Brian Krzanich, who was recently named chief executive, said that although Intel has been slow to respond to the rapid rise of tablets and smartphones, the company is well-positioned to participate going forward.

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For the current quarter, the company forecast revenue of $975 million, plus or minus 2 percent, implying a range of between $955.5 million and $994.5 million. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters most recently expected $1.01 billion.

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A teardown analysis conducted by the market research firm IHS, due to be released tomorrow, has pegged Samsung’s cost of materials and manufacturing to produce the U.S. version of the 32 gigabyte model of the S4 at slightly above $237 per unit. Without a contract subsidy, the entry-level 16GB version of the phone costs $639 when sold by AT&T Wireless.

The cost is somewhat higher than that of Apple’s iPhone 5, the base model of which costs $205 to build for a 16GB version, according to an IHS analysis conducted last fall. It’s also well above the cost of Nokia’s Lumia 900, which costs $209 to build, IHS found at the time.

The S4 cost is not far below the cost of Samsung’s larger Galaxy Note tablet, the cost of which IHS estimated last year to be $270.

Most phone manufacturers source their components from many different suppliers. But Samsung, a large, diversified manufacturer of many different kinds of electronic components, has used its significant capabilities to supply itself with many of the key parts inside most versions of the S4 phone sold around the world.

“Samsung’s strength is this ability to in-source to itself,” IHS analyst Vincent Leung said in an interview. “They just keep adding to the list of components that they can supply to themselves.”

One key component that Samsung did not supply to itself for versions of the phone being sold in the U.S. was the main applications processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, which contributes $20 to the overall cost.

Versions of the phone sold in Korea and other markets around the world contain a Samsung-made chip called the Exynos 5 Octa that costs $28. Samsung is known to be manufacturing at least four variations of the phone for different market geographies around the world, including at least two being sold in the U.S., one going to AT&T and T-Mobile, and another going to Verizon Wireless and Sprint, said Andrew Rassweiler, another IHS analyst.

“Samsung is demonstrating its ability to suit the tastes of carriers in different regions of the world,” Rassweiler said. “It comes down to what the market is willing to spend on the features offered.”

The fact that Samsung used the Qualcomm-made chip is a testament to the U.S. chipmaker’s prowess. “Even with all the vertical integration it’s doing, it’s not like Samsung has given up on Qualcomm,” Rassweiler said.

One interesting difference between the U.S. and Korean versions resulted from the difference in the choice of processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain an image-processing chip made by Japan’s Fujitsu that added $1.50 to the total cost. Leung says that in the Korean versions, some of the image processing is handed off to Samsung’s Exynos chip.

Samsung also supplied the flash memory used to store data on the device. IHS estimates that 16GB of memory added $28 to the cost of the device.

The Korean giant also supplied itself with a display and touchscreen parts, which added $75 to the cost of components. The combined display package also includes Gorilla Glass, a strong glass material made by U.S.-based Corning.

Samsung is also thought to have supplied itself with several unlabeled components, including the camera module and some wireless baseband chips.

A few non-Samsung suppliers include Broadcom, which provided Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips; Maxim, which provided a power-management chip; and Triquint Semiconductor, which provided some wireless chips.

Dubbed “Silvermont,” the new design sets its sights squarely on devices like smartphones and tablets, which obviously have limitations on battery life and require system-on-a-chip specifications made with energy efficiency in mind.

The design incorporates Intel’s “tri-gate” 3-D transistor technology first introduced in 2011, which essentially lets the company create smaller, faster processors which can perform at a lower voltage with less power leakage. Intel claims an improvement of around five times lower power consumption over its current Atom core mobile chips, with three times more peak performance.

“We have the ability to monitor what the power delivery characteristics of the platform are,” said Belli Kuttanna, Intel fellow and chief architect, in a briefing with reporters and analysts. From there, “we can change the limits to where the CPU cores are performing and dynamically adjust the power budgets.” In other words, it’ll help decrease battery-life consumption.

The update is yet another move in Intel’s move toward mobile, a space the company has sorely lacked. Historically, Intel’s core strength (so to speak) has been building beefy, high-power processors for desktop computers — chips that have no business in mobile devices.

But as the industry has shifted to mobile over the past few years, competitors like ARM Holdings and Nvidia — which specialize in designing and licensing low-power architecture designs for systems-on-a-chip — have gained solid ground in the chip space, leaving Intel struggling to catch up.

Intel has continually promised to deliver better mobile results soon. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the company announced that it will debut new chips aimed at the high and low ends of the Android market.

“We’ve done a lot of work on Android over the past few years,” Dadi Perlmutter, Intel executive VP and chief product officer, said at the briefing. “We’ve shipped 12 different phones to market.”

And as Mike Bell, the head of Intel’s mobile chip efforts said in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile last month, Intel is getting the hang of building chips for mobile, and claimed that its chips match and in some cases exceed ARM-based chips in certain performance and power-consumption comparisons.

Mobile is clearly a growing priority for Intel, especially as sales of personal computers, a market it dominates, have crashed to historically low levels. The decline has started to hit Intel where it counts: In its quarterly results, which last month showed a year-on-year decline of 25 percent.

Intel’s incoming CEO Brian Krzanich — tapped by its board of directors last week to succeed Paul Otellini, who is retiring — is said to have won the job in a joint pitch with incoming president Renée James that includes using Intel’s world-leading manufacturing capabilities to push chips into emerging product categories like wearable devices.

Intel plans to introduce the new Silvermont technology later this year. Shares of Intel were trading down a penny at $23.95 midday.

The new details about the decision to name Krzanich as the successor to retiring CEO Paul Otellini emerged in a brief report by CNBC’s Jon Fortt (video below) after he talked with Chairman Andy Bryant, who led the board’s search.

The joint pitch initially threw the board for a bit of a loop if only because it’s a highly unusual — and, one would presume, risky — move, in so delicate a matter as CEO succession at one of the world’s most influential tech companies. While the conclusion, at least as far as Krzanich goes, certainly appears to have been a predictable one — every Intel CEO since Andy Grove has been COO first — outsiders were still in the running until the very end.

Also a key selling point, though there are as yet no particulars about this, was Krzanich and James’ vision for pursuing the mobile market where Intel is as yet not participating significantly. Expect more noise on that subject once the pair starts their new jobs after May 16.

In November, when Paul Otellini announced his surprise retirement, I pointed out in a piece covering all the major contenders to succeed him, that every Intel CEO since Andy Grove was COO first. Krzanich will be Intel’s sixth CEO.

And while a lot was made of the fact that Intel’s board of directors was willing to look outside the company, and a lot of people rooted for Intel to name an outsider to run it, the board, led by its chairman, longtime Intel CFO Andy Bryant, decided to stick with established practice.

It’s not as though outsiders were not considered. I’ve heard reliable chatter that the headhunter Intel hired reached out to several people who turned the opportunity down. They include: Oracle President Mark Hurd; VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, an Intel veteran once considered a likely successor to Otellini, but who was recruited away by EMC CEO Joe Tucci; and Michael Daniels, the former head of IBM’s services business, who retired on March 31.

Krzanich was promoted to the COO job in a surprise shake-up last January. He had run worldwide manufacturing, and as COO he took over some IT and human resources functions that had previously belonged to chairman Bryant. He joined Intel in 1982, and has been an on-the-ground plant manager at Intel’s complex in Arizona. During 2001-2003, he oversaw a complex transition in Intel’s manufacturing technology across its entire global footprint of factories.

Patrick Moorhead, head of research firm MoorInsights, said Krzanich’s naming is a deliberate signal that at a high level much of its strategy will remain the same: “The strategy that has kept Intel running for the last 20 years will remain unchanged: Fab first.”

That means that Intel’s factories — the sprawling multibillion-dollar facilities known in chip industry lingo as “fabs” — will continue to be filled in the most efficient way possible. Intel is at its core a manufacturing company, and is indeed one of the few major chip suppliers left — Samsung is another — that owns its own fabs.

Since they’re so expensive to build, and equally expensive to equip, and since they need to be retooled every few years, Intel’s business model is probably one of the biggest exercises in managing depreciation over time.

The move is also a signal that pushes back against the people who have argued that Intel needs a strategic shake-up. At a moment when PC sales are sliding at a historic rate in favor of tablets and smartphones, Intel has largely been absent from those markets. So it’s no surprise that Intel’s earnings results have suffered in recent quarters.

Meanwhile, phone makers and tablet makers have been using chips from companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia that use designs licensed from the British firm ARM Holdings. ARM-based chips are in practically all the world’s smartphones. Apple uses them in the iPhone and iPad, and they appear in most Android-based phones and tablets, as well.

As Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip operations, told me in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile in New York last month, the company has made some strides in the mobile space, landing its chips in some phones and tablets, but they haven’t caught on in huge numbers yet.

There’s another important signal to consider. Renée James, the head of Intel’s software business, was named president. She has been chairman of the McAfee division that Intel acquired when it bought out that security software company last year, as well as of Wind River Systems, another software acquisition. For several years she has also been Intel’s point person in its dealings with Microsoft. While she was officially mentioned as a contender to be CEO, she is, at 48, still in contention for the post. She also sits on the boards of Vodafone and VMware, and for a time was Andy Grove’s chief of staff. (And, as I like to point out for fun, like me, she’s a University of Oregon graduate, and finished her MBA there the same year I was wrapping up my BA.)

But James’s elevation to president also sends an important signal about the rising importance of software at Intel. While Intel is at its core a manufacturing company, it has recognized the importance of software and acted accordingly. As Moorhead put it: “Intel once said it is the third-largest software company in the world, and I can’t prove, but I believe it. Intel is sending a really important message here. It sees software as where the puck is going.”

Shares are experiencing cumulative volume today of 73.7 million shares, versus a 30-day average of 16.74 million.

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And from venerable technology newsletter Microprocessor Report, come two intriguing technical articles today discussing some of the technology advantages of the chip giant.

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As of 3:05 pm ET today, Fusion shares were trading at $19.89, up $3.26 (or 19.6 percent) from a $16.63 closing price Wednesday. For one thing, the company reported quarterly results yesterday, and gave forward guidance for the current quarter that was better than anyone expected.

Another thing? There’s a new Facebook data center going up in Iowa. And as everyone who follows Fusion-io knows, Facebook and Apple are its marquee customers. A new data center means that a lot of new Fusion-io products are selling.

As CEO David Flynn pointed out in an interview this morning, that can be a blessing and a bit of a curse. Earlier this year, Facebook and Apple trimmed orders and Fusion was forced to trim its outlook. Now, with Facebook building again on a site that’s big enough to accommodate at least two more facilities just like it, there’s a brighter outlook. But if you take out the up-and-down side of Fusion’s business that caters to Apple and Facebook growth, Flynn said, there has been a nice, steady, predictable ramp.

There are also new customers to report: Box, the fast-growing enterprise cloud services company, has started adding Fusion-io products to its servers. So has music service Spotify.

Then there’s the matter of the $119 million acquisition of NexGen, a Louisville-based company that specializes in taking traditional hard-drive-based storage products aimed at mid-range companies and combining them with Fusion-io’s flash-based technology. The combination gives Fusion access to a base of customers it wasn’t previously reaching. “We started out reaching the companies at the top of the pyramid, and the fact is the size of the market opportunity in the middle market is bigger,” Flynn said.

The deal has Fusion paying $114 million in cash and $5 million in stock. It’s Fusion’s second acquisition this year. Last month, it acquired ID7, a British software firm.

The San Diego-based company said revenue jumped 24 percent, and projected a range for revenue growth in the current quarter with a midpoint of nearly 31 percent.

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As if you needed another indicator about how much the old Wintel world of PCs has flipped in the last couple of years, take a look at the earnings results of the British chip designer ARM, which just reported quarterly earnings this morning.

Sales rose by 29 percent year on year to north of 170 million pounds (or $260 million), which was better than expected. Earnings on a per-share basis were five pence versus the expected four pence, amounting to a beat of a penny per share. Its shares are rising by 9 percent both in the U.K. and on the Nasdaq in the U.S.

ARM, you’ll recall, is the company behind the designs that go into building the chips that land in most smartphones and tablets. Rather than make the chips, ARM licenses its blueprints to companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, which then make their own chips. And since phones and tablets are growing a lot faster than traditional PCs (come to think of it, PCs actually aren’t growing at all), ARM is looking a lot healthier than traditional chip companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Here’s a pretty good indicator: Royalty payments for processors rose in the quarter by 33 percent versus a processor industry that’s up about 2 percent.

ARM is quickly turning out to be the company to watch in the chip space. Chips sporting ARM designs are everywhere these days, and there has been a lot of chatter of late about them heading into the data center.

Hewlett-Packard offers ARM processors as an option on its radical new server design, called Project Moonshot. Dell offers ARM-based servers, too, and there are even more plans for ARM chips in servers. I talked with CEO Warren East about this last year. (East is retiring this summer, by the way, and Simon Segars will be ARM’s new CEO, starting in July.)

The basic argument that ARM makes coming in is that its chips are good at managing power consumption, in part because they were designed from the beginning for mobile applications. And power consumption continues to be a huge problem, especially in data centers where thousands of servers are crowded together in one place.

Intel, the king of the chip world, has responded and created its own line of low-power chips called Atom. And as we learned from Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip business at D: Dive Into Mobile last week, it has gotten off to a slow start but is starting to get a little traction in mobile.

Another version of Atom, announced the week before last, will also defend Intel’s interests in the server space. But keep an eye on this, because there’s eventually going to be a rumble.

The numbers issued Monday were at the high end of the company’s predictions. TI also forecast ranges for profit and revenue in the current quarter with midpoints that were higher than analysts expected.

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According to a report by Anand Lal Shimpi on AnandTech.com, Raja Koduri, who spent the last four years at Apple overseeing its graphics chip work, has rejoined AMD.

The move follows a similar one last year by Jim Keller, who had been Apple’s chip design guru working on its mobile A4, A5 and A6 chips that go inside the iPad and iPhone.

In his last stint at AMD, Koduri (pictured) was CTO for graphics and worked extensively on some of its best graphics products. His new job will be corporate vice president of visual computing, and he’ll be responsible for both the hardware and software sides of AMD’s graphics efforts.

“This is a great hire for AMD,” analyst and former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead told AllThingsD. “Raja did great things when he was at AMD and then played a huge role in making Apple’s mobile graphics the fastest in the industry. It’s also a huge loss for Apple, and it seems to be losing some very good talent these days.”

Koduri has also taken a role with an India-based graphics chips outfit called Makuta VFX as a technical adviser to its board of directors.

Before AMD, Koduri worked at ATI, the Canadian graphics chip company that AMD acquired in 2006, and before that he worked at S3, another graphics chip company.

First reported by ReadWrite, the deal will bring Mashery’s 125 employees into Intel’s services division. APIs are the keys to working with different cloud services and software. For developers, access to an API is usually the first step to building enhancements and ancillary services and features, or getting two services working together.

Mashery had raised more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase, the most recent of which was a $12 million venture round led by OpenView Ventures and Cisco Systems. Prior investors include First Round Capital and Formative Ventures. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The deal represents another example of Intel’s shift toward software development and away from a pure focus on building chips. In 2010 Intel acquired the software security firm McAfee for $7.7 billion. The idea behind that deal was to marry Intel chips that go into PCs and servers and other devices with McAfee’s various security capabilities.

The software and services group, which includes both McAfee and Wind River Systems, which Intel acquired in 2009 and which is run by Renée James, is a relatively small unit within Intel. In 2012, the company reported sales just under $2.4 billion, or about 4.5 percent of revenue. The group reported an $11 million operating loss according to Intel’s latest 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Intel, which supplies chips for most of the world’s PCs, has been grappling with a stark decline in PC sales. Data released last week by two research firms fed pessimism; one of the steepest year-on-year drops in global PC shipments was read as another sign that the growing use of smartphones and tablets is sapping demand for desktops and laptops.

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Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

As it happens, the report came a week before chipmaker Intel is due to report quarterly earnings on April 16. In a research note today, Stacy Rasgon of Sanford Bernstein sized up its prospects for the quarter and the rest of the year.

There’s a chance that the actual on-the-ground results may yet be worse than what the research firms detected. Relying on data from Taiwanese notebook manufacturers including Compal, Quanta and Wistron, sales were down in the first quarter by more than 18 percent, worse than the 11 percent to 13 percent drop reported by Gartner and IDC.

So what does that mean for Intel, the world’s largest supplier of computer chips and long considered an important bellwether of the overall tech economy? Nothing good, Rasgon argues. He expects Intel to report revenue of $12.43 billion, nearly $200 million below the consensus expectation of $12.6 billion. He expects earnings on a per-share basis to be 41 cents.

“Given the recent atrocious PC numbers, we believe investors may not be hugely surprised by weak outlook at this point (at least, they certainly shouldn’t be now),” he wrote.

Other key questions for Intel: Who will be the next CEO? And will Intel say anything about it on the conference call after earnings are announced? If you haven’t been keeping track, here’s a good rundown on who’s likely to be in the race, both internal and external. (Here’s a hint: It’s going to be an internal contender; Intel has never hired an outside CEO.)

“It is rapidly approaching high time for the company to provide color on a replacement,” Rasgon wrote. “While it appears they are actively vetting both internal and external candidates, we do not expect significant strategic changes regardless of the eventual choice as they have started the ball rolling on several initiatives that would be difficult to stop. … We would hope (but do not necessarily expect) that the company could provide additional information on the succession plan.”

Here’s a quick rundown: Hewlett-Packard fell more than 6 percent to $20.88. Dell fell more than 1 percent to $14.04. Apple fell slightly to $434.33. Intel fell 2 percent to $21.83. Advanced Micro Devices fell 3.5 percent to $2.52. Microsoft fell almost 4.5 percent to $28.93. Hard drive manufacturer Seagate fell 3 percent to $36.53. Western Digital fell 2.5 percent to $17.53. All told, they fell by an average of about 2.85 percent.

It was that kind of day, and the financial analysts who track the stocks of the PC makers had to jump in with their own assessments.

“We ultimately don’t believe that tablets are ‘replacing’ PCs (very few people we have met have actually retired their PC because of a tablet),” analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein wrote in a note to clients today, “but they are contributing to PCs being used less — which, in turn, is pushing out the replacement cycle for PCs. This is a big deal.”

He also said that HP in particular, which according to IDC’s reckoning saw a decline in PC sales of more than 23 percent year on year in the first quarter, may miss sales estimates by more than $700 million as a result. “A key question is whether the contraction in volume (potentially $1 billion in revenue) will have a material impact on PC margins,” he wrote. “We suspect that some of HP’s share loss was the result of increased pricing discipline and a focus on margins in the quarter.”

Shaw Wu, analyst with Sterne Agee, placed at least some of the blame for the market’s poor performance at Microsoft’s door. “We frankly believe Microsoft’s strategy of forcing user interface changes that nobody wants has proven to be a disaster,” he wrote in a note issued today. “Not to mention the customer confusion with too many choices with multiple form factors.” He now expects the PC market to contract in 2013 by 5 percent, down further from his earlier 2 percent guidance.

The chip maker’s shareholder returns for the year will include its regular quarterly dividend of 7.5 cents, amounting to about $50 million a quarter.

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CyOptics develops Indium Phosphide optical chips and components to enable bandwidth for high speed networks. It is a privately held company founded in 1999, with JVP Funds and TA Associates as its majority shareholders. The company’s revenue has more than tripled over the past three years, with net sales in 2012 reaching about $210 million, up 21 percent from a year earlier.

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Yesterday’s reports from the market research firms IDC and Gartner showed conclusively what pretty much anyone paying attention had already suspected — that the bottom has finally fallen out of the PC business. During the first quarter of 2013, the combined shipments showed their worst year-on-year decline ever.

Reversing that trend is probably not an option, which means that a fundamentally new chapter in the history of the personal computer industry is unequivocally here. Shareholders in those companies will start making value judgments accordingly. That was in evidence in the premarket trading this morning.

With a few minutes to go before the opening of markets in New York, shares of market leader Hewlett-Packard were down by nearly 6 percent. Dell, still the subject of an ongoing fight over its proposed $24.4 billion plan to go private in a leveraged buyout transaction, was down only slightly.

Chipmaker Intel was down nearly 3 percent. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s one remaining rival, was down 2.7 percent. Microsoft, the primary supplier of operating system software to the world’s PCs, was down 3.5 percent.

Apple, the maker of the iPad, which arguably has disrupted the PC industry, but is also North America’s third-largest supplier of PCs, was down by $2, or less than half of a percentage point.

In comments at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing overnight, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and head of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, described a rethink of how data centers might be designed. Currently, individual servers, each with its own computing and storage, are being packed tightly together in a rack, and in turn packed into a room with other similar racks.

Intel sees a world where all the computing and storage portions are separated. CPUs would be grouped together so they could be cooled together. They would in turn be linked to storage infrastructure by screaming-fast optical connections running as fast as 100 gigabits per second.

Eventually, Intel sees everything being separated into its own section of the rack: CPU, memory, storage and power. The point is that you’ll be able to upgrade one — swap out older memory modules for newer ones, or upgrade the CPUs, or replace a bad hard drive — without interfering with the operation of any of the other parts.

Intel’s play, Bryant said, is to offer a reference design — essentially a basic recipe for building the concept — to the big server manufacturers. And at least some portions of this concept are already operating in China. Intel has been working with Web commerce giant Alibaba, Web search concern Baidu, Chinese Internet company Tencent and China Telecom on something they call Project Scorpio. The idea is to centralize all the cooling and fans within the rack, and to demonstrate that you can save on operating costs.

There were new Intel chips disclosed, too. A chip code-named Avoton is due in the second half of this year. It’s a version of Intel’s lightweight Atom processor, aimed at small servers — not unlike HP’s Project Moonshot — that will be built on Intel’s latest 22-nanometer manufacturing process, and with a new design. In Intel’s recent “tick-tock” parlance, where it delivers a new design — a tick — then shrinks it with an new smaller manufacturing technology — a tock — this is effectively both.

Another chip, code-named Rangeley and also due in the second half of the year, is a 22-nanometer variant of Atom that will be aimed at networking devices, routers, switches and whatnot.

There were also three versions of the Xeon chip discussed. The next E3 will get some new tricks to support video analytics workloads. The next Xeon E5 will move to the 22-nanometer manufacturing process (that’s a tock), and will be available in the fall. Finally, a new Xeon E7 will be available in the fourth quarter. Its newest trick is that it can address three times the memory of its predecessor — up to 12 terabytes.

Reserving judgment, two analysts wondered in notes to clients today if even the most optimistic outcome for Moonshot is enough to get HP on track.

Moonshot is a “step in the right direction,” wrote Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee, but he wondered if large Web companies could be persuaded to buy from HP rather than have their own custom servers built for them. “But we are not sure if big customers including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter would switch from their current model where they procure customized server and storage components from Quanta and Compal.”

And even if successful, Moonshot might not have a big enough impact to nudge HP sales upward, Wu wrote, noting that servers account for roughly 25 percent of sales, versus PCs and printers, both in decline, which combined account for about half. “We believe the company’s turnaround remains tough as it remains to be seen whether its enterprise efforts are enough to offset continued challenges in its PC, printer, and services businesses,” he wrote.

It’s also going to take a while for revenue from Moonshot sales to start showing up in HP’s results, says Brian Marshall of ISI. “While we do not anticipate meaningful revenue from Moonshot in the next few quarters, we see it as a positive step towards maintaining HPQ’s number one share position in servers longer-term.”

Not all voices were so reserved. Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy who was on stage with HP execs at the launch today, said the most interesting thing about the Moonshot line is not the fact that it uses less energy or takes up less space than conventional servers, but that it works with all sorts of different chips to attack the computing job at hand. Yes, it supports conventional CPU chips like Intel’s Atom and ARM-based server chips like those from Calxeda, but also GPU chips from Nvidia; digital signal processor chips, like those made by Texas Instruments; and field-programmable gate arrays, the software-defined chips turned out by companies like Altera and Xilinx. That, he says, gives it “the potential to change the game in scale-out data centers.”