MENLO PARK, Calif. (CNN/Money) - If the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average don't do much for a few more weeks, Intel will finish the year as the best-performing Dow component, by far.

Since the beginning of the year, shares of Intel are up an astounding 115 percent.

Having said that, if the semiconductor king has many more "mid-quarter" updates like the one it released Thursday evening, Intel won't stand a chance of repeating the feat in 2004.

(Historically, that would be no surprise. Kodak, the Dow's No. 1 stock of 2002, is fixing to come in last this year, with a year-to-date loss of 30 percent.)

Intel out in front -- for now Based on year-to date performance, no Dow stock comes close to matching Intel's gains. Company (Ticker)  YTD Gain  Intel (INTC)  114.6%  Caterpillar (CAT)  68.2%  McDonald's (MCD)  67.0%  J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM)  54.9%  Alcoa (AA)  54.0%   Source:  Thomson/Baseline

It turns out that getting from $15 to $34, the stock's recent level, was the relatively easy part. To go from $34 to $73 would be damn near impossible.

Impossible, that is, if Intel merely hits the equivalent of three singles in four at-bats plus one error in the field, as it did Thursday.

To be clear, Intel had a good quarter. It raised slightly the midpoint of its expected revenues for the fourth quarter of 2003, from $8.4 billion to $8.6 billion. And it said the gross profit margin for the quarter would be 62 percent, compared with the previous expectation of 60 percent.

But it dropped a $600 million bomb on investors.

That's the size of the non-cash impairment charge it says it will take to write down the remaining value of its 1999 acquisition of DSP Communications.

I happened to be in Israel when Intel announced it would spend $1.6 billion to buy DSP, an Israeli maker of chips that go into cell phones. (To read my account of my visit to DSP as this deal was unfolding, click here.)

The impairment charge is an acknowledgement that Intel's foray into this segment of the wireless business isn't working.

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Intel's chief financial officer, Andy Bryant, called the quarter "unusual." He said "it's one of those quarters where you'd like to celebrate the business" because microprocessors are doing great and communications are doing as well as expected.

But the wireless business is a bummer. Hence the long faces.

This isn't the end of the world. Intel's unprofitable wireless-chip and computing group accounted for just 6 percent of Intel's third-quarter revenues, and the dominant PC business is humming along.

However, the wireless business was supposed to be a growth opportunity for Intel, as was the communications division, which still isn't lighting the world on fire. It seems investors will have to keep waiting for those parts of the business to kick in.

That means no celebration, which means no short-term gains for the stock, which already has incorporated so much of the good news reflected in Intel's strengthening businesses.

It's going to take far more than sort-of good for Intel to repeat the feats of 2003 in 2004.

Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.

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