Intel spoke about the rapid expansion of 10- and 14-nm production and even showed construction sites on video
Following a series of reports that Intel is considering outsourcing some of its manufacturing tasks, the US chipmaker announced that it is significantly increasing its manufacturing capacity in response to “unprecedented demand.”
The company said it has recently expanded the mass production of 10- and 14-nm chips at its factories in Arizona, Oregon and Israel by 25%. Intel’s Kiryat Gat plant, where the company makes 10nm chips, is currently fully loaded with 4,900 employees.
“Over the past three years, we have doubled the [10nm and 14nm] production in terms of silicon wafers. It has been a significant investment and we continue to move forward … We continue to invest in manufacturing capacity to keep up with our customers’ growing needs, ”said Keyvan Esfarjani, Senior Vice President and Chief Manufacturing and Operations, Intel. – Progress in the area of 10nm manufacturing is going pretty well. We have three large manufacturing plants operating at full capacity to serve our customers better and faster. ”
In a video attached to the post, Intel Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Ann Kelleher said that additional line expansions currently require new factories and this is happening. The video, which is clearly aimed at nervous investors, shows how Intel is building new factories along with setting up current production facilities and presenting from company specialists:
Intel also said that in recent years, innovative ways have been found to increase the yield of good chips at existing capacities (not surprising given how many years Intel has been leading 14nm standards, constantly improving). The highly-publicized introduction of the 10nm SuperFin process is another pride of Intel. The company says this technological advancement is the largest single-generation improvement in Intel’s history, and the performance gains from SuperFin are comparable to moving to the next generation process.
All this sounds promising, but in January the company is expected to announce new families of desktop processors, codenamed Rocket Lake-S and Comet Lake-S Refresh. And these solutions will continue to be 14 nm, although in the case of Rocket Lake they will receive a new architecture that promises a double-digit percentage increase in performance due to an increase in the number of instructions executed per clock cycle. But this was not given for free: the future flagship Core i9-11900K will only be 8-core, unlike the 10-core Core i9-10900K in the previous Comet Lake-S family.
