The Panther stalks: Intel’s Panther Lake CPUs set to take off in Oregon, company reveals, and cutting-edge 18A process is on track
Both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake use TSMC's N3B (3nm-class) manufacturing technology, which is one of the most sophisticated production nodes that the foundry has. TSMC's advanced fabs tend to be fully utilized, so Intel cannot get extra capacity quickly. Therefore, while the company expects growth of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake supply in the fourth quarter and onwards, it did not say that it would be enough to meet all of the backlog demand. The good news: Intel has enough LPDDR5X memory for its Lunar Lake CPUs that carry on-package DRAM, so the company's costs for these CPUs are not going to increase in the short term.
That said, it remains to be seen whether and when Intel hikes prices of its client CPUs over time amid insufficient supply, high DRAM prices, and DRAM shortages.
Although Intel has invested billions in equipping its fabs with the latest equipment, such as ASML's EUV lithography tools, the majority of Intel's fabs can only produce chips on its 10nm-class process technologies — such as 10nm SuperFin and Intel 7 (aka 10nm Enhanced SuperFin) — using DUV tools. As a consequence, the company cannot meet all the demand for its Xeon 6 'Granite Rapids' processors that use Intel 3 fabrication technology.
"The vast majority of our capacity today is still on Intel 7, 10nm and that is why we are tightest there," said Pitzer. "Quite frankly, if we had more Granite [Rapids] wafers, we would be selling more Granite Rapids. We feel very good about where we are in the initial phase of the Granite [Rapids] ramp, which is our latest generation server part."
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-admits-it-needs-more-core-ultra-200-series-wafers-if-we-had-more-lunar-lake-wafers-we-would-be-selling-more-lunar-lake#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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