SiliconBeat

Intel grabbed headlines today announcing its first-ever option exchange program that helped balance its implementation of an across-the-board salary freeze. But joining Intel today in announcing a plan to reprice employee stock option plan was NetApp, the Sunnyvale provider of network storage appliances, which is asking its shareholders to vote on a plan to reprice options with exercise prices of $22 or higher.

In its argument in favor of the measure, NetApp’s board said that Read the rest of this entry »

Carol Bartz (pictured), the recently named chief executive of Yahoo, resigned from Intel’s board after serving on it for 14 months. She has been a long-standing member of the boards of two other Silicon Valley heavyweights: Cisco Systems, where she mostly recently chair of its  acquisitions and investment/finance committees, and NetApp, where she is set to step down at the company’s annual meeting next month.

Her resignation may take a bit of potential chill off of Read the rest of this entry »

Intel will be the first Silicon Valley company among the vanguard of public companies in the United States that will ask shareholders this year to express their approval or disapproval of the way the company compensates its top executives.

The announcement came via Read the rest of this entry »

Intel said Wednesday it would restructure its manufacturing operations, halting production at five older factories. The company will also close two existing assembly test facilities in Malaysia and the Phillipines.

The chip maker said it expects the restructuring will affect between 5,000 and 6,000 employees, although not all would necessarily lose their jobs as the company siad some would be offered positions at other facilities.

The move comes on top of rumors that Intel may post its first quarterly net loss in 22 years when it releases results in April for its current quarter.

Intel said that it is uncertain whether or not it will be able to report a profit for its current quarter, according to a memo its chief executive, Paul Otellini, sent to the chip makers employees last week, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News Read the rest of this entry »

Intel sold 967,398 more shares of the 3.75 million shares of VMware it disclosed that it would sell in a filing on Nov. 3, bringing total sales under the plan to 2,365,524. The most recent sales were transacted between Dec. 5 and 12, and raised $23.2 million, as the shares sold at prices ranging from $23.26 to $24.50 per share.

Intel currently holds 6,143,476 shares of VMware shares, including the 1,384,476 shares that it still plans to sell.

VMware shares, which have lost 71 percent of their value since closing at $84.99 at the end of 2007, hit a low of $17.88 on Dec. 1.

The same day that Intel slashed more than $1 billion from its sales forecast for the current quarter, its board of directors approved revisions to the chip-maker’s Bylaws to “set forth more explicitly the processes that stockholders must follow” when they propose director nominations or proposals to be included in the company’s proxy “in light of the increased usage of more complex voting/ownership arrangements,” according to a filing it made with the SEC today.

The amendments are Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some good news: shipments of microprocessors used in personal computers reached record levels again in the third quarter, according to market research firm IDC. They were up 14 percent from the quarter before and up 15.8 percent year over year. The firm even gave a nod to Intel’s new Atom processor (pictured here next to a penny) for “ultra low cost mobile PCs (which Intel calls “Netbooks’)” — without Atom, the growth would have been Read the rest of this entry »

Chip sales worldwide grew to $23 billion in September, up 1.1% from the month before and 1.6 percent higher than September 2007, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That was the lowest sequential growth in three months and the smallest year-over-year gain in seven months.

The sales figures were dragged down by a Read the rest of this entry »

PLX Technology announced the hiring Ralph Schmitt as its new chief executive Monday. He’s replacing Michael Salameh, who has been CEO since co-founding the company in 1986, according to an SEC filing today.

Schmitt, a Cypress Semiconductor marketing executive from 1999 to 2005 when he left to become CEO of Sipex, an analog semiconductor company which merged with Exar, a fabless semiconductor company, in August 2007. In 2008 he left to work Read the rest of this entry »