Intel's third quarter revenue results aren't expected until October 16, but the chipmaker is already bracing analysts and shareholders for some bad news: the company has cut its revenue forecast from the previously predicted range of between $13.8 and $14.8 billion to a lower range of between $12.9 and $13.5 billion. Last year, Intel made $14.2 billion in the third quarter. InfoWorld reports that Intel officially blames the sluggish global economy for the drop in sales—while the company's data center business is performing well, sales of PCs to both enterprises and emerging markets are slow.
Traditional desktop and laptop PC sales in general are being impacted by the expansion of tablets, a product category in which Intel's presence is dwarfed by ARM-based processors from the likes of NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others. Intel's Atom chips are beginning to show up in some Windows 8 tablets, but the upcoming Bay Trail platform will be much more competitive than the current versions.
PC sales may also pick up slightly when Windows 8 is released on October 26—many of the PC designs revealed at this year's IFA and Computex trade shows are so different from the standard designs currently on the market that consumers may be waiting to get PCs designed to use Windows 8's new touch-optimized features. Intel is also planning to reveal more details on its next-generation Core-series CPUs, codenamed Haswell, at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) next week—these chips supposedly lower power consumption enough that they could also show up in Intel-powered tablets that are thinner and lighter than current designs, but we won't know for sure until we have more details on the CPUs.
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