Yesterday was a bad day for Intel , the value of its shares ended up falling 10.58 percent after revealing the financial results for the third quarter (Q3 2020), but another reason that encouraged its fall is that the company revealed that it will not be able to tackling the fabrication of all your future CPUs using its own 7nm manufacturing process, and this involves using an outside factory , and all the buzz we have heard since last year assumes that TSMC will help you in the process.
If they do not employ an external factory, they will have to double the production capacity, and seeing as the current situation is, it seems that it is not a plausible option for the company.
“So as we think about 2023 and beyond, we are looking at the products needed at that time. And we are evaluating our [manufacturing] process against other third-party processes . And the fundamental criteria, as you can imagine, are to fairly simple macro level: timing and predictability of timelines, product performance and economics with the supply chain, and our ability to control the supply chain as well as possible, “said Bob Swan , CEO of Intel, at the call with investors.
“So the criteria are relatively simple and we are evaluating each of them as we go out of 2020 and really early 2021, because that’s the time when we will have to make the determination of whether we are going to be buying more equipment to increase. production at 7nm or if a third-party foundry would add that capacity. “
“And as I said in my observations, it’s probably not all or nothing; it’s probably a mixed bag in terms of the best path to ensure that we have a predictable cadence of leadership products for 2023 and 2024 as we think we will have in 2020, 2021 and 2022. And we will learn a lot more as we have in the last 90 days over the course of the next 90 days and I think, we will be in a pretty good position to state our decision in the January deadline. “
None of these comments catches us by surprise, and we must remember that in January 2020, it had already been leaked that Intel would use TSMC’s 7nm to manufacture its GPUs, although the following news was revealed at the end of July: TSMC receives An order for 180,000 @ 6nm wafers from Intel to bring these GPUs to life because it no longer had access to any 7nm production, and right after it came TSMC would manufacture several families of Intel @ 7nm and 6nm CPUs and GPUs.
Now we just have to wait for Intel to confirm all the information, something that logically affects it since it means that they need to depend on an external foundry to get out of the hole they are getting into and reverse the situation.
