3 ms·

Intel's financial reports show their fabs losing billions every quarter. Nevertheless, it is hard to know how real are these numbers, because the prices charge

Intel's financial reports show their fabs losing billions every quarter. Nevertheless, it is hard to know how real are these numbers, because the prices charged by the Intel fabs for making Intel CPUs are set internally, so they could be manipulated to move all losses on the fabs from the consumer and server product divisions. Moreover, for the latest Intel fabrication process for which anything is known, i.e. Intel 4, which is used for making the CPU tiles in the Meteor Lake CPUs, it is known that the fabrication yields have been much less than desirable, which had two outcomes, both less profit margins when selling Meteor Lake and the inability to produce as many Meteor Lake CPUs as they could have sold. Both effects have increased the financial losses suffered by Intel during 2024. In general, "uncompetitive fab" can mean two things. Either there are things that the fab cannot do at all or the fab has too low fabrication yields at the things that it can do. The Intel fabs are in the second situation. They can do about the same things that TSMC can do, but at much lower fabrication yields, which means much higher production costs. High production costs means low profits and Intel is a company that has been habituated to have huge profits, so it cannot manage well the case when its profit margins are very thin.

spacemanspiff01 2y ago
But is this an issue of them only building their own chips? (Speaking of which, what does Intel do with old fabs for the past 20 years after moving to a new node?)
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The lower yields than TSMC would also cause lower profits when making chips for external customers, so Intel must really improve their yields. Old Intel fabs are refurbished, by installing modern equipment, so they are converted from old CMOS fabrication processes to recent processes. Before being converted, the fabs spend a few years making peripheral chips that complement the Intel CPUs, e.g. the so-called south-bridge, which may be packaged together with the CPU for laptops or it may be a separate IC package for desktops, and which does not need a fabrication process as dense as the CPUs.

spacemanspiff01 2y ago

But is this an issue of them only building their own chips? (Speaking of which, what does Intel do with old fabs for the past 20 years after moving to a new node?)

adrian_b 2y ago
The lower yields than TSMC would also cause lower profits when making chips for external customers, so Intel must really improve their yields. Old Intel fabs are refurbished, by installing modern equipment, so they are converted from old CMOS fabrication processes to recent processes. Before being converted, the fabs spend a few years making peripheral chips that complement the Intel CPUs, e.g. the so-called south-bridge, which may be packaged together with the CPU for laptops or it may be a separate IC package for desktops, and which does not need a fabrication process as dense as the CPUs.