TSMC Slows 3nm Expansion as Intel Meteor Lake Mass Production Delayed

New Delhi: Mass production of chipmaker Intel’s next big flagship processor, Meteor Lake, is expected to be delayed until 2024, according to a report.

According to TrendForce research, Intel plans to outsource the Meteor Lake tGPU chipset to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for manufacturing.

“Mass production of this product was originally scheduled for 2:22 a.m. but was later postponed to 1:23 a.m. due to product design and process verification issues,” the report said.

Recently, the product’s mass production schedule was pushed back again to the end of 2023 for some reason, “completely canceling the 3nm production capacity originally booked in 2023 with only a marginal amount of wafer input remaining. for the technical verification”.

Intel said earlier this year that Meteor Lake would be “powered up” this summer before shipping in 2023.

This incident “significantly affected TSMC’s production expansion plan, making Apple the only company among the first wave of 3nm process customers by 2:22 in early 2023 with products including M-series chips and A17 Bionic,” the report said.

Given this, TSMC decided to slow down the progress of its production expansion.

In addition to officially notifying equipment vendors of the company’s intention to adjust equipment orders for 2023 due to the high cost of 3nm expansion, TrendForce expects this decision also affects parts of TSMC’s 2023 CapEx planning.

Apple’s new 2024 iPhone is expected to fully adopt 3nm processors.

“If Intel 4 fails to mass-produce as planned, Intel could outsource its computing tiles to TSMC, which would strongly drive growth in 2024,” he added.

Intel suffered a 25% decline in consumer chip sales in the second quarter, along with revenue of $15.3 billion, down 22% year-over-year (YoY).

Its profits plunged losing half a billion dollars in the April-June period – a 109% drop in profits from the $5.1 billion recorded in the second quarter of last year.

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