Intel has admitted that skipping desktop PC iterations of its Broadwell processors last year was a mistake following a massive dip in sales for the company over the last twelve months. Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel, confessed during this year’s Citi 2015 Global Technology Conference in New York that not releasing Broadwell for PC – instead, opting for the Haswell Refresh – was “a mistake”.
“I mentioned desktop’s more than a $10 billion business for Intel,” Skaugen told attendees of Citi GTC 2015. “We didn’t build a next generation core product our last product for Towers. We made an experiment and we said maybe we are putting technology in to the market too fast, but let’s not build a chip for the mainstream Tower business, more than a $10 billion business. Turns out that was a mistake. It saved us some R&D, but XP end of life and then there was no reason to buy a PC this year.”
One upside of the decision, though, is that demand for new Intel desktop processors has never been higher, with Skaugen conceding that Intel is now “expecting a slightly better than seasonal or high-end to seasonal for the second half [0f 2015] now”.
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Image courtesy of WCCF Tech.
