News Compal warns of ongoing Intel parts shortage

We this is AMD's chance to try and gain more market share especially as Zen2 should be released by then (iirc).

 

Yep, AMD will be laughing all the way to the bank with the silly price increases for Intel parts, i5-8600k for example is closer to £300 now than £200 as it used to be...

 

TLR Intel have been talking to the RAM companies and rubbing their grubby hands together with glee.

 

More like Intel expected demand to flatline and wrangled the iPhone modem contract to use up capacity, then demand instead ramped up and now they lack packaging capacity (which is why they're spinning up the new plant in Vietnam for ULP test + package).

 

I've not seen anything to indicate there's been an increase in demand for Intel parts, from what i can tell this shortage is almost entirely down to the failure of getting 10nm into mass production.

 

There is currently only one fab at intel making 10nm parts (D1x), and it does so alongside 14nm (both processes use the same equipment, main process difference with 10nm is the Cobalt layers). They have no reason to take at-capacity 14nm lines, tell them "OK, move over to 10nm", then have them sit doing nothing.
Intel have had a wafer overcapacity for years, after they started spinning up new fabs for the mobile market they never captured. That's why Fab42 got built then immediately mothballed in 2013. It's only now that demand has actually reached the levels expected then, and it's chip volume demand rather than wafer area demand that is the issue (i.e. Intel are not yet at their limit for creation of dies, but at getting those dies into assemblies).

 

The 14nm lines wouldn't be doing nothing, just like the 22nm line wasn't sitting there doing nothing when 14nm came online, Intel move their chipsets to previous generation lines when it's no longer used for processors.

That's what happened with 14/10nm, Intel moved chipsets to 14nm a while ago when they shouldn't have despite mass production of processors not having moved to 10nm, they've even had to revert some lower-end chipsets back to 22nm recently because they were expecting there to be spare capacity on the 14nm nodes due to shifting processors over to 10nm.