News Intel admits supply problems ‘not yet resolved’

Intel are between a rock an a hard place:
- If they build new 14nm capacity (the meme that 14nm lines have been closed to set up idle 10nm lines is as false as ever) to meet the raised demand, that is money sunk into lines that will be obsolete within 12 months and never make back their setup costs, making every chip sild from them a net loss for Intel. Even if they somehow manage to switch from 14nm to 10nm for free (i.e. NO) that would still be a bad move if the increased demand proves to be a transient spike rather than a sustained market increase, as they would be left with a bunch of excess idle capacity.
- If they continue as is and allow demand to continue to exceed supply, then some customers get tired of waiting and buy AMD devices as stopgaps. The problem there is not so much 'lsot sales' (as those sales would never be made to begin with due to lack of things to sell) but that it moves the value needle from "any cost saved by buying AMD rather than Intel is more than offset by the cost of re-optimising for an architecture with radically different optimisation requirements (due to heterogenous internal interfaces, and the larger number of slower cores)" to "well we're stuck with these things for now, might as well make an attempt at getting the performance up a bit" which gets AMDs foot in the door for future sales.