The recession is over! —for the semiconductor industry, at least. Intel has reported monster numbers for its first quarter, showing over $10bn in revenue, a huge jump over last year. Recovery of demand in places like China has driven the numbers, and Intel is happy as a clam — so much so that they’re going to be hiring a thousand or more workers. I’d also guess that the success of the Core i* line is really letting them rake it in.
While Intel’s main competitor, AMD, is excelling in the graphics card battle against NVIDIA, the Phenom series of processors isn’t quite as competitive against Intel’s Core series. Intel holds the “performance” card, which is useful if you like to charge lots of money.
The latest MacBook Pros also sport Core i5s and i7s, so that’s another strong and growing market for the popular CPUs. If you’re interested in more accounting, the Wall Street Journal has more numbers for you.