Intel: We Have Sold $1 Billion of Atom and Supporting Chipsets Year-to-Date

From X-bit Labs: Intel Corp., the world’s largest maker of central processing units, said that shipments of mobile processors grew tremendously in Q3 2009, which allowed the company to post better-than-expected financial results for the quarter. What is even more noteworthy is that Atom and associated chipsets now represent over $1 billion dollar business for Intel, a situation that no one could foresee just about two years ago.

During the third quarter of fiscal 2009, Intel shipped record amount of microprocessors and chipsets. Mobility Group revenue was up 19%, Digital Enterprise Group revenue was up 14%, and Intel Atom microprocessor and chipset revenue was up 15% to $415 million, all sequentially. Intel’s third quarter revenue was $9.4 billion. The company reported operating income of $2.6 billion, net income of $1.9 billion and earnings per share (EPS) of 33 cents.

“[Sales of] Atom and the associated chipsets were a bit above $400 million, it was $415 million. Year-to-date, we have sold over, or right at, $1 billion worth of Atom and associated chipsets,” said Stacy Smith, chief financial officer of Intel.

Intel Atom central processing units (CPUs) are not meant to perform, moreover, supporting chipsets do not feature the latest multimedia or security technologies; in fact, the Atom platform is aimed at very basic tasks. It is rather obvious that revenues of Atom and supporting logic this year will be in the range between $1.3 and $1.5 billion as netbook shipments will be skyrocketing. The overall trend seems to be quite interesting: many people do not need performance or features from their PCs, which may be an alarming sign for CPU makers.

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