
Posted on Thursday, September 20 2018 @ 13:37 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Contrary to recent reports, Tom's Hardware
says their sources confirmed Intel is not outsourcing 14nm chipset production to TSMC. This could be subject to change in the future, but at the moment Intel is trying to free up some of its 14nm capacity by fabbing its new H310C chipset on the older 22nm process. Perhaps more chipsets or other low-margin parts could revert to an older process to solve the 14nm production capacity issues.
The worrying lack of motherboards with the H310 chipset, which began back in March, served as the first sign of an impending shortage of Intel's 14nm silicon. In May, reports surfaced that Intel had suspended production of the chipset, and in July, the company finally acknowledged a much larger issue with 14nm production.
Intel typically produces chipsets on a larger node than its current-gen processors, but the delayed 10nm production has found both chipsets and chips on the same 14nm node, creating a manufacturing bottleneck as the company experiences record demand for 14nm processors.
At the moment, it looks like Intel's 10nm process won't be ready for mass production until Q4 2019.