Bob Swan, CFO and interim CEO of Intel, has confirmed that they are working to improve the company’s production capacity and meet the high demand for 14nm processors that the market is currently experiencing.
Discussed previously, we have seen that the chip giant had difficulty supplying all its customers and that had led to a significant shortage and price increase in some markets, including the EU market, where the cost of some of the latest generation core processors almost doubled.
Intel has begun a very complicated adventure in recent years: the leap into the 10nm process, a transition that should have been made years ago according to the chip giant’s roadmaps. It’s obvious that things didn’t go as planned and that Santa Clara is still having problems effectively completing its transition to the 10 nm manufacturing process.
It’s true that Intel already has a 10 nm processor on the market, the Core i3-8121U, but we are before the exception that confirms the rule because it’s a simplified design that doesn’t even have an integrated GPU, which is not the case with the other Core i3, which is manufactured in the 14 nm process.
According to the latest Intel information, the 10nm process will not be commercially viable until the end of 2019, which means that they will have to centralize their production around the 14nm process for at least another year.
With this scenario, it is not surprising that Bob Swan wanted to go ahead and confirm that they will invest $1,000 million to strengthen their production capacity under the 14nm process. This is a message aimed at calming the market, but it is by no means clear that it will be enough to meet growing demand, which will also be boosted by the introduction of the new Core 9000 processors, a generation based on the 14 nm++ process that Intel will launch in mid-October.
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