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Fortune reports Aicha Evans, the Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) exec in charge of the company's wireless modem and radio chip engineering teams, has been convinced by CEO Brian Krzanich to withdraw her resignation. Bloomberg reported three weeks ago Evans is resigning.
- The news comes in a month that has seen Intel announce major layoffs and the pending departures of its Client Computing Group and IoT Group chiefs. It also comes amid expectations Intel's XMM 7360 4G modem, among the products overseen by Evans, will be used within some iPhone 7 units. Earlier this week, Qualcomm execs appeared to confirm on the company's earnings call (without mentioning Apple by name) it won't be Apple's sole modem supplier going forward.
- Meanwhile, rival AMD rose 52.3% today following news (announced in AMD's Q1 report) it's forming a JV with Chinese consortium THATIC to develop server SoCs for the Chinese market, and receiving up to $293M in related licensing fees. With THATIC partly led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (a major government research academy), the deal is being seen as an attempt by China to lower its reliance on Intel server CPUs in favor of locally-developed chips.
- The JV's SoCs are expected to rely on AMD's next-gen Zen CPU cores, which will debut on AMD chips made using Samsung/Globalfoundries' 14nm manufacturing process. MKM's Ian Ing, who upgraded AMD to Buy today, argues the JV's chips "will prove to be a serious challenge" to Intel's Chinese dominance. "The China server opportunity is significant, as we note three of Intel’s 'Super 7' hyperscale cloud customers (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent), many of the next 500 (i.e. JD.com), and widespread enterprise customers reside in China."
- Intel dropped in after-hours trading yesterday following the AMD news, but closed today down just 1%, a decline not much larger than the Nasdaq's 0.8%.
- Now read Intel Layoffs Are A Sign Of Poor Management