Intel Future TMSC Taiwan

Thierry12

What does today's Intel news with TMSC mean for Intel in Ireland and those thousands of jobs

If Intel go full TSMC fabs for their main products, what will they do with their own fabs in Ireland?

Write them off for billions?

Sell them? Who would buy?

Didn't they announce a massive investment and that farmer holding it up recently?

Who's gonna be interested in buying those outdated 14nm+fabs?

Will the Intel Fabs here be mostly dedicated to older process and possibly winding down till it all moves to TSMC?

Not looking good for Intel or Ireland anyway

https://m.hexus.net/business/news/components/144379-amd-intel-battle-tsmc-capacity-says-report/

A new report from Taiwan suggests that AMD and Intel are battling for production capacity at TSMC. This news might be behind the ceasing of trading of TSMC shares on Taiwan's stock market earlier today, due to caps on daily price movements. The company is up 10 per cent in the most recent trading session which flat-lined about mid-day Taiwan time, after intervention.

CNBC notes that the TSMC rally is due in part to Intel's financial statements last week, where it said it would be delaying its 7nm chips. Furthermore, Intel indicated it might hire other foundries to make advanced 7nm processors. However, the potentially bigger news, for TSMC at least, comes today via Taiwan's China News which asserts that Intel is indeed in talks with TSMC and is anxious to grab production capacity.

Insiders talking to the Taiwanese newspaper have indicated the following:

Intel has reached an agreement with TSMC
TSMC will begin mass production of Intel CPUs and/or GPUs next year
Intel chips will be fabricated on TSMC's 7nm optimised version of its 6nm process. (I'm not sure if that means TSMC N7P, N7+, or N6.)
Intel can be thankful for the TSMC capacity made available by the Huawei / HiSilicon orders being cancelled or it would be in an even worse position.

https://wccftech.com/intel-ponte-vecchio-gpu-tsmc-6nm/

L1011

Intel's current plans do not involve the Reid lands. They moved a road to connect two land holdings instead

They've had two disasterous processes in a row and if that continues there's a lot more at stake than just fabs. However, I suspect that a wholesale transfer to TSMC would probably be blocked by the US for many, many reasons - AMD are just a designer using TSMC already so it'd create a monopoly for x86 which isn't going away.

L1011

L1011 wrote: »

Intel's current plans do not involve the Reid lands. They moved a road to connect two land holdings instead

They've had two disasterous processes in a row and if that continues there's a lot more at stake than just fabs. However, I suspect that a wholesale transfer to TSMC would probably be blocked by the US for many, many reasons - AMD are just a designer using TSMC already so it'd create a monopoly for x86 which isn't going away.

What is this line referring to?

L1011

Processes = the actual chip making setup for a given wafer and gate size. This is why they're contracting out to TSMC for this as they've got reliable smaller gate processes.

Inquitus

Intel have applied for and been granted permission for an 8bn expansion of their Leixlip Fab to bring it up to date with the latest process nodes, if they ever come online, they have now been delayed for 5 years odd! They have held fire on the investment to date, I am sure Covid is not helping nor is their haemorrhaging market share to AMD in both the server, laptop and desktop segments. So we shall have to wait and see what happens, but a Leixlip upgrade is certainly being considered.