Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the 4th Quarter 2020 Intel Corporation Earnings Conference. At this time, all participant lines are in listen only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mr.
Trey Campbell, Vice President and Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone, to Intel's 4th quarter earnings conference call. By now, you should have received a copy of our earnings release and the earnings presentation. If you've not received both documents, they're available on our investor website, intc.com. I'm joined today by our Chairman of the Board, Omar Ishrak our incoming CEO, Pat Gelsinger our current CEO, Bob Swan and our CFO, George Davis. In a moment, you'll hear brief remarks followed by Q and A.
Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's discussion contains forward looking statements Based on the environment as we currently see it and as such does include risks and uncertainties, please refer to our press release for more information on the A brief reminder that this quarter we have provided both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. Today, we will be speaking to the non GAAP financial measures when describing our consolidated results. The earnings presentation I want to clarify 2 points ahead of remarks and Q and A. 1, we will be providing Q1 2021 guidance on this call, We'll provide full year guidance for 2021 at a later date, no later than our next earnings call in April. 2nd, we'll be providing more commentary on our progress on 7 nanometer with specifics on our manufacturing plans for our 2023 products to follow after Pat joins us in mid February.
With that, let me hand it over to Omar.
Thank you, Trey, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. As you've heard, Intel has been in the midst of a major transformation to strengthen our CPU franchise, While evolving into a multi architecture XPU company, the business is well positioned to capitalize on key technology inflections and extend our reach into fast growing markets. Under Bob's leadership, Intel has made significant progress on this strategy And once again delivered record results in the past year, which Bob and George will detail shortly. But before that, I'd like to say a few words about the CEO transition we announced last week.
This decision came after very careful consideration and planning by the Board and in partnership with Bob. Pat Gelsinger will rejoin Intel on February 15th as our new CEO and a member of our Board. Bob will remain in his role until then and will work with Pat to ensure a seamless transition. On behalf of the entire Intel team and Board of Directors, I'd like to thank Bob for his leadership and significant contributions Through this period of transformation for Intel, the company faced challenging issues when Bob took over, and he has been a fantastic leader. Bob clarified Intel's growth strategy, reenergized its culture and made significant progress on improving execution.
He leaves Intel in a strong strategic and financial position and we deeply appreciate his ongoing guidance during this transition. Last week, Bob and I introduced Pat to Intel employees around the world, who gave him a very warm welcome. We believe this is the right time to make this change, and we are confident Pat is the right person to lead Intel forward. In addition to deep technology expertise and unique insights on Intel's technology evolution based on 30 years as a leader here, Pat brings a distinguished record of driving growth and performance and shareholder returns. He lives by our values based cultural leadership and has a hyper focus on talent development and operational execution.
In sum, the Board is confident that Pat, together with the rest of the leadership team and our incredible dedicated 100 1,000 employees around the world will ensure strong execution of Intel's strategy, build on its record of product leadership And capitalize on the significant opportunities ahead to create long term shareholder value. While he does not step into the role for another few weeks, he has kindly agreed to join us today. So you will get to hear some of his initial observations With more to come after he officially takes over on February 15th. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Pat for
a few words. Thanks, Omar, for the kind introduction. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. I am thrilled and humbled to be coming home to my dream job as Intel's CEO. I was only 18 when I first joined Intel, and I am proud to say I spent the following 30 years learning from such industry giants as Grove, Moore and Noyce.
My experience at Intel has shaped my entire career, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to now lead this great company. I have tremendous regard for Intel's rich history of innovation and the world changing technologies invented here that now power the world's digital foundation. I can't wait to help lead this great technology innovator during a critical time of change and disruption. I know you're all very anxious to hear more from me on our long And I'll be sharing my detailed perspectives after I assume my new role mid February. That said, I do want to provide my view specifically on 7 nanometer progress.
I've had the opportunity to personally examine progress on Intel 7 nanometer technology over the last week. Based on initial reviews, I am pleased with the progress made on the health and recovery of the 7 nanometer program. I am confident that the majority of our 2023 products will be manufactured internally. At the same time, given the breadth of our portfolio, it's likely that we will expand our use of external foundries for certain technologies and products. We will provide more details on this and our 2023 roadmap once I fully assess the analysis that has been done and the best path forward.
Bob and George will walk you through the financials and provide guidance for the Q1 shortly. We are holding off in providing guidance for the full year until I join, But we will do so in a timely fashion no later than on our next earnings call in April. Looking ahead, the world is becoming more digitally connected, Expanding the market in front of us, Intel is the only semiconductor company in the world that has the depth of intelligent silicon, Platform vision, design and manufacturing capabilities and scale that our customers need to fuel their next generation innovations. There is enormous opportunity ahead for Intel, but to be able to seize these opportunities, we have to deliver the best products and stay ahead of our customers' needs. We need to passionately innovate with boldness and speed.
Intel culture and values must be healthy and vibrant, I also look forward to engaging with you, our shareholders, in the coming months to hear your perspectives and discuss our vision and strategy for Intel. We will position this company for sustained growth and leadership for our industry, our country and an increasingly digital world. I also want to extend my deepest respect and appreciation to Bob for his leadership and significant contributions to Intel through this critical period. I'm just starting to dive into the business, but already I'm confident that the strong foundation and progress achieved under his leadership Put us on the right track to build on Intel's great history and to create value for our customers and shareholders in the years to come. Thanks again.
Bob, over to you.
Thanks, Pat, and welcome back to Intel. It has been an honor to lead this incredible company and Talented team. It gives me great confidence in Intel's future knowing that I'll be passing the baton to Pat, whose technology expertise, industry knowledge, execution track record and commitment to our company is indisputable. Over the last 2 years, we made significant progress on our strategy to transform Intel into a multi architecture XPU company, To move from silicon to solutions and to contemporize our IDM model. I am proud of what we were able to achieve together As an Intel team in a relatively short period of time and echo Omar's words that Intel is in a strong strategic and financial position as we make this transition.
As demonstrated by the results we announced today, demand for Intel's innovative technologies remains very And our investments to capitalize on future growth opportunities are paying off. Our Q4 results Significantly exceeded our expectations, capping off our 5th consecutive year of record revenue. We generated $20,000,000,000 in revenue and $1.52 in EPS, exceeding our guidance by $2,600,000,000 and $0.42 respectively. For the full year, we delivered $77,900,000,000 in revenue, up 8% And $5.30 in EPS, up 9%. The client, data center, memory and Mobileye businesses Each set all time revenue records.
In Q4, we continued to advance our 3 strategic priorities, Improving our execution to strengthen our core business, extending our reach to accelerate growth and redefine our position in the industry, And continuing to thoughtfully deploy capital to create value for our shareholders. Let me briefly discuss some of the highlights. Starting with improving our execution to strengthen our core business, let me start with an update on process technology and our product roadmap. Over the last few years, we've been evolving the IDM model to ensure we can deliver a predictable cadence of leadership products, Preserve our IDM advantage, continue to invest in process technology leadership and generate attractive returns on capital. This evolution includes a disaggregated design strategy, adoption of standard industry processes and common tools, Flows and methods and deeper engagement with the industry ecosystem.
In July, we highlighted challenge with our 7 nanometer technology and started a process to improve it while evaluating the best approach for our 2023 product lineup. Since that time, we have made tremendous progress on our 7 nanometer technology. When 7 nanometer was originally defined, the flow contained a particular sequence of steps that contributed to the defect issue we discussed in July. By re architecting these steps, we've been able to resolve the defects. As part of this work over the last 6 months, We also streamlined and simplified our 7 nanometer process architecture to better ensure we'll be able to deliver on our 2023 product roadmap.
The in line data we have been collecting and our pipeline of proven yield development projects gives us Confidence in our ability to deliver on our commitments going forward. At the same time, as Pat mentioned, We will continue to leverage the relationships we've developed over the years with our external foundry partners and believe they can play a larger role in our product roadmap given Once Pat has had a chance to join, he'll further assess our analysis and drive the Final manufacturing decision for our 2023 CPU products. Therefore, we'll communicate that decision soon after he takes over, But not today. Turning to products, we've qualified several new products in the Q4 and we have an incredibly exciting lineup of CPUs for 'twenty one and 'twenty two. Just a couple of weeks ago at CES, we introduced more than 50 processors, Resulting in more than 500 new designs for laptops and desktops coming to market in 2021.
We are also seeing tremendous market response for PCs based on our new 11th Gen Intel Core Tiger Lake Processors. Our PC customers now have more than 150 Tiger Lake based systems in the market, well ahead of expectations. We believe we gained market share as PC CPU units grew an impressive 33% in the quarter. In a market where competitors are seeing supply challenges, this is a powerful example of the incredible value and scale of our factory network as we continue to deliver freighter performance and cost efficiencies for our customers. Moving to data center, we are now shipping our first Customers are going to see significant value in Ice Lake across cloud, network and edge workloads with excellent performance improvement and innovations Such as PCIe Express Gen 4, next generation Intel Optane persistent memory and security enhancements such as SGX.
As we look ahead, we are excited about the capabilities we are bringing to customers with Alder Lake for mobile and desktop PCs and Sapphire Rapids for the data center. These products take advantage of our enhanced SuperFin process technology and numerous architectural improvements and both are broadly sampling to customers. We will qualify Alder Lake desktop and notebook for production and begin our volume ramp in the second half of twenty twenty one. And we expect production qualification of Sapphire Rapids at the end of 21. In the expanded market opportunity in front of us, CPUs are critical, But multiple architectures or XPUs will be required to help customers optimize for specific workloads.
We had a big XPU leap in the 4th quarter as we entered the discrete graphics market with Intel Iris Xe Max Graphics, Intel's first Xe based discrete GPU. We are now shipping discrete graphics into thin and light notebooks from Acer, ASUS and Dell. And we introduced our 1st discrete GPU for the data center, which is already delivering great cloud gaming experience for customers such as Tencent. We also announced the gold release of 1API, our cross industry open Standards based unified programming model that delivers a common developer experience across architectures. 2nd, we've made strong progress extending our reach to accelerate our growth.
Over the past Several years, we have been making investments that have positioned us to lead key technology inflections such as AI, 5 gs Network Transformation and the Intelligent Autonomous Edge. We infuse AI capabilities into everything we make From the cloud to PCs and we see tremendous growth prospects as we build our position in data center training To complement the strength of our Intel Xeon for inference, we made a significant step in AI this quarter When Amazon announced EC2 instances that will leverage up to 8 of our Habana Gauti AI training accelerators and deliver up to 40% better price performance than current GPU based EC2 instances for machine learning workloads. We've also invested to drive networking workload convergence on Intel Silicon. In 2020, we expanded our into the radio access network delivering Xeon, SoCs, FPGAs and custom solutions for 5 gs base station designs and reaching our goal of 40% share, 2 years ahead of our original target. Today, we are the leading network silicon provider, winning in wireless, enterprise and cloud networks and delivering $6,000,000,000 in revenue this year, Up approximately 20% versus 2019.
Finally, we have enviable assets to lead the Our IoTG and Mobileye Businesses Have a combined annual revenue of $4,000,000,000 Mobileye delivered a record 4th quarter And had an explosive start to 2021 with a number of exciting CES announcements. 3rd, we've maintained our discipline in thoughtfully allocating our shareholders' capital. Since 2015, We have grown revenue by more than $22,000,000,000 and more than doubled EPS. We've driven spending from 36 percent of revenue to 25 percent of revenue, while investing in manufacturing capacity expansion, Adding more than $1,000,000,000 of R and D targeted to higher growth initiatives and focusing our product portfolio. As a result, we anticipate approximately $12,000,000,000 in proceeds from our NAND and McAfee exits over time.
At the same time, we've been delivering substantial capital returns to shareholders, including $19,800,000,000 In 2020 alone, through dividends and share buybacks, the latter of which included a $10,000,000,000 Accelerated share repurchase announced in August. Building on this, today, we announced that we are increasing our annual dividend by $0.07 or 5% from $1.32 to $1.39 per share. Before I pass it to George For more details on our Q4 results, I want to reiterate that I couldn't be more proud of the team at Intel and I cherish the time I've spent here. I look forward to watching Pat and the team's continued progress as they build on Intel's purpose to deliver breakthrough technology that enriches the lives of everyone on the planet. I also thank our investors and analysts on the line today for their continued support of Intel and for our valued engagements over the years.
Thanks, Bob, and good afternoon, everyone. Q4 marked a much stronger than expected finish Exceeding our guidance by $2,600,000,000 the revenue beat was broad based, led by stronger than expected notebook and cloud demand, Along with contributions from desktop and enterprise and government, data center related demand also led to stronger revenues in NAND. Gross margin for the quarter was 58.4 percent exceeding guide by 3 points due to flow through on higher revenue and the benefit of Ice Lake Server achieving production qualification prior to year end. Q4 EPS was $1.52 $0.42 above our guide due to strong operational performance And further boosted by gains from our iCap portfolio. Excluding a one time tax adjustment, about 2 thirds of our EPS beat was operational And 1 third was below the line.
For full year 2020, we achieved record revenue of $77,900,000,000 $4,400,000,000 higher than our January guide, which reflects a 1 year acceleration relative to our 2019 Investor Day target. EPS was $5.30 up $0.43 year over year and $0.30 higher than our January guide. We generated $21,100,000,000 of free cash flow, Up 25% year on year and returned 94% of free cash flow to shareholders. In total, we have repurchased approximately 17 We intend to complete the remaining $2,400,000,000 balance in Q1 'twenty one. Moving briefly to segment performance, Our data center group generated record revenue in 2020, up 11% year over year.
In Q4, DCG delivered revenue $6,100,000,000 down 16% year over year driven by enterprise and government weakness and cloud digestion, albeit lower than expected. As a reminder, Q4 2019 was a tough compare with an all time record for revenue with strength across all segments. DCG operating margin in Q4 was down $1,400,000,000 year on year on lower revenue and increased investment. Our other data centric businesses were up 1% year over year in 2020. In Q4, these businesses were Down 5% year over year, driven largely by COVID related demand impacts, partially offset by Mobileye growth.
Mobileye revenue was up 39% year over year in the quarter and operating margin was $110,000,000 Both records as IQ SoC demand continues to be strong. NSG revenue was $1,200,000,000 Down 1% year on year on lower ASPs, partially offset by higher volume growth. Operating margin was $76,000,000 PSG revenue was down 16% year over year due mostly to 5 gs ASIC transitions at key accounts in the Communications segment. CCG delivered a 5th straight year of record revenue, up 8% year over year. For the quarter, revenue was up 9% year over year, Driven by record notebook unit volume, ASPs were down 11% due to increased volume in Consumer Entry and Education segments.
Adjacency revenue was down 31%, driven by modem ramp down and the divestiture of our home gateway business. Operating income was $4,500,000,000 up $420,000,000 year over year on higher volume, partially offset by the ramp of 10 nanometer products. Moving to our outlook. As Bob and Trey said, we believe it is important To give Pat time to assume his new role and dig into the business before announcing our full year 2021 guidance and longer term plans. However, I will provide our Q1 outlook and then for the year discuss High level headwinds and tailwinds we expect.
As a reminder, our outlook for 2021 excludes the NAND business. We expect Q1 revenue of $17,500,000,000 down 12% year over year Or down 6%, excluding NAND. We see continuing strong demand for notebook PCs in Q1, Up significantly year over year and expect desktop volumes to be down year over year. We anticipate further cloud digestion and continued COVID demand impacts on IoTG. The Q1 revenue estimate also includes approximately $500,000,000 in corporate revenue That is one time in nature and relates to a prepaid revenue arrangement.
As we look At the remainder of the year, we see solid TAM growth in our core markets in 2021. We expect PC demand to be more first half weighted The normal seasonality and expect data centric demand to be more concentrated in the second half As cloud digestion eases and COVID impacted markets such as enterprise, data center and IoT improve, We have strong product roadmaps that have anticipated a more competitive market and the continued mix shift to entry consumer PCs in our revenue plans this year. Finally, we will see lower modem revenue this year from our exit of that business. Gross margin in Q1 is expected to be approximately 58%, down year over year by approximately 4 points On mix related ASPs from lower Xeon XCC volume and higher small core PC units, partially offset by lower margin impact from divested businesses and some improvements from our DCG adjacencies. Q1 operating margin is expected to be approximately 30%.
We are forecasting EPS of approximately $1.10 per share and a tax rate of 14.5%. With that, let me turn it back over to Trey and get to your questions.
All right.
Thank you, George. Moving on now to the Q and A, as is our normal practice, we would
Our first question comes from the line of C. J. Muse with Evercore.
Yes, good evening. Thank you for taking the question. Bob, it's been a pleasure working with you and Pat. Congrats and best of luck. I guess first question It's around the fact clearly the final decision hasn't been made yet, but it certainly sounds pretty clear that you're pursuing a dual path strategy of manufacturing At the leading edge both internally and externally.
So how should we think about the impact to CapEx? Will you need to make investments with your foundry partner to secure capacity And porting certain products to very different foundry design rules, what impact will that have on OpEx? And is that what is driving higher OpEx
Thanks, CJ. Maybe I'll start and George, you can finish up. First, yes, we've been through an exhaustive effort over the course of the last 6 months. And as we highlighted, we've made Tremendous progress on our 7 nanometer process technology, and that gives us a lot of comfort that the number one priority that we set in the middle of the year, which was a predictable cadence of leadership products that we would be able to deliver Our 2023 roadmap using i7 or our next gen technology. So The progress that the team has made has given us the confidence that we'll continue to leverage the IDM advantage and invest in technology development leadership in the future.
At the same time, we also realize that with our Disaggregated designs that we launched a few years back that we have enhanced flexibility to see If, when and what technologies or tiles we'll make inside, which will be the majority of our 'twenty three roadmap, but It gives us the flexibility to look at things outside. And the trade offs that we make in doing that are 1, performance of product in a predictable manner 2, economics and 3, ensuring that we have the capacity and the control of the supply chain so that we can Our customers can count on our deliveries. So over the course and time, preserving the IDM advantage while being more and more flexible in our
Yes. And CJ, in terms of spending, I would say, yes, we're increasing spending on I wouldn't tie it Explicitly in any way to the trade off between manufacturing internally or externally, that's really going to be decided As Pat looks at the product roadmap, most of our spending increase in the year compared to what we thought is Tied to more spending on AI and on our Xeon roadmap, which pretty much It was a redirection of the savings that we got from the divestitures.
And if I might, CJ, this is Pat. Pleasure to join all of the investors On this call today, I just want to affirm, as I said in my formal statements, that I was very pleased to see the great progress on 7 nanometers and in the TD team has really done a great job over the last 6 months. That gives me the confidence, as I said in my formal comments, The majority will be internally, but we will be increasing the use of our foundry capabilities as well. And we'll be being more specific on this after I plan to dig
Our next question comes from John Pitzer with Credit Suisse.
I'll echo CJ and thanking Bob for all of his help and welcoming Pat to the team. I guess my question, Bob, Probably just around gross margins, clearly you significantly upside in the December quarter. I would have thought that going into March, Given the divestiture of NAND and that being gross margin accretive that maybe you'd get some better leverage on gross margin. So maybe you can address that. And I guess more importantly From the March quarter, Bob or George, can you talk about how we should think about the puts and takes to the cost sides on gross margins as 10 nanometer begins to ramp?
Yes. Hey, John, I'll take it. This is George. In Q1, what we're really seeing is, again, atypical seasonality. So When you look at the fact that we're in a digestion phase, and we're actually in the Q3 of it, That has a significant impact on mix that's affecting our ASPs.
You're also seeing tremendous demand NTC is well above our expectations, obviously contributing to the beat in Q4, continuing into Q1 and actually we think Continuingly strongly into the first half, and that's largely small core type devices. So we have an ASP effect there as well. We are seeing some higher 7 nanometer costs impacting Our outlook for gross margin and we are getting the benefit from NAND as you talk about. And but we're also seeing more savings in 10 nanometer costs as we're making more progress Then we've then actually we were even expecting it's accelerating. So we're pleased with that.
As you think about the full year, I think trying to take a compare off of Q1 when we're Impacted on ASPs both from DCG and from CCG Makes for a difficult full year extrapolation. We're going to come back to you with a full year outlook and we can go more into it. But in terms of Headwinds and tailwinds that we see as we go into the year. Obviously, we're going to have higher 10 nanometer volume, which is going to impact Gross margins overall, the client mix is going to continue to be heavily weighted, particularly in the first half on small core. I think on data center, we think there'll continue to be competitive pressures On ASPs, but I think DCG is really going to be more of a cost story with 10 nanometer coming in.
Although we're much further along in the maturity of 10 nanometer, so it won't be as impactful as we saw with CCG last year. And then of course, for DCG, you can expect the inclusion of Optane will have a little bit of impact on margin as well. So the tailwinds still look very strong. Obviously, the ramp down on modem, our divestiture of the gateway business, The sale of NAND and improvements in 10 nanometer are all tailwinds that should help us in gross margin. But We'll go into more detail on that when we guide the full year.
Yes. And I would I'd put maybe, John, just I think history here is a reasonably good indicator of the commentary that George provided for 'twenty one. And if you go back a year, we said gross margins would be 59% for 2020. And we ended up at 57.5%, so down 1.5%. And if you look at the fundamental drivers Of that 0.5% versus what we thought at the beginning of the year, first, we generated $4,000,000,000 more revenue than we thought.
So volume was much higher. And then when you look at the makeup of that volume, it was in my mind, it was all good things that foreshadow Important things for 'twenty one and beyond. First, the demand for our 10 nanometer products was much It was higher or greater than we expected, and that was a very positive in terms of income But slight degradation in gross margin. 2nd, the PC demand that we experienced during the course of the year, which Relative to where we were at the beginning of the year, it was off the charts, including what we believe was share gains in the 4th quarter, Came predominantly with consumer entry and education. So those two Segments tend to be lower margin, but real strong demand and that was the gap that We didn't feel when we were capacity constrained last year.
So I think in terms of the mix of more 10 nanometer, Much more PC demand at the lower ends. Those were things that drove down less margin percent, but a lot more income Dan, we expected a year ago. And those things, as George mentioned, going into 'twenty one are going to be you're going to have a much better mix because of the exit of motive in NAND, Number 1. Number 2, 10 nanometer product cost, as George mentioned, is going to get much better during the course of the year. Number 3, 14 nanometer is going to be more fully depreciated equipment.
Those three things are very positive as we get into the year. At the same time, George flagged 2 issues. 1 are those mixed dynamics of PC TAM, we think, is going to be relatively strong, but We do believe it's going to be at the lower end. Education will be a big part of that demand. That has lower margin.
And We renewed our commitment to 7 nanometer process technology, and that, in fact, will have a degradation. So in so many ways, We generated a lot more income and revenue in 2020 as the adoption of our better Of our 10 nanometer products in lower end and consumer were very positive impacts for earnings. And those trends you'll see As we go in the Q1 and throughout 2021.
That's a great explanation. Thanks, Bob.
Our next question comes from Joe Moore with Morgan Stanley.
Great. Thank you. I wonder if we could drill down on the progress on 7 nanometer. If I look back at the comments From July, you had talked about having your first client product first half of twenty twenty three. Is that still the right I don't want to be too granular about timeframe, but Seems like early 'twenty three versus late 'twenty three would make a big difference.
Are you still kind of on the track that you talked about in July for the first 7 nanometer output?
Yes. I think at the time, we said that in effect, given the process challenges we are dealing with the product road map, We expected to shift a couple of quarters into 'twenty three. And as normal, client will Likely go first and server will go after that. So the expectation is and our focus in improving 7, so that we can hit that predictable cadence of leadership products in 'twenty three, we have Dramatically improved our confidence in our ability to hit that product roadmap schedule that we talked about at the time.
Yes, that's very helpful. Thank you very much and
Our next question comes from Vivek Arya with Bank of America.
Thanks for taking my question and congratulations and best wishes to Bob and Pat. Bob, my question is, if you're saying Intel will get to 7 nanometers by 2023, the competitive foundry products will still be 1 node ahead. TSMC is planning to ramp their 3 nanometer node next year, right, and will probably have a much bigger ramp by 2023. So I'm curious, what does Intel need to do to kind of match or leapfrog foundry capability? Because in the 2 or 3 years that you're trying to get to your 7 nanometer, competition, several with ARM based capabilities is still making progress.
So I'm just Trying to think to what is kind of the conceptual state of competitive Play when we get to 2023. Thank you.
Yes. Vivek, two things, and we've talked about this A bit over the last couple of years. But first, our belief on delivering Leadership products over time is going to be dependent on a multitude of factors. Process technology is very important. Packaging Technologies becomes increasingly important in our mind.
A multitude of architectures, CPU to XPU or including graphics and AI capabilities, Memory, security and last but not least software. And you'll remember that we talked about those as the Six pillars of technology required to deliver product leadership where process is very important, But it's not the only thing. So that's kind of the strategy we've been on for the last couple of years. But secondly, we're going to continue to invest in process technology. So some of the progress we made on 7 Over the last couple of quarters, it's important for the next generation of process technology.
So as we leverage Our 6 pillars of technology to deliver leadership product, we will also continue to invest in Next generation process technology beyond 7 nanometer.
Let me just add a couple of points to that. This is Pat again. As we said, we believe the majority will be on our 7 nanometers, but we will be increasing the use of foundry capabilities in that time frame as well. Overall, it is about building, as Bob said, a competitive product that has leadership in the marketplace, and that's what our intent is to do. And as we broaden the use of our technologies across packaging software, internal and external, we're confident that we can deliver a leadership Product family in the marketplace across all of our major product categories.
Additionally, I was also very pleased to see some of the long term innovations coming out of TD, Right. As we work to close any gaps with external foundries as well as leap ahead, and clearly, we're not interested in just closing gaps. We're interested in resuming that position of the unquestioned leader in process technology, and that's our commitment. Also with the IDM model. We believe we have the right combination of being able to deliver supply to meet our customers' requirements by leveraging internal and capabilities which our competition doesn't have.
And between all of these capabilities, we believe we're striking the right balance of internal and external To deliver an unquestioned leadership product in the marketplace that meets our customers' requirements for the long term.
Great. Thank you, Bob.
Our next question comes from Ambrish Srivastava, CMO.
Hi, thank you very much. Bob, thanks. I really enjoyed my interactions with you. I had a question for you, Pat, and I don't believe everything I read in the press, but And even if you did look at the opportunity earlier, I just wanted to get a feel from you, what really appealed to you When you looked at this opportunity versus the very successful stint at VMware, especially in light of the challenges Intel has had, which we could argue Bob inherited from before. So can you just help us understand kind of what are the challenges and the opportunities that you saw which got you to this role again.
And welcome back, by the way.
Well, thank you very much. And a few general comments would be, one is, This is a great company and one that I have just great history with, as I said, 30 years as part of this company, Grove, Moore, Noyce, these are the people that I grew up, right, at their feet of learning. And to me, it really is a privilege and an honor to come back to this As I said, my dream job. The second, this is a national asset. This company needs to be healthy for the technology industry for technology in America.
And to me, it's an opportunity to help and to unquestionably Put Intel and the United States in the technology leadership position. So I'm excited by that opportunity to do that. It was also Very exciting to see the unity of the Board in calling me to the role. And with that, Working closely with the Board and their enthusiasm to bring me into the company as well as the alignment on the look forward strategy That we're laying out and those together. And I'd say the timing wasn't necessarily I was enjoying my time at VMware, But the opportunity to come back now, be part of this great company and Intel has gone through cycles before, Right.
And clearly, as I was here, economic cycles, we've had periods where we were ahead and periods where we were behind Others, personally, I was very involved in the period where we were very, right, diminished in the marketplace and late to the multi core. And in that period of time in 2005 through 2,009, we turned around the company and unquestionably established the leadership position After a period where many were questioning the ability of the company to be successful yet again, great companies are able to come back from periods of difficulty and challenge, And they come back stronger, better and more capable than ever. And that I believe is the opportunity at Intel and I'm confident That this company has its best days in front of it, and I am looking forward to the opportunity to be part of that.
Thanks, Beth.
Our next question comes from Stacy Rasgon with Bernstein Research.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. And Pat, welcome to Intel. Glad to see you here. I'm going to address the elephant in
the room a little bit.
And Pat, I understand your Initial perspective on 7 nanometers, looking at it for a short period of time. But at the same time, look, I got to say, the company was telling us for a year that 7 nanometers was on track, then it looked great. And then all of a sudden, it wasn't to the point of considering potentially massive strategic shifts. So now, I mean, I guess, how can we as investors have confidence that after a brief look that you've given at this point that things really are On track, what are you seeing that gives you that confidence? And how should we think about the current process?
And I guess, and how they feed into the risks, Potentially the future nodes, since it sounds like you're sticking around on internal manufacturing, especially just given what we've seen at both 7 nanometer but also 10 and 14, the
Well, I would also say that Bob and the team have been working on this for the last 6 months diligently. So even though my investigation was really just a few days, I'm looking at data that's been thoroughly analyzed, trends over the last 6 months That clearly is bringing them to a point of greater confidence for I looked at that data. I came to the same decisions that they were. At the same time, we're pausing, right, to say that everything is resolved to give me a little bit more time with the team to understand the roadmap And to dig deeper into those decisions, like we said, we'll be giving more clarity on that in the near future after I've had time to analyze it more carefully. Also, the team has been making adjustments of leadership.
Anne has been doing a great job as we moved her into that role. You'll be seeing we're making adjustments in the leadership of our Product development teams as well, where talent is going to come into the company. They're excited about the road map that we're on. You might have seen me just announced a New Fellow coming back, one of my absolute favorite clients here and Glenn Hinton coming back to the company. And you'll be seeing other announcements of key leaders coming back in.
So I think the team has been doing a great job getting us to this point. I expect with the leadership, the road map and a few more weeks of analysis,
Got it. Good luck.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Harlan Sur with JPMorgan.
Good afternoon. I want to welcome back Pat to the team and Bob, thank you for all the contributions and support over the past few years. Underlying the strong performance of the Data Center Group last year was the continued penetration of Xeon, ASICs And networking connectivity solutions into your large 5 gs service provider customers as they continue to virtualize the core and radio Parts of their networks. I think this helped to drive the 50% growth in data center adjacencies last year. Your Networking Compute segment was $6,000,000,000 and up 20% as you mentioned.
So just given the continued build out of 5 gs this Does the team continue to see double digit type of growth profile for the networking compute segment this year? And Compute networking has been a segment where Intel, I think, still owns 100% share in the x86 server CPU market. Are you guys starting to see competition stepping it up in this fast growing segment?
Thanks for the question. You gave Most of my answer in your acquisition. I mean, first, as we've been saying for the last couple of years that We view 5 gs and network transformation as a significant opportunity for us to Span the role we play as more and more compute moves from the data center to the cloud to the network and those Dumb pipes become smarter and smarter pipes. So this has been a pretty large thrust for us for the last several years. We've made tremendous progress in migrating a custom oriented environment to general purpose compute.
And that has been a big source of growth from A $1,000,000,000 business probably 5 or 6 years ago to $5,000,000,000 last year, that came primarily by Leveraging the core GPU in the network environment. But a couple of years ago, to your question, we expanded the role that we thought we could play As more and more compute happen at the network and that included moving into the radio access space with more With general purpose compute but also custom architectures, including FPGAs and ASICs, and that Allowed us to play a much bigger role in our customers' success in a key emerging technology that we've been focused on for a while. So I think that maybe the one other point that I would make that we've gone we targeted about 20% share In that radio access space by 2022 and we hit that 40% share in 2020. So we're well ahead of where we expected. The role we play at 5 gs and the network is much bigger.
We've developed partnerships along the way In this space, including with VMware, so I can only imagine those partnerships and complementary capabilities Will allow us to play a bigger and bigger role as more and more compute moves to the network and to the edge.
And If I might pile on to this one, as Bob had said, Bob and I had struck a partnership when I was in my VMware role when I've been driving the 5 gs Strategy at VMware. So this is one I'm actually quite intimate with. And the opportunity at 5 gs as it becomes a horizontal versus a vertically controlled industry, it's absolutely enormous. But it's even more important than that because 5 gs is going to represent a platform That is redefining edge computing. It will open up smart cities.
It will smart factories. It will displace Wi Fi. This is a powerful technology. It will also be deployed in private 5 gs environments as well. So not only is Intel establishing a beachhead In a very important market, that was never a major source of revenue for it in the past, but it is a redefining all aspects of distributed computing in the future.
So this leadership position that is established today is one that we'll be harvesting for the next decade. And 5 gs isn't just faster LTE, It is a new network with increased security, connectivity, bandwidth, better than wired capabilities and truly will open up markets as we've never seen before. This one is Exciting. And the leadership position that's already been established here will be harvested for many, many years to come.
Yes. Thank you for the insights.
Our next question comes from Matt Ramsay with Cowen.
Yes. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. And thanks Bob for everything. Pat, welcome home.
I guess my question is a bigger picture one and Pat you had mentioned a little bit about this in one of your previous answers. And I guess the question is to Omar, yourself and to Bob. No secret that Intel's success is hugely critical to U. S. Competitiveness in the long term on several pillars of technology.
I wonder, Pat, your decision to come back, Omar, your decision and the Board's decision to take make the CEO change and go in that direction, How much that influenced that and what the interactions with governments, U. S. Government, the Israeli government, etcetera, what those conversations have been like in support of Intel?
Well, let me take that on. First of all, the Board has a succession planning process, which we are looking at, and We felt that this was the right time to make the move in partnership with Bob. And there was no real government influence or anything like that In this decision, so this was part of our regular process, and we're just delighted to have Pat join us at this time. And we're confident he can take this company to the next As he's been saying, and thanks to Bob for what he's done. So there was no other motive other than the regular succession planning process that the Board does have.
And then on the specific question about the dynamics in discussion With kind of the U. S. Government or maybe just our foundry capabilities, I would just we've been talking about this for a couple of years. And I think the implications of a couple of years ago increased trade tariffs, now more Increasing trade restrictions. At the time, we saw that as a challenge because China is a large market for us, but also is a big opportunity.
And the big opportunity were on two fronts. In the event of an increasingly east versus west world, We saw an opportunity for us to play a bigger role in 5 gs. So we talked about that. And I think as a result of The incremental investments we've made, the team has made tremendous progress on our 5 gs space. At the same time, we also talked about Addressing a growing need in an East versus West world where supply where there are dual supply chains and increased anxiety about having all your Technology dependencies, more in the East.
So for us, what that meant was engaging both with the U. S. Government and with commercial players who Just we're increasingly anxious about their exposures. And what we've heard from the U. S.
Government is, 1, we need Advanced access to advanced microelectronics technology and manufacturing here in
the U. S.
We need greater industrial manufacturing base here in the U. S. And we need a safe and secure supply chain increasingly here in the U. S. And with those Three things, and this is both U.
S. Government and commercial customers. We're the only company that can really check All three boxes. So along the way, as you know, Matt, we told the U. S.
Government that we would be in a position For the good of the industry, frankly, for the good of the country, for the good of Intel, we would leverage our competencies, our capabilities to Provide foundry services to the U. S. Government and then been working very closely because foundry services require scale. How do we make sure that we have the technology that can meet both USG needs and commercial players' needs? And that's a dialogue that has been back and forth For a while, and we think we've played a role both with ourselves and the Semiconductor Industry Association in trying to shape Some of the incentives coming out of Washington that in effect do A more effective job in leveling the playing field to invest in foundry services here in the U.
S.
Thank you very much, Bob. That was helpful.
Our next question comes from Timothy Arcuri with UBS.
Hi, thanks. I guess I had a broader question on just captive versus foundry as well. And Bob, you had an interview, I think maybe it was a month ago, maybe it was weeks ago where you talked about licensing or the possibility to basically license a process from a foundry rather than just strictly out Sourcing to a foundry and you said that yes, that is actually possible that you could do that. I mean that would be quite a tectonic shift and I guess since Pat is also on the phone, I just wanted to ask you, is this something that's remotely on the table as you sort of think about this? Thanks.
Well, I'll be a little more generic. I think what I said is that our focus is on how do you deliver a predictable cadence of leadership products, Preserve IDM advantages and invest in technology development. And along the way, how as a company, be much more open and engaging With the ecosystem to make sure we understand the inherent technologies that are out there and embrace technologies to the extent They might be better than what we have or not as critical in the determination of product performance differentiation. So that's a what we've characterized is just engaging with the ecosystem in a much more holistic way. And broadly Speaking that may mean sharing technologies that we have that they could use or leveraging technologies that Others have developed that we can use as well.
So that's I just think it goes back to how do we take this wonderful Business model called IDM, where we co optimize design and manufacturing, Yes, we make all the money and we control the supply chain. How do we evolve that very powerful business model in Industry and an ecosystem that's made dramatic advancements over the last 10 years where we think we can be more open minded in engaging and leveraging those.
I would just add to that, that this will certainly be a topic that we'll discuss as I go forward with the company. Also that's clearly this ability to work more closely with the equipment suppliers, right, the CAD tool suppliers, other technology sources in the industry. We're committed to the IDM model. We're committed to leadership products, but also innovation that fundamentally has us leading the industry in consistent basis and sometimes that may happen outside of the company, sometimes it will be inside of the company, but we're committed to leading innovation
Yes. Thank you. And Pat, I'm just going to give maybe a few minutes here at the end for you to frame out your priorities as we leave the call and just
Great. Thank you, Trey. And thanks again to Bob. And it really is incredible to come back home And have my dream job. And thank you, Bob, for being the vehicle to deliver that up to me.
Four areas that I touched on briefly in my formal comments that you'll see me focus on as I come into the company. One is great products, right, where we simply will be the leader in every category that we participate. You'll see me dive into details. We'll build out the partnerships with our customers, but we're going to deliver leadership products and have a development machine that consistently does that. Then execution.
Obviously, we have to regain the confidence of our customers that our supply chain is the best, that our road map is the best, That they can rely on us for their products and their strategies for the future. Innovation, We're going to continue to be a source of fountain, a continual delivery vehicle for the greatest innovations of the industry. We'll be doing that with the IDM model, 7 nanometers beyond, but continuing to find radical areas to innovate because the world is looking For more digital technology as more and more of every aspect of humanity is coming online and coming to the digital foundation that we uniquely build and deliver. And finally, culture. I was trained at the feet of Grove, And we will have the Grosven, Maniac execution, transparent data driven culture and rebuilding that as part of this company.
And as we look across these areas, as I said, I'm convinced the best days for this company are in front of us, And this is a priority for Intel, a priority for the technology industry and our nation, and it is a Sovereign duty, responsibility and opportunity for me to be taking on that role. Thank you all for joining us today.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.