Intel announced that their 45nm process is finished and is just about ready for prime-time. The company put out some samples of their forthcoming 45nm shrink of Merom/Conroe, codenamed Penryn, in order to demonstrate the new process. Sometime in the second half of 2007, Intel plans to start producing chips on the 45nm process, which will give them a jump on AMD's 45nm plans.

As Intel has stated before, they'll use Penryn to work out the kinks of the new process and get yields up before transitioning it to production of their next full-blown microarchitectural revision, codenamed Nehalem.

The other conference call news related to Intel's poor financial performance last quarter. The price war with AMD is taking its toll, and the company posted a 39 percent decrease in net income in the last quarter of 2006. Despite record sales of processors and memory products, and the fact that they laid off over 10,000 workers while selling off a number of units—including the XScale ARM line—the price war with AMD was more than enough to tip Intel's financials in the wrong direction.

Speaking of sell-offs, Intel also announced plans to sell off a fab in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and there are rumors that the company may be getting out of the NOR Flash business entirely.

Right now, the only thing that's known for certain is what Intel has publicly announced, and that's the fact that they're putting the Colorado Springs fab on the auction block. Reports related to the NOR Flash sell-off are a bit confusing and conflicted, a confusion that's probably the result of both the conference call sell-off report and more than one NOR Flash rumor reverberating in the same journalistic echo chamber and getting mashed up together.

The report from the Jerusalem Post—one of the first outlets to break the NOR story—has Intel and STMicroelectronics announcing a "reorganization" of Intel's NOR Flash plant in Israel. Intel and STMicro are allegedly planning to sell part of the fab to a private investment firm so that all three parties (i.e. Intel, STMicro, and the unnamed firm) hold equal stakes in it.

Other reports have had Intel selling the NOR fab entirely (this is probably confusion with the Colorado sale), while others have them merely beefing up the unit, while still others have them not refusing to say anything about it. (A quick glance at Google News will give you a feel for the scope of the confusion.)