Intel will reportedly outsource 14nm production to TSMC to alleviate supply issues

It looks like Intel hitting the limits of their 14nm manufacturing capacity, preventing the company from manufacturing enough of their products to meet consumer demand. 

While in some ways this is a good thing (it is nice to sell every CPU you manufacture), Intel knows that this pent-up demand from OEMs and system builders will inevitably force customers to turn to AMD, securing their competition design wins and increase their revenue to by delivering them increased sales volumes.   

This problem cannot be solved by building new fabs, as such a process will take to long to implement and will ultimately leave Intel with too much 14nm capacity when 10nm processors eventually come to market. Surely there is another way to increase Intel’s 14nm production volumes, right? 

DigiTimes has reported that Intel plans to outsource some of their 14nm chip production to TSMC, freeing up some of the company’s in-house 14nm production capacity for the creation of high-value silicon. This means that Intel will likely be using TSMC/s 16nm or 12nm product nodes. 

It is likely that Intel will outsource the production of their 300 series chipsets, as these products will be relatively unimpacted by the node change, at least when compared to Intel’s Core processors. Moving Intel’s CPU designs to TSMC would be a challenging task due to their design complexity, whereas Intel’s chipset will not be impacted by the node shift in a noticeable way. At worst, TSMC-made Intel chipsets will consume a little extra power.