Intel 7nm Delayed By 6 Months; Company to Take “Pragmatic” Approach in Using Third-Pa

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While today second quarter earnings report from Intel represented a high-water mark for the company amid booming sales and revenues, unfortunately not everything disclosed today was good news from the company. As part of Intel’s quarterly earnings presentation, the company announced that their under-development 7nm manufacturing process has suffered a six month delay due to a defect in the process. As a result, the first consumer products aren’t due until at least late 2022, leaving Intel with 10nm as their best in-house manufacturing process for the next couple of years.

But even more important than that, the delay has spurred some soul searching within Intel, driving the company to pivot on its manufacturing plans and open the door to using third-party fabs for a much broader segment of its products. Going forward, the company will be taking what CEO Bob Swan and other leadership are calling a “pragmatic” approach, looking at both in-house and third-party fabs and using those fabs that make sense for the company and the product in question. And while the company has not announced any specific plans to outsource production – they are looking at it for products in the 2022-and-later timeframe – it would be hard to overstate how dramatic of a shift this is for the industry, and for a company that even five years ago was the world’s leader in silicon lithography manufacturing.

7nm Delayed By Six Months

But before we get too far into Intel’s future plans, let’s talk about the past and the present, and how those are driving Intel’s decision to look towards outside fabs. Ever since Intel’s 10nm process suffered repeated delays, Intel’s plan to get the company’s manufacturing side back on track was to nail the development of their 7nm process. The goal was to deliver 7nm on time – making up for the time lost from the 10nm delays – getting a solid process out that Intel could quickly ramp up, retaking the lead in the race to sustain Moore’s Law. A side-effect of this plan would have been that 10nm was to be a relatively short-lived process, allowing Intel to get off of the troubled process rather quickly and on to the more reliable 7nm process.

Unfortunately for Intel, developing their 7nm process has not gone to plan. As revealed in today’s call, 7nm yields are roughly a full year behind schedule – that is, Intel expects it to take another year to get yields to where they wanted them for Q2 of 2020. As a result, the company has needed to push back the bulk of its 7nm product schedule by 6 months. The first 7nm client CPUs are now not expected before late 2022 or early 2023. Meanwhile the first 7nm server part is not expected until the first half of 2023.

The only 7nm part that remains (roughly) on schedule at this point is Ponte Vecchio, Intel’s Xe-HPC GPU that will be going into the Aurora supercomputer. That is expected to ship in late 2021 or early 2022, and even then Intel is evaluating whether to move the manufacturing of some of Ponte Vecchio’s parts to third-party fabs.
The good news, at least, is that despite all of this, Intel believes that they have a good grasp on the problem. With Swan describing the problem as a “defect mode” that was reducing yields, Intel has found the root cause of the issue and is moving to fix it, stating that that the company doesn’t believe that there are any fundamental roadblocks in their 7nm process. So as Intel’s current plans go, the company is still all-in on 7nm, and baring further issues, it’s going to become the cornerstone of their technology in 2023 when it begins volume shipping.

None the less, a six month delay is still a six month delay, and it comes at a time when Intel can ill afford it. Intel’s repeated 10nm problems set the company back years, and the ramifications to Intel’s product lines are ongoing as they continue to ship 14nm desktop and server processors. Meanwhile, though not wholly comparable in terms of node size, fab rival TSMC is set to start shipping 5nm parts this year, extending their lead over Intel and giving TSMC’s customers a leg-up in terms of things like power efficiency and die sizes. At the end of the day Intel has already been down this road once before with 10nm, and they’re intent on not repeating the same mistakes.
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