@4K8KW10 Check Intel's quarterly reports if you think they're in a 'dire' situation, they're selling everything faster than they can produce it.
And I highly doubt they're going to use TSMC for any processors, the gigantic 22nm fab they have in Israel is getting upgraded to 10nm and that has a 150,000 wafer output per month. As a reference, AMD uses the GloFo's New York foundry for Ryzen production, and all of its Ryzen line is ~60K wafers per month.
Though it's still an image hit for Intel to have to resort to TSMC for production, even though it's chipsets. Shows how badly their 10nm transition has been planned.
150k 22nm wafers doesn't translate to 150k 10nm wafers. Going from primarily single patterning 22nm to a quad patterning 10nm changes the time wafers take to make and increases the number of production stages massively. Even 14nm with dual patterning has significantly dropped capacity. I'm not sure where you got the 150k from at all tbh as I see Intel make no claims of those numbers. Regardless, Intel's fab 28 has 200k square feet of clean room space, Global's Fab 8 has 210k square feet of clean room space.
Sometimes as 200mm wafers were standard in the industry for a long time and is still used in large volume by TSMC and many others the 300mm numbers get standardised against 200mm fabs. Global was rated at 60k 300mm wafers a month on construction and this has since been expanded to closer to 80k a month. LIkewise they rated this at the equivalent of 135k 200mm wafers a month.
The likelyhood is Fab 8 is close or a bit bigger than fab 28. That doesn't change that Intel has multiple fabs and huge capacity, but they also had so much excess capacity on 14nm that they shut the doors on a brand new fab they built waiting for future demand with the intention of shutting down older less capable facilities at the same time.
https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/fab-42-recent-announcement/
It's quite hilarious how the timing has worked out. They built fab 42 but found that less demand meant they didn't want to spend billions on 14nm equipment just to move to 10nm or beyond. AS it happened they planned to wait all the way to 7nm to use it. So they are struggling badly for 14nm capacity, have a completely empty fab without even any equipment in it (maybe some test 7nm/euv stuff but certainly not full up). Somehow they've switched too much existing 14nm capacity to 10nm before 10nm was ready, have loads of empty fab space and are making too few chips to meet demand all at the same time. Concurrently they were waiting for 7nm for fab 42 while they can't make 10nm work at all. There's a reason the CEO got fired, the handling of this fiasco is laughable. Icelake/10nm delayed by ~4 years IF it comes out late 2019, spending billions on fabs they shut the doors on waiting for future equipment. Screw up a 2 year industry lead on process node which was the single biggest advantage they had over everyone else and sit on the same architecture for years which lead to the problem of process being their only big advantage any more.
As for dire situation, for a company like Intel losing sales of billions because you can't make chips due to your own screw ups is dire... hence a CEO getting canned, hence hiring a bunch of new execs to head up every different major chip design department because your current architecture hasn't moved forward, hence a huge stock drop in recent months and that is all before the upcoming year they'll be a full node behind AMD who will have a new architecture which takes another step forward.
To you and me, making 10 billion one year and 8 billion the next is like... dude, I made 8 billion.... wooooooo. To a publicly traded company making less money than you should be making is borderline crisis level situation. But really the issue isn't how it is now, it's how they are expecting demand to drop next year and profitability to crash next year. They'll still be profitable but as above, a reduction in profit is bad to such companies.
When Apple had reduced growth in profit everyone panicked, that's right, a reduction in growth, profit was still higher than the previous year but the growth in profit slowed and wallstreet had a panic attack.
More than that, what happens next year will change the fight for the next 5 years. If AMD gained 1% server market share and stuck there for 5 years, Intel don't care. The massive disparity there will be between Intel and AMD in server could mean that AMD have a 15-20% market share by the end of 2021 and once they have that market share and without a process advantage to beat AMD with there is no telling that they'll ever win that back. Basically their screw ups are opening the door for AMD and once they get their foot in the door it may be impossible to shut it again.
