A key Intel exec has recently admitted that the company is more heavily reliant on third-party manufacturing than it would like. As an outfit that always prided itself on making everything it sold, the expectation that entire CPUs of its upcoming Arrow Lake generation might be made by TSMC, and not at Intel fabs, will be a source of frustration within the company.
In a conference call with investment bank Morgan Stanley, the Chief Financial Officer of Intel discussed how things were going in the chip giant's foundries, market shares, and what's happening next. When asked about its relationship with TSMC, the CFO said everything was great, despite being a competitor, but that Intel was relying a little too heavily on external foundries compared to its own for chip-making duties.
Morgan Stanley and David Zinser, Chief Financial Officer of Intel, were recently discussing (via ) Intel's current status in terms of making chips, how things were fairing, and what the near future was looking like.
One topic of focus was the reliance on TSMC for fabrication duties, and Zinser remarked "I think probably, we are a little bit heavier than we want to be in terms of external wafer manufacturing versus internal, but we're always going to use external foundries for wafers."
If you could [[link]] peel apart a , you'd see four tiles nestled together on top of an interposer, essentially a big base tile. Only the latter and the primary compute tile, which contains all the P and most of the E cores, are made by Intel. For this, the chip giant has been heavily pushing forward with its foundry technologies, with .
The rest of the tiles (graphics, SoC, and IO) are all fabricated by TSMC, though, in a variety of its foundries.
None of this will change with , , and , in fact there might even be more reliance on TSMC, with some rumours suggesting even the compute tiles of some Arrow Lake chips will be [[link]] manufacturer outside of Intel and not on their own super-special new process node.
These are the next generation of GPU and CPU architectures Intel is targeting for release at some point this year, and given that Intel is planning to not only maintain its market share in the CPU industry but expand it if possible, and especially increase its GPU share, then TSMC's order books are going to be full a good while longer.
: The top chips from Intel and AMD.
: The right boards.
: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.
: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
It wasn't all that long ago that Intel made everything it sold, but how times have changed. Not only is it heavily reliant on TSMC for the majority of its consumer-grade CPUs and GPUs, it's also transitioning to become a . So on the one hand, Intel is going to become an increasingly important customer for TSMC but also a rival in the foundry business.
Zinser also admitted that Intel "missed the EUV thing and that set us back." Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) is the type of electromagnetic wave used in the most cutting-edge of process nodes. For example, , all of which are heavily utilised by AMD, Apple, Nvidia, and Intel, of course.
I'm sure that Intel feels a sense of bitterness regarding the delay in and how it's part of the reason why it has to rely on TSMC so much, and will continue to do so for a good while yet. For the end user, though, all that matters is that this somewhat unusual customer-competitor relationship ultimately results in CPUs and GPUs that are fast and affordable.