Unlike AMD, Intel Is More Pessimistic That The Chip Shortage Will Continue Until 2023

JAKARTA - Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says the ongoing global chip shortage will be a problem for much longer, at least until 2023.

"We're in the worst shape right now, every quarter of next year, we'll get better gradually, but they won't have a supply-demand balance until 2023," Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger said this during his earnings report in Q3 2021 recently. However, Gelsinger's statement is in contrast to its competitor AMD. Where AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed recently that chip supply may be tight for the near future, but will gradually get better in 2022 as production capacity continues.

"It gets better next year, not immediately, but it will gradually get better as more plants appear," said Su.

Meanwhile, Nvidia on the other hand also has the same hope that supply issues will improve throughout 2022 for its GPUs.

Intel Reveals Revenue Report in Q3 2021

Reporting from The Verge, Friday, October 22, Intel's less encouraging prospects emerged when the company announced a 2 percent drop in revenue for the Client Computing Group, which manufactures desktop and laptop chips.

Led by a 5 percent decline in notebook sales due to the constraints of the notebook ecosystem. That means this laptop company doesn't have enough spare parts to use. Part of the problem isn't always the lack of chips in particular, but rather with the combination of parts.

“We call it a matchstick set, where we might have a CPU, but you don't have an LCD, or you don't have Wi-Fi. Data centers are really struggling with some power chips and some network or ethernet chips,” said Gelsinger.

However, this decline was also offset by growth in desktop PC sales, with Intel seeing a 20 percent revenue gain for the category, but not enough to offset the decline in notebook sales.

PC sales were on a downward path for roughly a decade, but during the pandemic with millions turning to remote work and school, sales skyrocketed again. But that didn't last long, as people began to return to work and school face-to-face, that growth already starting to slow down earlier this year. It's even made worse by the recent component shortage.

Despite the decline in laptop revenue, Intel still saw its total revenue increase by 5 percent year-on-year (YoY) to US$18.1 billion, thanks to massive growth in data centers, internet-of-things, and the Mobileye group.