According to Digitimes, Intel’s OEM partners and the supply chain are still short of the supply they are requesting from Intel and its distribution network.
Intel has been having supply issues since mid-2018 when Spectre and Meltdown created a performance hit which was remedied by increasing the size of server deployments to re-match their original capacity.Intel moved some of its fabrication capacity away from its future 10nm process and back onto its 14nm to meet demand.
"Intel has seen its 14nm chip manufacturing capacity fall short of demand again recently, which may force many notebook vendors to postpone their new model launches to next year, according to industry sources", Digitimes wrote
This made Intel shedloads of cash. Intel CEO, Bob Swan, said he expected PC CPU supply would be up mid-single-digits this year and PC TAM to grow slightly.
"We'll continue to work with our customers to meet their required product mix and ramp additional capacity to ensure we are not a constraint on their growth. We lost a little bit of share in the second quarter, particularly in CSG at the lower end small core primarily due to supply constraints. So -- and we expect that we'll begin to work our way back in the second half of the year given the capacity we've put in place to have more supply and meet our customers' demands.”
But Digitimes seems to think that is unlikely as Intel does not seem to be able to meet all of its 14nm CPU demand by the end of 2019. With the recent launch of Comet Lake in the mobile space, Cascade Lake in the enterprise and workstation space, and the future launches of similar product lines, users and Intel’s partners are expecting a stable supply of CPUs with the generational update.
Officially Intel has said while its output capacity is increasing, it remained in a challenging supply-demand environment in our PC-centric business.
It said it was working to address this challenge, and "we continue to prioritise available output toward the newest generation Intel Core i5, i7 and i9 products that support our customers’ high-growth segments”.
