… This is almost certainly a reference to some light pilot production as opposed to bringing the entire foundry fully online as a high volume manufacturing facility. It typically takes 2-3 years to build a foundry, followed by a 6-12 month manufacturing ramp. …
… Both foundry manufacturers are pushing hard for next-generation nodes, because hitting new nodes quickly means capturing the lion's share of the revenue over that node's lifetime. …
… It manufactures its own chips and RAM with its fabs, but it also engages with customers and acts as a client foundry. Samsung's Line 2 foundry. Line 2 itself is intended to build DRAM, V-NAND, and "foundry" solutions -- no word on what those might be. …
… It may be cheaper to push some chipset manufacturing off to a third party and keep more of its own foundry space crunching on high-margin Xeon parts than to shift existing 14nm over to building chipsets while simultaneously trying to bring 10nm online. …
… Intel's Pat Gelsinger has pushed the US to make a massive investment in chip manufacturing, though that issue is still being debated in Congress. …
… The question is whether those gains continue to be worth the costs, and when the foundry node shrink economics fail altogether. An EUV rollout at 7nm or 5nm will push things along a little while longer, but what happens after that is still largely unknown.
… For decades, semiconductor engineers have come to broad agreement about which technologies represented the best and most reliable scaling opportunities for future manufacturing. …
… All manufacturers build in a degree of redundancy, but when manufacturing tolerances are being tightly squeezed, adding redundant circuits also pushes up complexity. …
… Hopefully relaxing its clock speeds will allow the chip giant to actually push the Core i9-10850K into retail at volume, thereby gaining some traction in-market for its new chips in the process. …