Intel CEO Bob Swan tried to put a positive spin on the chipmaker's tumultuous third quarter of 2020 during the earnings call, even as net incomes fell nearly 30% year over year.

"We delivered solid third-quarter revenue and profitability despite increasing COVID-driven headwinds affecting significant portions of our business," he said, according to a transcript.

Swan said strong consumer notebook demand and continued cloud growth helped Intel generate $18.3 billion in revenues during the quarter. To this end, he talked up the company's 11th generation Intel Core processors — used in commercial notebooks and towers — and the company's upcoming third-generation Xeon Scalable processors, which are now expected to arrive in Q1 2021.

He also lauded the company's latest cloud win. Oracle in September announced its plans to use Intel's upcoming Scalable processors in its public cloud offering. However, it should be noted that was far from an exclusive deal. Oracle also announced plans to deploy AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra, and Nvidia A100 CPUs and GPUs in its cloud.

The resilience of Intel's notebook and cloud divisions wasn't, however, enough to prevent the chipmaker's revenues from slipping 4% year over year. Net incomes fell even farther to $4.3 billion, down 1.7 billion from a year earlier. To Swan's credit, things could have been worse with revenues coming in approximately $100 million higher than Intel's guidance for the quarter.

According to CFO George Davis, Intel faced "intensifying COVID-related demand impacts, particularly in our data center, enterprise, and government segment."

These challenges sent the company's data-centric revenues — which include Intel's Data Center Group (DCG), Internet of Things Group (IoTG), and Non-volatile Solutions Group (NSG) — tumbling during the quarter.

DCG revenues, which for the last few quarters have accounted for more than half of Intel's overall revenues, were down 7% year over year, driven by poor performance within the group's enterprise and government segments.

Meanwhile, Davis reported that "revenue from our other data-centric business was down 18% year over year, due to declines in our IoTG, NSG, and [Programmable Solutions Group] businesses."

Declines in the NSG business — down 11% year over year — was driven by lower volume and higher average selling prices. Meanwhile weaker demand within the PSG drove revenues down 19% year over year.

Intel this week announced it would sell its NAND business, including much of the NSG, to SK hynix in a deal valued at $9 billion. The deal is not expected to close until sometime in 2025.

Looking to the fourth quarter of 2020, Davis anticipates COVID-19-related headwinds will continue to dampen the company's revenues.

"We see many of the same dynamics in Q4 that were in place in Q3," he said. "We see continued strength in consumer notebook PCs supported by work and learn-from-home dynamics and from increased supply."

However, Davis was not overly optimistic about data-centric revenues during the final quarter of 2020. "As a result, we expect total revenue of $17.4 billion with PC-centric down low single digits and data down approximately 25% year over year," he said.