Strong performance in client computing, data center, and the Internet of Things (IoT) resulted in a strong fourth quarter for Intel. The company reported fourth-quarter revenue of $16.37 billion, beating analysts’ estimates of $15.75 billion. For the full year, the company reported revenue of $59.39 billion and a profit of $10.32 billion.
The company’s non-GAAP operating income was $5.1 billion, net income was $3.9 billion, and Intel reported earnings per share of 80 cents. The company has about $5.8 billion in cash from operations and paid dividends of $1.2 billion.
Company executives said IoT revenue was up 15 percent to $17.2 billion for the year, primarily from the video, retail, and industrial segments. For the quarter, IoT revenue was $726 million, an increase of 16 percent year-over-year.
Intel’s Data Center Services business experienced strong growth. Data center revenue was $17.2 billion, up 8 percent from 2015. For the quarter, data center revenue was $4.7 billion. Within the segment, Intel executives said that much of the growth came from cloud service providers and communications service providers. Enterprise growth was flat.
CEO Brian Krzanich said he expects enterprise cloud business to continue to decline but that more workloads will likely move to the cloud as more and more things become connected. “The cloud today is based mostly on people but with autonomous cars – that’s petabytes of data, up to 4,000 gigabytes of data per day, so that means you need petabytes of storage to handle it.”
Autonomous cars are a big area of focus for Intel and Krzanich said the company is betting big on autonomous driving. “Why are we doing that? It’s around data and data centers. All those maps will require data centers and data centers at the edge.”
At CES earlier this month, Intel announced Intel Go, a platform for autonomous driving that includes Intel Atom processors and Xeon processors. The goal of the platform is to give carmakers and suppliers more flexibility in design and the ability to deliver a new driving experience.
5G in the FutureNot only is Intel bullish on autonomous cars, but it’s also looking ahead to 5G, having recently released a 5G modem and transceiver that will be available for sampling later this year.
The modem, code-named Goldridge, will work in the 28 GHz millimeter (mmWave) spectrum as well as the sub-6 GHz spectrum range. Intel says it will support the 3GPP 5G new radio (NR) specification. Features include low-latency frame structure, advanced channel coding, massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna structure, and beamforming.
During the earnings call, Krzanich talked about how Intel is positioning itself for 5G by working in standards groups and helping carriers in their field trials. The company is currently a “friendly” user in an AT&T 5G trial in Austin, Texas.
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