Initially, the troublemaker was the SemiAccurate resource, which shared with its loyal subscribers the news of an additional delay in the start of shipments of Intel Ice Lake-SP processors for server use. Judging by the comments of analysts at Mizuho Securities, it was initially about the delay in deliveries until the third quarter of next year. Representatives of this investment bank said that Ice Lake-SP processors will not be delayed that much, but the time shift is indeed acceptable.

Morgan Stanley added that this is a delay of several weeks, which will not play a special role for Intel customers in terms of the life cycle of their products but will cause some reputational damage to the processor giant itself.

Since the images of the Intel Ice Lake-SP engineering sample have already appeared in the vast Chinese social networks, the SemiAnalysis resource undertook to predict what the crystal area of ​​various modifications of the processors of this family will be. The authors of the forecast proceeded from the assumption that the photo shows the most compact crystal in the family, containing 10 computing cores on an area of ​​about 370 mm ². For Ice Lake-SP models with up to 28 cores, crystals up to 505 mm ² can be used. Finally, the older processors of the family can have up to 38 active cores (in fact, there are 42 pieces) on a monolithic crystal with an area of ​​640 mm ².

The production of such crystals, even according to the advanced 10nm process technology for Intel, will not be particularly profitable for the company, and this reminds of the problem of rivalry with AMD, which is in a more advantageous position: its EPYC processors with 64 cores are much more profitable in production not only due to the use of 7nm process technology, but also thanks to the multi-chip layout. A possible delay in shipping Ice Lake-SP processors will only worsen Intel’s competitive position.