See also: The Electronics Weekly's focus on Intel
The market is waiting to see how Intel’s marginally better than expected Q1 results will affect high tech shares.
The encouragement came from the Q1 net profit figure of $647m, or 11 cents per share.
Despite being well down of a year ago, it was over one and a half times the Q4 figure.
But the stock market will take more convincing, I suspect. They may now see some light at the end of the tunnel but it is still very small and dim.
This uncertainty was embodied in the nervous start to the ARM share price this morning.
The sales trend at Intel is still downwards, but the pace of deterioration seems to have slowed appreciably, which has encouraged market watchers to speculate that the worst could bed over for the PC industry.
The chip maker’s Q1 sales were 26% down on the same quarter in 2008 and as much as13% down on the last business quarter.
The numbers are not rosy. Microprocessor sales are still falling and even the new Atom processor was more than 25% down on the last quarter.
But still Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini believed “PC sales had bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns."
I suspect we are still in the end of the beginning territory rather than at the start of the end of this downturn.
See also: Electronics Weekly's Focus on Intel, a roundup of content on the chip giant's technology. As well as presenting news coverage from Electronics Weekly, we draw on wider resources available on the Web.