• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

LETTERFROMYOURCEO To our stockholders, customers, partners, and employees: Legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove talked about “strategic inflection points,” periods of fundamental change in a business, an industry, or even the world. At such times, he said, clarity about what you uniquely do and why you do it is essential to defining your path forward. The emergence of data as a transformational force is such a moment—for the world and for Intel. We already create technology that enriches lives, serving every industry, every sector of society, and nearly every person on earth, every day. But now nearly everything looks more like a computer and therefore what it means to have “Intel Inside” is changing. A computer is no longer simply a PC or a server in a data Bob Swan, Chief Executive Officer center, or even a phone. Computing is permeating all of our Our progress on this journey and our record results are interactions: the global communications network, every retail gratifying, but they’re not a reason for complacency. Our experience, vehicle, hospital, farm, and factory floor. This is ambition is to play a much larger role in our customers’ helping unleash the potential of data in every part of our lives success. Therefore, we need to ensure that we exceed their and create societal and economic value on a global scale. expectations and deliver what they need when they need it. Intel Inside now goes well beyond the familiar CPU in your PC Sometimes we failed to do that last year, and that was to include processors that orchestrate a network, visual unacceptable. Customers look to Intel for a predictable processing units that help give a car awareness of its cadence of high-performance products and technologies that environment, and ASICs specially tuned to machine learning are integral to their success. They also look for products that algorithms. Also, new, highly flexible packaging technologies are designed for privacy and security, and manufactured in a enable platform solutions that solve our customers’ biggest sustainable, ethically sourced way. Accountability comes with challenges. the territory. We will improve our execution. This profound evolution in computing opens a much larger We are positioned for another strong year in 2020. We will opportunity with implications for every aspect of our continue to make significant investments in R&D and capital business. As Intel’s leadership team, we must reimagine the expenditures to deliver an unmatched portfolio of leadership world through this change, and move forward boldly, not products, increase capacity for our customers, and accelerate constrained by history. This includes the iconic Intel culture our Moore’s Law transitions. We expect to return in excess of that helped define not just our company, but Silicon Valley 100% of free cash flow in 2020 through our dividend and itself. In some regards, that culture is more differentiating share repurchases. And finally, we will leverage our leadership than ever, particularly the value we place on brilliant position in the global tech ecosystem to help Intel and the engineering, integrity, truth, and transparency. But we also industry make more progress in corporate responsibility, know that we must continue to evolve our culture. We must environmental sustainability, diversity, and inclusion. No one approach every day with a growth mindset. company, no matter how significant, can solve these problems alone. We will soon outline long-term goals to We took important steps in that direction in 2019. Our focus extend our positive global impact through 2030 and beyond. on data drove record financial performance, informed strategic investments, and gave us the conviction to make To explain why I am so confident in our future, let me briefly tough decisions about what not to do. The result is an Intel address three key elements of our journey going forward: that is more relevant in a world where AI is pervasive, investing in strategic technology inflections to accelerate networks are transforming for unprecedented amounts of growth; executing and innovating inspired by Moore’s Law; data, and more intelligence is moving to the network edge. and, critically, taking our culture forward. These emerging opportunities all benefit from Intel’s unique ability to reimagine the boundaries of innovation, achieve Embracing strategic inflections economies of scale, and build global ecosystems. Intel at its best creates technologies that have true global impact. The PC, the Internet, and the cloud were fully realized “Our ambition is to play a much larger in part because of the power of our technology and the richness of our ecosystem. The technology inflections now role in our customers’ success.” driving the data revolution—AI, 5G, and the intelligent edge— will similarly rise on a foundation of great technology, shared standards, and scale economics that unlock the creativity of innovators around the world. “Intel at its best creates technologies led us from tens, to tens of billions of transistors per chip. His simple thought experiment still inspires our team every day to that have true global impact. The PC, continue reinventing not only transistors, but everything we the Internet, and the cloud were fully do. realized in part because of the power To keep his vision alive, we are innovating and investing across six pillars of technology that will fuel our product leadership: of our technology and the richness of process and packaging, architectures, memory, interconnects, our ecosystem.” security technologies, and software. At the same time, Intel Labs is researching completely new approaches to computing—such as neuromorphic, probabilistic, and As a result, our opportunity and our ambitions have never quantum—that could unlock completely new opportunities. been greater. Our strategy to help customers unleash the potential of data has increased our addressable market by Our process technology and design engineering teams are about five times, to nearly $300 billion1. And we made working closely to simplify design and balance schedule, significant progress in 2019, repositioning Intel for these new performance, power, and cost, leveraging each of our six inflections. pillars. In 2020, we will continue to make progress with important new products, platform initiatives, and software According to IDC, 75% of enterprise applications will use AI optimizations. by 20212. That’s why we’re infusing AI into everything we build. One reason Cascade Lake is our fastest ramping Intel® • Data center performance will advance when our 3rd ® ® Xeon® processor ever is its unrivaled AI performance, generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor debuts in the including built-in Intel® Deep Learning Boost technology. Our second quarter of 2020 with “Cooper Lake,” followed by Intel® Movidius™ Vision Processing Unit is a performance initial production shipments of 10-nanometer “Ice Lake” in the latter part of the year. We will also continue to deliver leader for AI at the edge, and we recently acquired Habana platform solutions in the data center, combining Labs, further strengthening our broad AI portfolio. advancements in CPU with technologies like Intel® Optane™ With products spanning from the cloud to the intelligent DC persistent memory. edge, we generated billions in AI-driven revenue in 2019, • Client performance in mobile has excellent momentum to growing in strong double digits. date on the strength of 10-nanometer Ice Lake system designs, and will advance with our newest Intel® Core™ We also have a very significant networking business helping mobile processors, code-named “Tiger Lake,” later this our customers transform their networks with a cloud-style year. Our Project Athena program also helps the industry infrastructure that’s more flexible and efficient, virtualizing create laptops with truly exciting innovations that workloads on Intel® architecture-based servers. consumers and businesses really care about, including longer battery life and instant wake features. Together with The 5G era will significantly increase demand for computing our partners we expect to have verified more than 70 throughout the network. Many services delivered from a Project Athena designs across Windows and Chrome by the distant cloud today will be processed nearby to improve the end of this year. experience—at what we call the intelligent edge—whether the context is AI-assisted retail or a super-efficient factory. Perhaps the most transformational segment at the intelligent edge will be transportation or “mobility,” where Intel is a leader thanks to our acquisition of Mobileye two years ago. We couldn’t be more excited about our progress toward winning the $70 billion-plus3 opportunity for advanced driver- assistance systems, autonomous vehicles, and crowd-sourced maps generating valuable data. We aim to play an even larger role in the $160 billion3 opportunity for mobility-as-a-service. We recently demonstrated our capability in a very public way 10th Gen Intel Core Processor, code-named “Ice Lake” when analysts and media from around the world test drove • Software optimization is critical for any workload on an our technology on the demanding roads of Jerusalem, where individual silicon architecture, but it isn’t enough to the industry’s leading autonomous vehicle solution navigated approach each in isolation when customers’ problems a wide variety of driving complexities and delivered increasingly demand diverse computing architectures. unmatched agility and safety. That’s why we launched the oneAPI industry initiative to deliver a unified and simplified programming model for Executing, inspired by Moore’s Law application development across a global ecosystem on diverse architectures. Our co-founder Gordon Moore articulated a law of exponential improvement for semiconductors in 1965 that 1 Source: Intel calculated 2024 total addressable market derived from industry analyst reports. 2 Source: International Data Corp. (IDC), “Artificial Intelligence Requires Tailored Solutions from Technology Providers” (2019). 3 Source: Intel calculated 2030 total addressable market derived from industry analyst reports. Our pipeline of innovative 10-nanometer products is strong.

Load more

  132

Copy Link