Monday, January 27th 2020
Intel Rumored to be Courting GlobalFoundries for Some CPU Manufacturing
With its own silicon fabrication facilities pushed to their capacity limits, Intel is looking for third-party semiconductor foundries to share some of its supply load, and according to a WCCFTech report, its latest partner could be GlobalFoundries, which has a 14 nm-class fab in Upstate New York. If it goes through, the possible Intel-GloFo deal could see contract manufacturing commence within 2020.
GloFo's fab offers 14 nm FinFET and 12LPP, a refinement that's marketed as 12 nm. According to the report, Intel could use GloFo for manufacturing CPU dies, specifically its entry-level chips such as Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron. Intel is also known to shed its own manufacturing workload by contracting foundries for 14 nm core-logic (chipsets). In a bid to maximize 14 nm fab allocation for its CPUs, Intel also started making some of its 300-series chipsets on the older 22 nm process, which goes to show the company's appetite for 14 nm.
Source:
WCCFTech
GloFo's fab offers 14 nm FinFET and 12LPP, a refinement that's marketed as 12 nm. According to the report, Intel could use GloFo for manufacturing CPU dies, specifically its entry-level chips such as Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron. Intel is also known to shed its own manufacturing workload by contracting foundries for 14 nm core-logic (chipsets). In a bid to maximize 14 nm fab allocation for its CPUs, Intel also started making some of its 300-series chipsets on the older 22 nm process, which goes to show the company's appetite for 14 nm.
14 Comments on Intel Rumored to be Courting GlobalFoundries for Some CPU Manufacturing
EMIB based multi-chiplet 14nm server dies will still beat them, and AMD can't touch them in AVX512 and its subset instructions
Honestly, I have nostalgia for the place for some weird reason, but I doubt this'll really happen.
As for AVX512, the use cases for normal people are still far too limited for this to actually matter. For now. Might change in five years, but by then AMD will have their own version.
No insulting others.
Thank You and Have a Good Morning.
Intel will look for more and more possibilities. GF is cheap - perfect for the entry level models. The whole Zen idea is built around being on the best node available to stay competitive.
People keep saying that the common die means big savings during binning - virtually any Zen die can be used somehow if it has 2+ working cores.
What they forget (or ignore) is that AMD has to make all dies using a very expensive process.
Intel makes many different designs on different nodes, but it lets them make the entry-level stuff with minimal cost in the first place.
The bottom line is that - at least for now - Intel's gross margin remains much higher.
I still agree that this sounds plausible and smart, though. On the other hand one has to wonder about the performance and power efficiency of these parts. It would also be incredibly fascinating to compare such a part to an AMD part made on the same node. That's as like-for-like a comparison of architectural performance and efficiency as you can get. Has this ever been possible before?