On December 18th, the blogger of the Semiwiki Forum, Daniel Nenni, stated that Intel will close its foundry business.
Daniel Nenni pointed out that after Intel announced the official closure of the foundry business in the Semiwiki forum, he received a lot of e-mail inquiries, but he thought the news was not surprising to him because he believed that Intel's foundry The business was a wrong idea from the beginning.
He explained that Intel's provision of its manufacturing services to fabless would distract Intel's core competitiveness in manufacturing microprocessors. The ecosystem is everything in the foundry business, closely linked to time, capital and technology, and Intel seems to have greatly underestimated these three things.
Daniel Nenni cited an example. He believes that Altera is the biggest beneficiary of Intel's custom foundry business. Before Altera handed the foundry order to Intel, Altera was doing foundry in TSMC. After TSMC provided the foundry service for Xilinx, Altera's relationship with TSMC deteriorated. Later, Altera handed over its 14nm wafer foundry order to Intel, and was eventually acquired by Intel at a high price.
Daniel Nenni said that Intel's 14nm chip for Altera can be said to be the first product of Intel's 14nm process line. Intel has made several delays in its own 14nm process and prioritized Altera's 14nm chip. Because Intel's 14nm FPGAs outperformed Xilinx 16nm in terms of density and performance, Altera's 14nm chips became a very competitive product at the time.
As of now, Intel has not issued an official comment on the report.
