According to the Business Times, Intel has reached an agreement with TSMC and has booked TSMC’s 180,000 6-nanometer capacity next year. In addition, AMD will also expand its orders for TSMC to cover most of its 7/7+ nanometer capacity.
Since the United States has no sign of easing the ban on Huawei, the market originally expected that TSMC’s lack of Huawei HiSilicon orders would lead to a capacity vacancy in their 7-nanometer process next year. And now TSMC, which has won large orders from Intel and AMD, will continue to be fully loaded with advanced manufacturing processes in the first half of next year.
It is understood that Intel lags behind its internal targets by about 12 months because of its 7-nanometer process yield performance, and the launch of the first 7-nanometer processor is postponed to after the end of 2022. Intel CEO Bob Swan revealed in the second quarter financial report that he is considering the possibility of delivering his own chips to other foundries. It seems that TSMC has already been set, and Intel’s failure in chip manufacturing means that TSMC has one less competitor in chip manufacturing and may increase a potential customer.
AMD continues to carry out product line conversions in accordance with the original plan. Due to Intel's process delays, AMD will expand its shipments of processors and graphics chips next year and continue to capture market share in desktops, notebooks, and servers. From the end of this year to next year, AMD will begin alternating product lines of Zen 3 architecture processors and RDNA 2 architecture graphics chips, and expand orders for TSMC’s 7/7+ nanometer process. Next year, it will be the largest customer of TSMC’s 7nm process.