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Chips Sales Down 30%, Will Keep Falling

Posted 04/03/09 at 10:50:05 AM  by Paul Lilly

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As if the semiconductor market needed any more bad news, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) released a statement showing how bad worldwide sales of semiconductors have fallen in the past year, while warning that the industry has yet to hit rock bottom.

"The global semiconductor industry is going through one of the steepest corrections in its history," said SIA President George Scalise. "While it would be premature to conclude that the sales decline has hit bottom, there are some indications that the rate of decline has moderated from the final quarter of 2008. The industry responded quickly to the changing market environment by curtailing production and reducing inventory as demand slowed in late 2008. The world’s two largest foundry manufacturers have recently reported slight improvements in factory utilization rates, albeit at levels well below those of a year ago," Scalise continued.

According to SIA, worldwide semiconductor sales sat at just $14.2 billion in February 2009, a decline of a little more than 30 percent over February 2008 when sales reached 20.3 billion. It also represents a 7.6 percent drop from one month ago when sales were $15.3 billion in January.

Scalise warned that sales are expected to keep falling "well below 2008 levels" for the foreseeable future.

Image Credit: SIA

COMMENTS:3
TAGS: cpu, processor, sales, business, microchip, semiconductor
COMMENTS
avatarI thinkk the CPU sales dip is a result of....

Submitted by ghot on Sat, 04/04/2009 - 6:19am

...not a whole lot of motherboard improvements.

Motherboard munufacturers still insist on putting the PCI-E slots perpendicular to the RAM slots...(with the ever taller RAM) this screws up the air flow.

Also...the bitter and utterly ridiculous crap btween Intel and nVidia and AMD and ATI just adds to this problem.

AMD made a huge mistake when they snubbed nvidia chipsets and Intel is about to make the same.  Look back over th past few years....nVidia chipsets...were by far the best and in my opinion still are. This summer when I do my annual upgrade...I'm going to be forced to skip the motherboard this go round....coz in my mind there just aren't any really good choices.  Sure I could bottle myself in to an Intel CPU/motherboard combo...but that has always scared me.  By the same token I can't condone an AMD CPU/motherboard combo because of those lame chipsets they use now.  And most of all I simply refuse to buy a motherboard with the RAM and PCI-E slots perpendicular to each other.  That is the single dumbest thing I have EVER seen.

Larabee is not gonna be a good solution either, I can feel it my bones already.  Sadly we're at that point in time where there are many great components out there....just nowhere to put them....yet!  Maybe 2010 will bring us the next decent motherboard...who knows.

I do know this though...the next decent motherboard will have parallel RAM and PCI-E slots, will not have the SATA connectors anywhere NEAR the PCI-E slots, and will have an nVidia chipset!  And while they are at it...its way past time for a preinstalled-universal motherboard CPU cooler backplate.....way past time.

 

 

Take an OS, and edit out all the efficiency, and what you have left is a post-XP Microsoft operating system :)

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avatarToo Bad

Submitted by Seana7a7 on Fri, 04/03/2009 - 12:33pm

Looks like Intel are only going to make a few worthless trillions, that wouldn't even cover the price of the shareholders champagne, caviar and and their anti competitive lawsuits so THEY CAN RIP US OFF.

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avatarOh my...

Submitted by Springfield45 on Fri, 04/03/2009 - 6:22pm

I sense a great deal of bitterness.....

-- An armed man is a free man. --

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