Chip giant Intel announced its fourth quarter and yearly results and said that while its sales had shifted upward by seven per cent compared to the last financial quarter,Q3, year on year and quarter on quarter, revenues dropped by 20 per cent.
As usual with press releases, the real story was tucked away near to the end, with Intel saying: "Average selling prices of microprocessors were down slightly from the third quarter primarily due to increased sales of Pentium III processors for the Microsoft* Xbox* design."
Just as well AMD didn"t get the X-Box contract then. There a was time when it was nearly so.
Pentium IIIs were largely displaced by the Pentium 4 in the middle of 2001, as Intel reacted swiftly to AMD"s incursion into its desktop territory is the way we"d put it. But then we"re not Spinolas here...
Dr Craig Barrett, the company"s CEO, said 2001 was a "terrible year" for the chip business. But he claimed that capital investments Intel had made will ensure the company will do well this year.