When Alder Lake arrives, if 12th-gen CPUs are as good as rumors suggest, could supply issues be a concern?
Intel has warned that we are entering a period where the supply of its processors for consumers is going to become thin on the ground, so unfortunately, we can expect trouble ahead on the stock front. In fact, Intel’s chief financial officer, George Davis, has said there will be ‘acute’ supply problems in Q3 (from now through to September), following CEO Pat Gelsinger’s recent observation that the global chip shortage is likely to continue for one or two years, so perhaps until 2023. Davis said on an earnings call (as transcribed by Seeking Alpha): “Persistent industry-wide component and substrate shortages are expected to lower CCG (Client Computing Group) revenues sequentially. We expect supply shortages to continue for several quarters but appear to be particularly acute for clients in Q3. In data center, we expect enterprise, government and cloud to show further recovery in Q3.” Intel is prioritizing the production of heavyweight processors for the likes of data center use because that’s where the big profits lie (and also due to contracts the chip giant is bound by). Of course, if you only have a certain amount of production capacity, it makes sense to produce the biggest earning CPUs with the beefiest premium.
