Intel, during its recent earnings conference call, has acknowledged the problems it’s facing with the production of consumer-level CPUs and has claimed that these CPU shortage problems will last throughout the third quarter of this year. This comes after the company had infused an extra $1.5 billion to improve its 14 nm fab output about a year ago.
Intel’s CEO, Robert Swan gave the following statement:
“We have increased capacity to improve our position in the second half, although product mix will continue to be a challenge in the third quarter as our teams align available supply with customer demand,”
Intel was unable to meet the demands for its consumer CPUs, and chipsets last year due to increasing demand for server and HPC processors. Because of that, the company invested $1.5 billion in its manufacturing plants in Oregon, Arizona, Ireland, and Israel to boost its output. These plants use Intel’s 14 nm manufacturing process.
Producing and selling more high-level products like Xeon and Core i9/i7 over lower-end products like Atom, Celeron, and Pentium makes more financial sense for Intel and it does exactly that. The company will follow suit and the availability of these entry-level products will suffer until at least the end of the third quarter of this year.
Intel also started the production of its Ice Lake-U CPUs earlier this year and because of Intel’s factory network optimization, it is able to manufacture more of these chips than it was earlier expected. Since Ice Lake-U CPUs are based on the 10 nm process, the mass production of these chips will reduce the pressure on 14 nm and will also lead to lower demand for the 14 nm products. This could be the reason why Intel is so optimistic about improving its situation regarding its 14 nm technology in the second half of 2019.
Further Reading:
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