News Intel Increasing Use of Third-Party Fabs for Non-CPU Production

[Admin]

Intel is looking to outside firms to free up more of its own production capacity

Intel Increasing Use of Third-Party Fabs for Non-CPU Production : Read more

 

[hannibal]

So Intel is using Also TSMC... good plan, now amd have even less production capasity to use the cpu / gpu shortage of amd products is getting worse.

 

[InvalidError]

So Intel is using Also TSMC... good plan, now amd have even less production capasity to use the cpu / gpu shortage of amd products is getting worse.

AMD almost certainly has a multi-year wafer start agreement with TSMC that guarantees a minimum volume and likely some margin for extras. TSMC getting even more customers and an even longer backlog has no impact on that. As far as AMD is concerned, it will only delay supplemental orders beyond the agreement's maximum should AMD decide it needs to place any. If AMD foresees continued increasing demand, it could also seek an increase in its commitment's limits that would get phased in over the next six months of TSMC backlogs.

It is mainly companies that want occasional batches instead of on-going production that get screwed over by long backlogs as more fab lines get dedicated full-time to large customers like AMD.

 

[thGe17]

As a note: The NNP-T1000 is a bad example for outsourced production. When Intel aquired Nervana, the design was (almost?) finished using TSMCs 16 nm process (CLN16FF+), therefore it was obvious that Intel would continue this path. (Otherwise Intel would have had to redesign the whole chip with its own tooling and libs, wasting a lot of money. Not funny with 27 billion transistors in size.)
On the other hand, the NNP-I1000 for inferencing workloads will be produced in Intels 10nm process.