Wow, this is interesting. When I first heard a few weeks ago that TSMC would be building factories in Phoenix, Arizona[1], my impression was that this was an act of aggressive competition with existing Intel factories and engineering talent in the area.

Based on this article, it looks more like a long-term partnership. Intel has been an industry leader for a long time by both designing and manufacturing their own chips. Recently, with all the doom and gloom about Intel's future, I'm curious to see if outsourcing will become a larger part of their strategy.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tsmc-arizona/phoenix-okay...

Important to note that:

> Construction would start in early 2021, with factory production expected in 2024.

The title should say "TrendForce believes Intel will outsource some production to TSMC". As it stands now it (1) implies Intel have announced it and (2) implies that Intel will outsource all production.

Correct, my bad.

I got carried away by wccftech's title. This link may be a better source without intermediaries: http://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20210113-10651.ht...

I can't edit the post now.

I thought TSMC would be so overloaded that they would not be able to provide meaningful capacity for Intel. Interesting turn of events.

Im sure Intel had no problem outbidding AMD.

Is this the end of Intel fabs?

I don't think it is. However, that brings the question of why would TSMC allocate capacity for Intel. If in the long term Intel plans on going back to using their fabs, why offer them this short-term advantage?

because i don't think it'll hurt their bottom line? even if intel came back with their own fab, amd is not going to use intel fab, qualcomm is not gonna use intel fab. So this is just an extra source of revenue and it potentially opens the door for intel to become dependent on them.

Right, but AMD may not gain enough market share if it loses the competitive advantage that TSMC provides.

This strategy may not play well for TSMC in the long term.

What he's likely refering to is that TSMC has huge backorders as it is, why they would allocate their resources to Intel rather than their existing partners which already fill their pipes makes little sense unless Intel commits fully to TSMC to become a partner which they can count on when expanding their production.

It’s a massive marketing and reputation coup.

Besides, Intel has the kind of margins and volumes that if TSMC wanted to massively expand their production lines, Intel’s orders could underwrite it.

Finally, there may be some technology transfer advantages as well.

> It’s a massive marketing and reputation coup.

Expand please

> Besides, Intel has the kind of margins and volumes that if TSMC wanted to massively expand their production lines, Intel’s orders could underwrite it.

This is my point, imagine building all this manufacturing capacity for Intel, and then they get a breakthrough with their own manufacturing and goes "nah, we'll make these ourselves now". Since <insert nm here> manufacturing still gets old after awhile it's not like it'll be very utilized once it's "old" (I believe, taken out of thin air though, i know some big NM is still used for things like switch ASICs and such)

I've got to believe that TSMC has required enough booking volume to safely amortize the investment in new capacity.

Probably indeed, but that's still capacity their existing partners could make good use of. Which is why I think it's a little weird. Obviously this is something that wasn't just taken out of someones arse, but it does raise questions for me.