Intel Corp (INTC)

[Dan3]

Troubled Intel Corp. has put several of its loss-ridden communications-chip businesses on the block, including its network processors, XScale chip lines and other products...

...Most recently, struggling Intel will halt future development of optical physical-layer products developed by Giga A/S, a Copenhagen company Intel acquired in 2000 for $1.25 billion.

With little or no fanfare, Intel is moving out of the embedded chip space. And there is speculation that Intel will exit or spin-off its NOR flash unit, which is also losing a ton of money.

Still to be seen, however, is what Intel will do with it bread-and-butter microprocessor business, which is losing share to rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. One of the products in danger at Intel could be the 64-bit Itanium processor line, a chip that was late to market and has generated lackluster demand

See the rest at: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188701421

A good strategy might be to cover up some of this quarter's and next quarter's operating shortfalls with a couple of multi-billion dollar write-offs associated with the sale of these various operations. They can spin the shortfalls as being unrelated to today's businesses.

Maybe they'll sell "the rights" to Itanium to HP for some nominal price and take a big paper loss on it.