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2018 hasn't been a good yr for Intel; the company has been rocked by security problems from Spectre and Meltdown and pinched by manufacturing issues related to the ramp of its long-delayed 10nm process. Earlier this year, the company told customers to expect 10nm shipments to be pushed back all the way to Q4 2022. It's repeated that guidance several times since, only the timeline may have improved in recent days.

Last week, Intel acting CEO Bob Swan published a alphabetic character in which he wrote "We're making progress with 10nm. Yields are improving and nosotros continue to await volume production in 2022." This omitted the specific reference to "Holidays" 2022 that Intel had previously given, but it wasn't clear if the company was changing its guidance or was simply choosing non to emphasize that information technology would exist more than a twelvemonth before it could ship 10nm parts in volume in a letter that was supposed to be positive and forward-looking.

A note from BlueFin Research Partners yesterday sent Intel's stock price spiking, however, with claims that 10nm might be in-market sooner than expected. The note claims that Intel is making "pregnant strides," and has held informal talks with suppliers about ramping products before June. If Intel could ramp before June, that could put hardware on shelves in time for the back-to-schoolhouse season — and that'southward a major buying cycle.

Intel-AMD-Stock

According to SemiAccurate, Intel has made significant changes to its 10nm to push button the tech out the door, relaxing its design rules and changing the nature of the implementation. It's not clear how meaning these changes will be. S|A before argued that the new rules would leave Intel's 10nm more equivalent to a 12nm process node, merely its near recent update argues that "the new downgraded '10nm' procedure from Intel will non have equally large a hit from the removal of this tech as SemiAccurate said earlier, only it will still take a hitting."

S|A should be taken with a grain of salt, but the idea that Intel would tweak 10nm to become information technology out the door more effectively isn't surprising. Nor is the idea that the company might take had to back off its initially-aggressive plans for 10nm in order to make upward for lost time. Intel's original program for 10nm involved an aggressive shrink it referred as "hyper-scaling," consummate with a new metric for measuring node benefits that would've played up the reward of Intel'due south manufacturing technology.

Correct now all of this is speculation and it'south still possible that the Q4 2022 deadline remains the official goal. Intel could introduce 10nm in express fashion in the first half of the year just expect to transition most parts to the node until yields improved. This would repeat the original Broadwell ramp, when 14nm initially deployed in mobile but desktop chips waited to accept the spring.

The impact on the competitive state of affairs in the x86 market is similarly difficult to predict. If I personally had to bet on which issue represented the larger potential do good to AMD: Intel existence delayed on shipping 10nm chips (giving AMD the opportunity to ship 7nm first) or Intel's demand constraints (perchance allowing AMD to ship CPUs to a larger percentage of the overall market) I'd pick the demand constraints. Obviously, in this case, the two issues are causally linked, only the benefits of node shrinks have become uncertain enough that I'm non sure how much upside AMD tin can actually look to meet from a 7nm shrink alone. It's not that in that location won't be improvements — it'southward that the improvements specifically attributable to process are an ever-smaller percentage of the pie, even as the pie is getting smaller.

As the graph above shows, AMD's stock price has gotten hammered at the same time Intel'southward has soared, just it's not clear either shift is really warranted. Intel putting 10nm into product isn't going to dramatically transform the CPU industry, and AMD competing against Intel'south 10nm a few quarters earlier than expected shouldn't be a dramatic or item trouble for Ryzen 2, either.

At present Read: Intel Issues Update on Supply Issues at 14nm-, AMD May Regain 30 Pct Desktop Marketplace Share By Q4 2022, and If Intel Is Suffering a CPU Shortage, Can AMD Pick Upwardly the Slack?