Intel willing to fab for competitors

[SiliconWars]

Well as far as I'm concerned Intel doesn't care about desktop or servers any longer because they have no competition there. That's an easy decision for them to make. Mobile is more difficult but I also believe they are slowly beginning to understand what it's all about. This is why they are now talking about opening up their fabs to competitors too.

I actually don't think a few months delay on 14nm matters that much. They talk a lot about making Atom being on par with Core but what they really need is for Atom to be ahead of Core, and that wasn't happening at 14nm anyway.

 

[Arachnotronic]

The yield problems are not solved. Improving yes, solved no.

The point I'm making is that this has been a feature for them so far on 14nm. Peaks and valleys one after the other. Ask yourself how likely it is that Intel is going to go ahead full-out production on a node that has shown these characteristics? It's not safe for them to go ahead on the hope that it's fixed - they need to know for sure.

So 14nm matches 22nm once in Q1? What if it drops again? No, they will make sure it's totally fixed.

So then (assuming they have 3-4 test batches of 22nm-level yield), at the end of Q1 they have to move the process from R&D to the actual fabs in OR and AZ. That takes time as well. After that's done it's generally 6 months before general availability.

Sure they can *maybe* paper launch something in Q2, but it'll be the mother and father of all paper launches. This is absolute best case by far - detractors will say 2015 and it's likely going to be in the middle, or late 2014 before we see any kind of decent 14nm availability.

[redacted]

BTW, I remember TSMC was pumping their 16nm FinFET Cortex A57 "test chips". Funny. Intel has 10nm test chips out today and they didn't make a big deal about it.

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-ViRGE