New winds for Intel and as the saying goes: “who has seen you and who sees you”. And it is that the change of policy with the arrival of Pat Gelsinger has been a breath of fresh air for the company, but at the same time it has shown its weaknesses, something that Bob Swan tried to hide and buy time with it. Today we know that Intel is worse than expected and will have to outsource its production to its greatest rival if it does not want to lose the rope with AMD and NVIDIA.
That TSMC is taking over the global market is a fact. The problem comes from its rivals who have seen how the field was left free and have done nothing to avoid it, including Samsung itself. The Taiwanese caught everyone off guard and now comes the subjugation by one of the opponents…
The 6 nm and the GPUs, the first agreement of many?
It is more than known that Intel graphics cards will be manufactured with TSMC’s 6nm node in a movement that on the one hand is believed to be proposed to see how Asians work internally, while on the other it seems that Intel does not want to bet internal production in a market in which it will not be competitive in all its segments.
Both even make sense together. What are you going to spend your best nodes and wafers for if you can’t compete properly? Better to outsource the production and see how the rival works, because again quoting a saying: “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”. For this reason, Intel’s 6nm agreement will apparently not be the only one in volume with TSMC, rather on the contrary, it could be the first of many, where apart from GPUs, FPGAs could be included, for example.
TSMC’s 3nm on stage: Intel vs Apple?
Well, it seems that way, because those from Cupertino already have reserved, if not all, a large part of the stock of 300 mm wafers to record chips at 3 nm with EUV. A famous analyst has put white on black by stating that Apple will not be alone with AMD, but that Intel has reached an agreement with TSMC to get production of its 3nm next year, which could again be a coup for part of the blues.
Why? Mainly because Intel in 2023 won’t be on time with their Intel 4 node so it leaves 100% of the market to TSMC (Samsung is facing some delays too) so they can’t let Apple and AMD take the whole cake , it is necessary to cannibalize chips in key sectors to compete where it is weakest, in this case it seems that in GPU and if the price were good per wafer (which it does not seem so seeing the prices of the 5nm) could Intel manufacture Pentium, Celeron or i3 in those 3nm from TSMC?
Rumors of similar moves have always been there, but now it is a fact that the two companies are signing agreements. In any case, the figure that has been leaked is key: the 20% of chip demand of Intel will be based on production subcontracted to TSMC, or what is the same, one in 5 will not be from Intel itself in 2024, but from its competitor.
