According to new research from TrendForce, Intel plans to outsource its new tGPU chipset to the new Meteor Lake at TSMC for production.
Mass production of the 3nm was originally scheduled for 2H22 but was later postponed to 1H23 due to product design and process verification issues, recently, the product mass production schedule was again postponed to 1H23. end of 2023 for some reason. This almost completely nullified the 3nm manufacturing capability originally envisioned in 2023 with only a marginal amount of wafer input remaining for engineering verification.
TrendForce indicates that this incident significantly impacted TSMC’s manufacturing expansion plan, making Apple the only company among the first wave of 3nm process clients from 2H22 to early 2023 with products including chips from the M and A17 Bionic series .
With this in mind, TSMC has decided to slow the progress of its manufacturing expansion to ensure that production capacity is not excessively idle, leading to massive pressure on amortization of costs. In addition to formally notifying equipment suppliers of the company’s intention to adjust 2023 equipment orders, due to the high cost of the 3nm expansion, TrendForce expects this move to also affect parts of the CapEx 2023 schedule. TSMC and consequently, TSMC’s CapEx scale in 2023 may be lower than in 2022.
It is worth mentioning that although Intel has significantly changed its 2023 outsourcing plan, forcing TSMC to postpone its expansion plans for 2023, by looking at other advanced process clients including AMD, MediaTek and Qualcomm, all of these companies subsequently plan to mass produce 3nm products in 2024.
- Intel Postpones Production of Meteor Lake’s 3nm GPU Tile at TSMC, Trendforce Claims (Tom’s Hardware)