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Intel Mum On When Entry-Level CPU, IoT Supply Will Improve (crn.com)
Intel is staying quiet on when the company expects its shortage of entry-level CPUs to end as it prioritizes production of Core and Xeon processors to meet growing demand in the PC and server markets. From a report: The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company provided more details on its plan to improve processor supply in its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, when the company reported a continuing resurgence in its PC business and strong continued growth in its data-centric businesses. When an analyst asked Intel interim CEO Bob Swan when he expected the supply constraints to be over, Swan did not provide a timeline in his response. But he answered other parts of the analyst's questions about the company's efforts to improve supply. "We were caught off guard a little bit this year by the explosive growth well ahead of what our expectations were back at the beginning of the year, and that growth came from all different segments of the business," he said. "It put us in the unfortunate situation of constraining some of the demand signals that we were seeing from the market and our customer base."
It's not a particularly huge issue for them as their 14 nm process is very mature and highly performant. Even on Intel's own marketing slides, they indicated that their 10 nm would not initially have as good of performance characteristics as their 14 nm process.
The real problem for Intel is that they anticipated moving several product lines off of 14 nm by this point, but since that hasn't happened they're unable to supply all markets adequately. AMD can't take all that much advantage of the situation as they're selling Ryzen products about as quickly as they can make them as well. The biggest issue for Intel will probably be in the server market as that's where AMD's 7 nm products will launch first and likely have a massive core advantage over Intel parts given AMD's multi-chip module approach when compared to Intel's monolithic die.