CEO Bob Swan suggests his chips may some day be TSMC-flavored
Intel on Thursday reported second quarter sales of $19.7bn, up 20 per cent year-over-year, and still investors distanced themselves from its stock, which was down around 10 per cent in after-hours trading following the manufacturer’s earnings report. The US giant’s results [PDF] exceeded what analysts had anticipated – and Chipzilla even raised its guidance about future results. But the selloff appears to have been triggered by the announcement of yet another production delay. Intel’s 7nm process node is six months behind schedule, and the yield is a year behind. That means PC processor chips using this node for CPU cores won’t hit the market until late 2022 or early 2023. A 7nm data-center processor is now expected to arrive the first half of 2023 rather than in 2022 as expected. And its 7nm GPUs codenamed Ponte Vecchio are now due late 2021 or early 2022, which is a bit a problem: Intel promised the accelerators for the US government’s $500m exascale Aurora, supercomputer due to be built in 2021. As such, Intel may be forced to turn to outside foundries to produce certain dies, aka chiplets, for its 7nm multi-die-single-package chips, including its Ponte Vecchio parts. «The company’s 7nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately six months relative to prior expectations,» Intel said in a statement [PDF]. «The primary driver is the yield of Intel’s 7nm process, which based on recent data, is now trending approximately twelve months behind the company’s internal target.» This comes after Intel’s 10nm node ran into years-long delays as the one-time semiconductor king went down a dead end with its assembly lines. And we’re still waiting for a substantial shift to 10nm from 14nm by Intel.
