Thursday, September 6th 2018
Intel 14nm Processors Face Shortages
Intel's 8th generation Core desktop processors based on the company's 14 nm node are facing shortages in the market, according to a Tom's Hardware report. Tracking prices and availability of popular 8th generation Core SKUs such as the i5-8400, i5-8600K, and i7-8700K, the report notes that retailers are heavily marking up these SKUs above their SEP, and many of whom are running out of stock often. This may not be attributed to heavy demand.
A possible explanation for these shortages could be Intel allocating volumes from the same 14 nm++ node for its upcoming 9th generation Core processors, which debut with three SKUs - i5-9600K, i7-9700K, and i9-9900K. Intel probably wants to launch the three chips not just at competitive prices, but also good enough volumes to win the 2018 Holiday season, and repair its competitiveness damaged by AMD 2nd generation Ryzen over the past couple of quarters.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
A possible explanation for these shortages could be Intel allocating volumes from the same 14 nm++ node for its upcoming 9th generation Core processors, which debut with three SKUs - i5-9600K, i7-9700K, and i9-9900K. Intel probably wants to launch the three chips not just at competitive prices, but also good enough volumes to win the 2018 Holiday season, and repair its competitiveness damaged by AMD 2nd generation Ryzen over the past couple of quarters.
19 Comments on Intel 14nm Processors Face Shortages
Can not wait for AMD 7nm, really hope they get an real edge over Intel even in gaming.
Isn't it more likely linked to tariffs? Intel moves their chips all over the world during production. Everytime they enter the USA, they could be getting hit by another tariff. Intel could easily be passing that down the chain and they're bumping their prices up to reflect that.
Who could have foresee this happening??? :-)
First of all, those charts from PCPartsPicker are barely an indicator of price trends. Except for i5-8400 the biggest fluctuations come from places like Walmart and Newegg marketplace(not Newegg themselves).
Secondly, as @FordGT90Concept already noted, the price spike coincides "for some reason" with 25% US tariff bump on electronics. If you use the same ole PCPartsPicker and simply select some other world regions, you'll notice that there was no spikes, or at most 1 or 2 retailers did a "reactionary" bump at the same time as US, while the others remained calm and patient.
From my personal experience I can tell you that our retailers only ran out of Ryzen 7 CPUs for a short time, and prices fell significantly for both blue and red camps.
I am sure everyone wants a piece of that DDR4 success story - selling 3+ years old tech for double the price!
If all these factors can't lead to a strong demand, then Intel should be already dead.
And for "gamers don't have much money", yeah. So all those Geforce cards are selled for, ummm, scientific purposes?
The bulk of intels profits come from servers and data centers, NOT Core I7s sitting in gaming desktops. Same will eventually go for AMD, they are gunning hard for datacenter sales, where margins are exponentially higher then consumer sales.
Even nvidia, with its geforce cards, makes a shitload of cash off of datacenters with tesla and quadro GPUs.
Ryzen is good enough for gaming for most people. Ryzen also seems to have smoother frame delivery in game VS intel, something noted when ryzen first came out. It is a credible threat to intel's dominance. If AMD can get clock rates up to 5 ghz before intel can get substantial performance boosts out, intel is in serious trouble.
Nothing here is "trolling". Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but that is the truth. Intel is facing a credible challenge, and that makes you upset, but that doesnt mean you can just go labeling conversations as trolling because you dislike them.
4C Coffeelake ~ 140mm^2
6C Coffeelake ~ 160mm^2
8C Coffeelake ~ 180mm^2 (est.)
Don't know on the RMA part but there certainly have been more forum reports of defective cpus since skylake...