Intel are going to announce its first-quarter earnings on weekday after the close of the stock market, with results expected to be in distinction with what the company and analysts hit been predicting. After the roller-coaster ride of 2009, a little predictability is probably a great thing for Intel.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is expected to report first-quarter net income of $0.38 a share on income of approximately $9.82 billion, according to a consensus survey by FactSet Research. That would be a 9 proportionality sequential decline over the fourth lodge of 2009 -- scarce reason to kvetch as Intel's fourth lodge is ever its best and its first lodge is one of its weakest.

Moreover, it's a 37 proportionality improvement over the $7.145 billion Intel reported in Q1 of 2009, which was coming off the worst scheme collapse in decades.

If anything is going to affect Intel's numbers, it's likely the Asiatic New Year, which occurred on Feb. 14 and is a public holiday that runs for seven days on the mainland. FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger said in a research state that whatever PC ODMs pushed component orders and/or figure builds into the ordinal lodge largely due to Asiatic fag shortages during the holiday.

FBR expects Intel to come in slightly above its income counselling range of $9.3 billion to $10.1 billion. It expects notebook builds to fall by 10 proportionality sequentially and screen builds to modify 13 proportionality sequentially, with the amount of builds pushed out to the ordinal lodge being an unknown quantity.

However, Intel module intend a little extra income and margin bump from better-than-expected income of the newborn Xeon 5600 processors, which are higher-margin parts, as well as the newborn 32nm Westmere laptop processors. "Specifically, we think its revenues tracked in the upper half of 1Q guidance, though not at the high end of guidance, and that 1Q gross margins likely tracked in the 61-62 proportionality range, an investor positive," Berger wrote.

A 61 to 62 proportionality margin would be almost equal to the 64.7 proportionality margin from Q4 2009 and well above the 45.6 proportionality margin of Q1 2009. This would stingy aggregation EPS of $0.39, one cent above the industry consensus.

Intel faces whatever challenges heading into the current ordinal lodge as well. There is component immovableness (but not shortages) for hard round drives, Blu-ray optical round drives, and DDR2/DDR3 memory chips, and AMD is showing signs of life with its newborn laptop chips, the Lenovo care that got AMD into the Asiatic market, and newborn screen mainframe shipments.

Still, Berger projects Intel's revenues enable them to track seasonally lower by 2 to 4 proportionality sequentially in Q2, as is historical, for a income range of $9.2 billion to $10.0 billion, a doable gross margin of 61.5 percent, give or verify a few points, and aggregation EPS of $0.38, ahead of the Street estimate of $0.36.

Intel module also hit to address whatever non-silicon issues on the call as well, such as the condition of Sean Maloney, executive evilness chair and co-general manager of the Intel Architecture Group (IAG), who suffered a stroke in March. Maloney was widely tipped to be the successor to CEO Paul Otellini when he retires, which he must do in five years according to company policy.

The other issue is whether Intel module hit to report any "material adverse impact" from the fresh passed health care reform legislation. A number of large companies hit already declared the impact, with AT&T attractive a $1 billion charge.