Intel’s Earnings Fall, but Beat Expectations - The New York Times

Intel in transition

"Intel still gets 59 percent of its revenue from chip sales to PC makers like HP Inc. and Dell, just as Microsoft and other makers of PC software count on the demand for new PCs to sell their products. Now PCs are a tough business: On Tuesday, the market research firm IDC said 276 million PCs were shipped worldwide in 2015, a drop of 10.4 percent from 2014.

“PCs don’t matter as much as they used to,” said Jay Chou, an analyst with IDC. “They’re only part of the story that includes mobile devices and cloud computing.”

On Thursday, Intel said data center chip sales, not just to clouds but to older kinds of computing, rose 4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. Along with Intel’s much smaller businesses in memory and sensor chips for devices, data center chips accounted for than 60 percent of the company’s operating profit margin."

Intel’s Earnings Fall, but Beat Expectations - The New York Times