Monday, December 7th 2020
Intel to Outsource Atom and Low-Power Xeon Manufacturing to TSMC?
In a bid to maximize utilization of its own semiconductor foundry for manufacturing larger, more profitable processors, Intel could be look at contracting TSMC to manufacture certain processors based on its low-power CPU microarchitectures, according to a new Intel job posting discovered by Komachi Ensaka. The job description for a position in Intel's Bengaluru facility, speaks of a "QAT Design Integration Engineer" who would play a role in the "development and integration of CPM into Atom and Xeon-based SoC on Intel and TSMC process."
QAT is a hardware feature that accelerates cryptography and data-compression workloads. Since the Xeon part in this sentence is referenced next to SoC, Intel could be referring to Xeon processors based on low-power cores, such as "Snow Ridge," which uses "Tremont" CPU cores. The decision to go with TSMC could also be driven by the 5G infrastructure hardware gold rush awaiting the likes of Intel across dozens of new markets, particularly those averse to buying hardware from Huawei.
Sources:
Komachi Ensaka (Twitter), Dr. Ian Cutress (Twitter), Tom's Hardware
QAT is a hardware feature that accelerates cryptography and data-compression workloads. Since the Xeon part in this sentence is referenced next to SoC, Intel could be referring to Xeon processors based on low-power cores, such as "Snow Ridge," which uses "Tremont" CPU cores. The decision to go with TSMC could also be driven by the 5G infrastructure hardware gold rush awaiting the likes of Intel across dozens of new markets, particularly those averse to buying hardware from Huawei.
22 Comments on Intel to Outsource Atom and Low-Power Xeon Manufacturing to TSMC?
Didn't some top R&D researcher at TSMC joined some failed Chinese Fab already ?
That's like when the customer liked the chef food he invited the chef to work for him :roll:
Would be interesting to see which products feature on TSMC, if they're high margins it's quite possible Intel will book good capacity to ensure supply for the product's lifecycle. Though again at that point Intel might as well abandon their plans for leading edge nodes as it seems they're just not gonna catch up to TSMC anytime soon!
This is why AMD is still using 7nm on their Ryzen 5000, 5nm is reserved for Apple. Apple always use TSMCs best process for new chips. This has been true for years.
You can't say it's their fault for being the best, they can't produce an infinite amount of wafers, your reasoning is bizarre.