What just happened? Intel’s ongoing CPU supply issue may get worse before it gets better. According to Digitimes Research, demand for Chromebooks – which enters the high period around this time – could cause supply gaps to grow one to two percentage points in the second quarter of 2019.
Supply shortages hit in August 2018 but some market watchers believed the issue would gradually resolve itself after vendors completed inventory prep for year-end sales. As Digitimes notes, however, this didn’t come to fruition as the supply gap hovered around the same level in Q4 as it did the previous quarter.
As Intel shifted much of its capacity to high-end processors with better profit margins, lower-end chip production suffered. The development has prompted some manufacturers to opt for alternate Intel solutions with others turning to AMD.
As a result, AMD’s worldwide notebook shipment share has climbed from 9.8 percent in Q1 2018 to 15.8 percent in the first quarter of this year. The chipmaker’s share is expected to rise to 18 percent in the second quarter of this year, its peak for 2019.
Come July or August, Intel should be volume producing 14nm parts which will “completely resolve the shortage problem.”
Intel previously said it would begin mass production of 10nm Ice Lake parts in the second half of 2019 although according to Digitimes Research’s upstream supply chain sources, Intel’s production schedule for the 10nm process still has lots of issues… so many that Intel may skip over 10nm entirely and dive into development of the 7nm process.
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