Intel Corp (INTC)

[This Causes an Error]

morrowinder

your making a lot of assumptions...

Perhaps, but I believe any assumptions that I'm making are sensible!

Now he may have been forced out but he also may have retired.

Maybe, but he's fairly young (late 40's) and while I don't doubt that he made a considerable amount of money while at Intel (he started there in 1993) -- enough to retire comfortably on -- he bills himself as a "High-tech Executive specializing in semiconductors."

And frankly, smart, highly motivated people like him (you don't get to where this guy got by not being generally good at what you do) probably aren't all that content to just sit around all day without exciting professional challenges to work on.

This is in contrast to, say, Sunit Rikhi who formerly led Intel's Custom Foundry Group who explicitly says in his LinkedIn profile that he's retired.

I don't know whether he retired or was forced out, but to me it smells much more like "forced out" than "retired."

You are basing this off of one powerpoint slide.

That is not correct. I'm basing it off a number of data-points that are easily observed in public domain:

1. Supply for 6700K Skylake is embarrassingly low; Intel has actually cut prices on the older gen Haswell-DT/Haswell-E chips, likely in order to satisfy enthusiast demand for the holidays.
2. Skylake-U with Iris GPU (GT3e) is not widely available; Iris Pro not expected to come until 1Q 2016 (we'll see how good availability is when it does arrive, too).
3. Broadwell-E/EP (large, high performance dies) have been pushed out. These were supposed to launch in 4Q 2015 AFAICT, but Broadwell-EP is now a 1Q 2016 affair and Broadwell-E (consumer variant) and Broadwell-EX are coming in 2Q 2016.

There's also of course the information that Bill Holt showed at the Investor Meeting which very clearly shows 14nm yields not where they need to be.

What I also find particularly interesting is that Intel had said during the first half of 2015 that they expected its PC OEMs to "refill" channel inventories after draining them down in 1H 2015.

We're not really seeing a big impact from this "refill" of channel inventory.

In going from Q2 2015 -> Q3 2015, Intel saw Client Computing Group units up just 3% q/q, with the majority of the revenue increase due to higher ASPs (implying that Intel shipped a richer mix of products; richer product mix is generally good). I would have thought with such significant inventory depletion, Intel may have been able to see a bigger sequential increase in units.

Maybe this is a case of PC OEMs trying to keep their inventories ultra lean because they are not confident in the overall PC market. However, I do have to wonder if OEMs as well as guys like Newegg.com, Amazon.com, etc. would have been more eager to stockpile more chips if they knew that they could get their hands on the latest Skylake stuff rather than older 22nm chips that will become totally obsolete once Intel sorts out its yield issues on 14nm (particularly Haswell-DT; Haswell-E has more life in it yet as BDW-E isn't expected to arrive until May/June).