Friday, August 2nd 2024
Intel "Meteor Lake" CPUs Face Yield Issues, Company Running "Hot Lots" to Satisfy Demand
In a conversation with Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger, industry analyst Patrick Moorhead revealed that Intel's Meteor Lake CPU platform suffers from some production issues. More specifically, Intel has been facing some yield and/or back-end production issues with its Meteor Lake platform, resulting in a negative impact on Intel's margins when producing the chip. The market is showing great demand for these chips, and Intel has been forced to run productions of "hot lots"-- batch production of silicon with the highest priority that gets moved to the front of the production line so they can get packaged as fast as possible. While this is a good sign that the demand is there, running hot lots increases production costs overall as some other wafers have to go back so Meteor Lake can pass.
The yield issues associated with Meteor Lake could be stemming from the only tile made by Intel in the MTL package: the compute tile made on the Intel 4 process. Intel 4 process is specific to Meteor Lake. No other Intel product uses it, not even the Xeon 6, which uses Intel 3, or any of the upcoming CPUs like Arrow Lake, which uses the Intel 20A node. So, Intel is doing multiple nodes for multiple generations of processors, further driving up costs as typical high-volume production with a single node for multiple processors yields lower costs. Additionally, the company is left with lots of "wafers to burn" with Intel 4 node, so even with Meteor Lake having yield issues, the production is ultimately fine, while the operating costs and margins take a hit.
Sources:
Patrick Moorhead on X, via AnandTech
The yield issues associated with Meteor Lake could be stemming from the only tile made by Intel in the MTL package: the compute tile made on the Intel 4 process. Intel 4 process is specific to Meteor Lake. No other Intel product uses it, not even the Xeon 6, which uses Intel 3, or any of the upcoming CPUs like Arrow Lake, which uses the Intel 20A node. So, Intel is doing multiple nodes for multiple generations of processors, further driving up costs as typical high-volume production with a single node for multiple processors yields lower costs. Additionally, the company is left with lots of "wafers to burn" with Intel 4 node, so even with Meteor Lake having yield issues, the production is ultimately fine, while the operating costs and margins take a hit.
18 Comments on Intel "Meteor Lake" CPUs Face Yield Issues, Company Running "Hot Lots" to Satisfy Demand
Gelsinger should pack his stuff... quit the clown parade.
My condolences to US Tax payers.
Considering the amount of time chip development goes trough I doubt raptor lake had much of his influence as it was released a couple of months after he became ceo.
3 years is enough to see the "fruits" of work. In this particular case he should have insisted on axing many many things and quit bleeding money.
He'll be fine.
3 years is no where near long enough to address the cluster that was and still is Intel. Even the money the US and other gov are throwing at will only have real impact years down the road out side of construction jobs today because they are more about building new fabs not fixing the the current process issues. Intel, in my opinion, is trading high cost people in order to keep building fabs thought likely at a slower rate but faster then they would with out the US and other governments propping them up. If cutting R&D bites them in the future we'll have to see, that budget has been huge in the past with out a lot of progress for a number of year but with cuts that large companies normally throw out the good with the bad.
20A restores parity between nodes. eg N2. 16% denser than N3, on it's turn at least 30% denser than N4
Intel 4 and 3 were supposed to be the ++ of the same 7nm node and now they claim the 5 nm ++ 20 and 18A are going well and ramping up when intel 4 struggles. How is 5nm doing better than 7nm only makes sense if they were overly optimistic like the feasibility of 13th 14th at 6+ Ghz.
That's really the main reason for the stock drop. I imagine their new fabs, once built, will have the same issue.