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Alongside Intel’s weak Q2 2024 earnings report and the announcement of $10 billion in spending cuts and layoffs for 2025, the company is also relaying one other piece of bad news regarding its current chip deliveries. A brief report, posted on X by analyst Patrick Moorhead and citing a conversation with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, revealed that Intel has been dealing with a yield issue on Meteor Lake, with the issue being significant enough to drive intel to take extraordinary steps to deliver the necessary chips.
Decoding Moorhead’s dense tweet, the biggest revelation here is that Intel has been suffering from yield issues on Meteor Lake. The first chip from the company to incorporate Intel’s EUV-augmented Intel 4 process, Meteor Lake was not expected to be particularly high yielding at the start (no lead chip for a new process node ever is). However, without citing specific figures, Moorhead’s report implies that Intel’s yield – and resulting Meteor Lake chip throughput – were worse than even the modest expectations that come with a new node.
Most interesting of all here is the claim that Intel has been running production “hot lots” of Meteor Lake – high priority wafer batches that get moved to the front of the line in order to be processed as soon as possible (or as reasonably close as is practical).
