Intel seems 100% tied to its outcomes as a foundry now. If there is any disruption in chip prodution from Taiwan for example, I can see its stock doubling in price.
NVIDIA, AMD, Apple and other companies seeking cutting edge performance will choose the most advanced node to stay competitive. Being the second best foundry has historically not been good business.
This is an extreme scenario, of course.
People sometimes wonder why anyone is buying Boeing planes—it’s because it’s that or nothing. Airbus has no spare capacity.
If you exclude Intel themselves (although they also use TSMC now) and Samsung, TSMC is pretty much the sole supplier to the leading edge.
So, yes, TSMC has the capacity.
Your Boeing / Airbus analogy hinges on multiple factors. First, Airbus and Boeing have comparable capacity. Second, they have comparable products. Both are not true when you compare Intel and TSMC.
NVIDIA is heavily supply constrained. Why haven’t they sourced Intel or Samsung as second source?
Historically, there are also many other issues with Intel operating as foundry. Do you think NVIDIA and AMD will be happy to send their CPU and GPU designs to Intel for manufacturing? Independence was one of the main drivers why TSMC was founded. To have an independent supplier who does not compete with its customers.
That said to poke at your answer a bit:
If nvidia is heavily supply constrained, wildly profitable, and strictly limited to TSMC doesn’t that dynamic lead to other customers being pushed aside? If so, doesn’t that open an opportunity for Intel if they can execute?
Intel is going to fight an uphill battle with all these issues, it's likely that TSMC the other competitors can expand capacity faster than Intel can convince customers to gamble on them.
I would not. There is nothing to indicate Intel leadership is capable of executing. Bean counters are not the kind of leadership you need in a changing environment.
It's really hard to reason about things until you hit large quantities of hardware in production, separate statistical failures from non-statistical failures, separate end user idiocy from real issues and do the analysis, then reproduce it conclusively. This is not helped by the target end of the market demand being interested in running things close to the line on boards kicked out by the lowest bidder. On top of that you have large vendors like Dell and Lenovo who take forever to feed information back on warranty claims because their end user support is fucking awful.
Basically it's very hard to reason about this pre-production despite every effort and QA step in the book being followed.
The available evidence that they are actually doing the right things to turn the ship around isn't that positive in my, or apparently many very large shareholders view though.
During the last couple of years they have achieved in time all the product and process launches that had been announced with years in advance, up to Meteor Lake on the new Intel 4 CMOS process at the end of 2023 and Sierra Forest on the new Intel 3 CMOS process at the middle of 2024.
The only things that could be considered as under-achievements are the facts that in the Intel 4 process the maximum clock frequencies have been lower than hoped and the production yields are still low. Nevertheless, these 2 problems are not surprises. Every new CMOS process launched by Intel during the last decade has been affected exactly by these 2 problems, at least for its first year. For each such process, Intel has succeeded eventually to solve the problems, but they have always needed the experience of multiple years of production for that. With Intel 4 this will not happen, because it will not be used again for another product, being replaced by Intel 3, which probably incorporates whatever fixes were suggested by the experience with Intel 4.
So the financial problems of Intel are not caused by Intel failing to execute their roadmap.
Nevertheless, the bad financial results have been perfectly predictable from the Intel roadmap, as it had been known for years, because that roadmap does not attempt to achieve parity with the AMD server CPUs before the end of 2026 at the earliest.
The financial results of Intel have shown profits for the client CPUs. They have shown losses for their foundry, which have been unavoidable, due to their need to invest huge amounts of money to recover Intel's handicap vs. TSMC and due to the need to transfer a part of their chip production to TSMC, while they are developing their new processes.
They have also shown great losses for the server CPUs. The losses in server CPUs are likely to be caused by Intel having to cut their prices a lot when selling to big customers, in order to convince them to not buy the superior AMD server CPUs.
It is very likely that Intel will continue to have great losses in the foundry and in the server CPUs for at least one more year, based on their public roadmap. After that, their results will depend on how good the Intel 18A CMOS process will be in comparison with the competing CMOS processes of TSMC.
The Intel roadmap for manufacturing processes and for client CPUs has been decent. While some of the Intel choices may be undesirable for their customers, other choices would not have improved their financial results.
Where Intel could have conceived a much better roadmap is in server CPUs, where they have their greatest losses. When AMD launches a new microarchitecture, like now with Zen 5, after 3 or 4 months they also launch their server CPUs with that microarchitecture, like with AMD Turin later this year. On the other hand, when Intel launches a new microarchitecture in their client CPUs, like in the next couple of months with Lunar Lake and with Arrow Lake S, they follow with server CPUs using the same up-to-date microarchitecture usually only one or two years later, e.g. in the second half of 2026 in this case.
While the Lion Cove and Skymont cores of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake S are competitive with Zen 5, the Intel server CPUs launched these days, Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids, continue to use cores that are only marginally better than the cores used in Alder Lake three years ago.
The new Granite Rapids server CPUs will be able to match the number of cores per socket of the AMD server CPUs, for the first time after many years. However, they will use cores not much better than Zen 4, which will be inferior to Zen 5.
This situation would have been easily avoided by Intel if they would have launched now only CPUs using their up-to-date cores, instead of using obsolete cores in their server CPUs.
The reason why AMD does not have this problem is because they design a single CPU chiplet that will be used both in their desktop and high-power laptop CPUs and in their server CPUs. On the other hand, Intel duplicates their design and validation efforts by designing distinct chips for desktops and for servers. When AMD finishes the design of a chiplet, it is ready for both desktops and servers. Their server CPUs use a few months of additional testing, but that is all of the delay. It is not clear how the design work is organized at Intel, but it appears that there is not enough overlap in the design of the client CPUs and of the server CPUs, so the latter are finished only after one extra year or two.
By selling defective products
This is what a lot of people who have no idea about the semi industry miss because they get all their education from news headlines. Which is what I assume leads to Intel's massive stock drop. People voting on FUD, kind of like the opposite of the hype that pushed Nvidia to the moon, but when you asked investors who bought Nvidia, what Nvidia actually makes, most are clueless and only bought out of hype and FOMO.
Everyone assumes the world only needs 3nm chips because that's what TSMCs latest cutting edge node is and that's what they learned powers their iPhone, but the reality is the world runs on nodes much larger than that. To put this into perspective, the new TSMC fab being built in Germany will tape out 28/22nm nodes and then upgrade to 16/12 nm nodes mostly for robotics, industrial, IoT and especially automotive. Just let that sink in. Even Global Foundries is stuck at 12nm.
Intel's 4 process is cutting edge by comparison and plenty of international players who can't afford TSMC or Samsung would gladly pick up that node capacity for the right price.
Add to that those older processes are more mature, having been refined for decades, get higher yields, and are far cheaper as well.
I guess intel lays off another 15% of people because of ... 'FUD' and 'people who have no idea about the semi industry'
Yea.
Also look at the market tank. What's the usual reaction to that? Trim costs to improve shareholder appearance.
Like I said, Intel's layoffs are a reaction to their stock tanking, and their stock tanking is due to investor behavior which is sometimes rational, but a lot of the times not.
How else am I supposed to interpret that paragraph?
They need the layoffs because all their competition have fewer employees. Intel is simply bloated.