Thursday, November 21st 2019
Intel Hasn't Yet Resolved its Supply Challenges: Top Executive
Intel executive vice-president and general manager for sales, marketing, and communications, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, in a letter addressing the company's customers and partners, expressed regret that the company hasn't been able to resolve the challenge of PC CPU supply falling behind market growth (demand) despite its "best efforts." She elaborated on these efforts by summarizing additional billions of dollars in capital-expenditure the company spent in retrofitting its facilities to 14 nm fabs. The added capacity increased Intel's output in 2H 2019 by a "double digit" percentage compared to 1H, however, even that proved insufficient to cope with market demand. "Sustained market growth in 2019 has outpaced [Intel's] efforts and exceeded third-party forecasts," she said.
"Supply remains extremely tight in our PC business where we are operating with limited inventory buffers. This makes us less able to absorb the impact of any production variability, which we have experienced in the quarter. This has resulted in the shipment delays you are experiencing, which we appreciate is creating significant challenges for your business," she added, probably referring to the vast portfolio of dozens of SKUs of products that aren't yet EOL, but share the same 14 nm node. Intel deployed its product representatives to proactively reach out to all their customers to "answer their questions." This is probably another way of saying "retaining your businesses." Intel is embattled on two fronts: to make its 14 nm supply keep pace with demand; and to quantitatively transition to the newer 10 nm process.
Source:
Intel
"Supply remains extremely tight in our PC business where we are operating with limited inventory buffers. This makes us less able to absorb the impact of any production variability, which we have experienced in the quarter. This has resulted in the shipment delays you are experiencing, which we appreciate is creating significant challenges for your business," she added, probably referring to the vast portfolio of dozens of SKUs of products that aren't yet EOL, but share the same 14 nm node. Intel deployed its product representatives to proactively reach out to all their customers to "answer their questions." This is probably another way of saying "retaining your businesses." Intel is embattled on two fronts: to make its 14 nm supply keep pace with demand; and to quantitatively transition to the newer 10 nm process.
24 Comments on Intel Hasn't Yet Resolved its Supply Challenges: Top Executive
It's a short term benefit though. Intel knows that I am sure and that's why they are working hard on all these exotic interconnects.
That certainly helps them but it isn't the core of it. The fact is communication between cores, memory, etc happen faster on one slab of silicon than across bridges.
Chiplet is certainly the way forward for cost effectiveness reasons. Wafer costs and yields will eventually be crippling for Intel to keep this up. But this is hard science what I am stating. Monolithic performs better on equal clocks. But it will be costly, and eventually, completely unsustainable for anyone to do a complex high end chip on.
Or do you mean correlating the advantage to games?
Easy. Games are real time, latency sensitive applications. Even when downclocked to Zen 2 series cpu speeds Intel cpus still hold their own on games. Why is that? Zen 2 has higher IPC than skylake, right?
Look at the chiplets.
Keep in mind this isn't some fanboy post. AMD is far better prepared than Intel going forward and that's not a bad thing here. If anything this post is endorsing AMDs plan.
Here, let me just play "shot in the dark:"
www.techpowerup.com/245521/on-the-coming-chiplet-revolution-and-amds-mcm-promise
www.extremetech.com/computing/280344-chiplets-are-the-future-but-they-wont-replace-moores-law
If anything, our local retailers still have an abundant supply of 6-8th gen CPUs for mainstream and HEDT platforms (but still severely overpriced). Even the laughable i5-7640X is still in stock.
Same goes for mobile segment as well.
Intel at least is able to build their own fabs and have exclusivity in them.Shortages are observable in the OEM channel - mostly mobile and server, where large clients order thousands of CPUs. Basically, Intel's delivery time is longer than it used to be.
It's difficult to notice this in retail, where a few CPU boxes standing on a shelf (or an active "order" button) give you a feeling that "there's no shortage".Yes it does. You're categorizing programs incorrectly, but I'm not surprised. You've shown multiple times that you don't know how computing works and you're unwilling to learn anything new (perhaps other than memorizing AMD slides).
You say "multi threaded" but you think about batch processing, where latency doesn't impact performance. A problem is divided into large number of small independent "jobs" that are flushed to the CPU and merged on output. Lags don't add up.
But there could be multiple parallel threads in the program that depend on each other and then latency would add up.
That's why there's a big variance between different benchmarks (that mimic different tasks). Some tests are dominated by AMD's core count advantage, but in some Intel wins despite having less cores (even at similar clocks).
If architectures were similar, the CPU having more cores and higher clocks would always win.
I'm sorry, I have nothing to add that wasn't even a debate. They just don't want to admit the old dog came back to bite and take advantage of the situation. Some people saw this a mile coming.
You're on point, I was comparing my Phenom II 960T, the side-grade i5-2400 and some older cpus a lot in games and benchmarks 6 years ago. So it makes sense to me. This stuff used to fly over my head when I wasn't interested or just not having any knowledge in the inner workings of silicon.
It's either someone refusing to listen just because... or they're ignorant. I feel bad for him, honestly.
There is nothing like 162 cpu hardware issues. Try high single digits with most mitigated...
Yes, it's bad, but exagerations like that server no one.