Intel's Chief Financial Officer admits the company is 'heavier than we want to be in terms of external wafer manufacturing'
A key Intel exec has recently admitted that the company is more heavily reliant on third-party manufacturing than it would like. As an outfit that always prided itself on making everything it sold, the expectation that entire CPUs of its upcoming Arrow Lake generation might be made by TSMC, and not at Intel fabs, will be a source of frustration within the company.
In a conference call with investment bank Morgan Stanley, the Chief Financial Officer of Intel discussed how things were going in the chip giant's foundries, market shares, and what's happening next. When asked about its relationship with TSMC, the CFO said everything was great, despite being a competitor, but that Intel was relying a little too heavily on external foundries compared to its own for chip-making duties.
Morgan Stanley and David Zinser, Chief Financial Officer of Intel, were recently discussing (via Seeking Alpha) Intel's current status in terms of making chips, how things were fairing, and what the near future was looking like.
One topic of focus was the reliance on TSMC for fabrication duties, and Zinser remarked «I think probably, we are a little bit heavier than we want to be in terms of external wafer manufacturing versus internal, but we're always going to use external foundries for wafers.»
TSMC is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, and its chip fabrication plants (aka foundries) churn out more chunks of silicon than any other company. Its order books for the very best process nodes, the name given to the overall manufacturing sequence for chips, are taken up mostly by AMD, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, but Intel also relies on TSMC to make a large portion of its key chips.
For example, the GPUs used in Arc graphics cards and the monstrous data centre processors are all made by TSMC. However, so too are most of the tiles in the current Meteor Lake-powered Core Ultra laptop chips, as will the next generation of desktop CPUs. Rather than use a single chunk of
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