Prices Intel Coffee Lake Procs Are Skyrocketing due to 14nm shortages

Yes. Apple had to raise their prices too as there was no way to make any profit on their iphones because of tarifs

 

This is getting ridiculous. First DRAM prices, next mining GPU price hikes, then the current Nvidia prices and now Intel joins the trend.

Great.

 

None of this seems to be adding up...
* Considering Intel's tech has been stagnant for the past 3 or so years (not to mention, all of the security issues) while AMD's has grown more interesting, I'm finding it hard to believe that Intel is struggling to keep up with demand. Where's the sudden demand coming from? Furthermore, all of the parts with elevated prices are the ones that people have the least interest in nowadays. So... why are these the ones that are getting more expensive?
* To my understanding, Intel has separate facilities for 10nm, so if anything, shouldn't the 10nm parts they're making be reducing their 14nm workload?
* Intel earns more net revenue per year than they know what to do with. I understand this price hike is due to shortages, but it seems like this is only going to hurt them in the long run. I figure OEMs like Dell, HP, Acer, etc could just use a previous-generation 14nm 2-4 core CPU (where there's still remaining stock) and nobody would know the difference.

 

Funny i´m struggling with the same questions. Unless there´s an huge, really huge, demand from the server market i can´t understand how Intel can be struggling to produce enough desktop chips unless everybody in China woke up with a burning desire to buy a system with Intel inside...
Another option is that maybe they already decommissioned one or two 14nm factories to change them to 10nm but that would be pretty stupid even for Intel´s standards...
I think there´s some key information missing because this is very strange stuff....

 

I'm not sure this is referring only to cpu manufacture. It probably is referring to all the other chipsets and sub-devices they also make, as well as the new iphone modem contract they took from Qualcomm. I mean, if there is demand to meet the shift backwards, it would actually be a clever business move rather than a poor one. The lack of progress towards 10nm is clearly their biggest sticking point, but if they are outsourcing some of their 14nm production to maintain processor availability on the market and their motherboard chipsets work on 22nm (https://ark.intel.com/products/125903/Intel-Z370-Chipset), it could also mean that the demand is so high that they need to make more of them. It could also simply be that outsourcing at last minute to TSMC costs them a fair bit of extra cash, particularly as TSMC looks to be at almost max capacity with current orders.
In reality, it is difficult to tell what is what with Intel, but the only place they are obviously losing money is the fact that their 10nm production process has yielded few results until now, but actually they have not seen a real drop in their market demand...yet. Things could rapidly shift in the next 12-24 months, and particularly the new Rome Epyc chip looks to change the playing field if that becomes AMD's template for future CPU's all round (https://wccftech.com/amd-epyc-rome-7nm-64-core-cpu-performance-benchmark-leak/) - almost 10 times the cinebench score with just over 5 times the threads is dream like, but it could be...!! Just trying not to ride the hype train too much.

Either way, nice to see competition in the market place again and actually push the industry forwards rather than sideways or in tiny increments. I am also interested to see if ARM ever becomes a realistic alternative architecture for desktop and the server space, but currently doesn't look like it is anywhere near that.

 

Just checked my local Microcenter and at this time they still have the i7-8700k for $329.99.

http://www.microcenter.com/product/486088/core-i7-8700k-coffee-lake-37-ghz-lga-1151-boxed-processor

Was going to put it off and wait for the i7-9700k but I think I will just pick this up this weekend.

 

what i'm p.o.'d about is the impact on the struggling young enthusiast.
i'm not going to start farting dust about my twenties. i will say that there has always been a higher bar to entry to this hobby than many others and that some things are relative.
but what gets me is the gouging. as an early adopter to most things i'm used to paying the freight, often literally. but "early adoption" is also about supporting a vision. this isn't about that.
there is no early adopting to Intel, just late adapting from Intel. and charging for that dubious privilege.

there is no problem with the engineers at Intel, they've just have been ignored at the top level for the last seven years.
the I-5 needs to be an unlocked six core with hyper-threading. period
the I-7 same, higher clocks also unlocked
the I-3 needs to be quad core with Hyper-threading, locked lower speed
oh yeah, all need to be 15% less expensive.
Done (and don't think this hasn't been brought up among shareholders)

 

Wouldn't it better to wait and see what it might be in a couple of weeks time with the new cpu releases?? Could be even cheaper!

 

I think that's part of the problem. By now, Intel was expecting 10nm to be carrying more of the load, but with the process still not ready they're having to rely on 14nm more than they had planned. It's another consequence of their manufacturing issues.

This shortage will affect the 9000 series CPUs as well. At this rate, it will be another paper launch.

 

That doesn't make sense though - in this context they're specifically struggling to keep up with 14nm parts, not 10nm parts (they are struggling with 10nm too, but that's more due to simply having poor yields, rather than a shortage issue). They've been on 14nm for years, even before Ryzen, so if they have separate 10nm facilities that make products that offload demand from 14nm parts, how does this result in a shortage of 14nm parts?

But, I think @moo100times might be onto something about the Qualcomm contract. Qualcomm makes a lot of chips, and even though their designs aren't anywhere near as complicated as Intel's, I could definitely see how they might put a damper on Intel's own production.

 

All kinds of bad news for intel is good news. Intel has been amazing at fcking things up this year, keep on keeping on pls.

 

It makes perfectly sense alright. Intels chipset has reached 14nm node not to long ago, problem is they are already making cpu's at 14nm, we all know their cpu's should have been at 10nm years ago. Intel never planned to make both chipset and cpu's at the same process. The whole 10nm delay is basically causing a massive 14nm node clusterf*ck inside intel. They sinced moved some of their chipset back to an even older 22nm node.Its all blody lovely.

 

It's not just Qualcomm, but I believe a company called Ampere Computing that is using ARM cores in order to try and enter this market too. https://amperecomputing.com/
They are declaring pretty high performance for an ARM cpu in the server space as based on SPECint results, but how this actually correlates with real world productivity remains to be seen. I am still sceptical, particularly considering that Qualcomm has been at this for a while with limited success just trying to get a reasonable laptop processor, and other companies including AMD abandoned ARM chips for the server space in favour of their current designs which seem to be doing well. Also slightly suspicious is the lack of customers they are willing to announce despite the chips supposedly being released. Does that mean there aren't any...? Either way, let's see!

Edit: Seems they have 1 buyer - lenovo. Oracle owns 20% of them however and has so far not bitten. Interesting.https://www.networkworld.com/articl...essor-challenges-for-the-data-center.amp.html

 

Yeah, and as the article mentioned they've already put chipsets back on 22nm. So, that's not the only problem here.

 

Yes , this is happening here where i live , the brick and mortar stores have insanely increased the prices of Intel coffee lake and skylake cpus all of them too , i did not see this coming ...

 

THG goes over some of the reasons. Producing chipsets on 14nm was the start of it, but was exacerbated by other factors as well. Intel probably thought 10nm would be handling most of the load by now and didn't expand their 14nm capacity, which is now having to handle a bigger load than anticipated.

*EDIT* Also note that the 8000 series features larger die sizes (151 mm squared vs 125 mm squared). Not only would that lead to 20% less chips per wafer but also also less yields due to defects. This problem will only get worse with the 9000 series CPUs, which may be why Intel is keeping quiet about it despite all the supposed leaks.

 

Yeah i feel you Portuguese comrade. One CPU for one minimal wage, its crazy.

 

I think its quite clear to everyone that AMD fans are hands down far more emotionally invested and all one needs to do is check out any intel or nvidia related thread on this forum. Just look at all the fake news out there in recent months like how everyone was claiming AMD was dominating the data center market when in reality they went from 0.4% to 1.4%. And this series of articles are some of the most noteworthy. Claiming AMD has 50% of the market based on a single retailer who primarily sells AMD chips is so far off base that the term disingenuous is being kind. Then there are the conspiracy theorists in this thread which laughable. False claims, fabricated stories, and other such nonsense not based on fact is the kind of stuff you get when people are emotionally driven

 

That same chart shows the 8700K absolutely dominating sales in the beginning of the year. To claim that this retailer "primarily sells AMD chips" is laughable - where is your proof?

 

Mindfactory stats are a data-point. No reason to doubt or downplay them.

However, anyone using this single data-point (which itself is derived from a very small CPU segment -> DIY), to draw big conclusions, does so at its own peril.