I read it and there wasn’t a lot of facts, but they say AMD is focusing on the high end chips and Intel is pricing their chips more competitively…doc
edit: I wonder what size die they use on the new XEON chips. I couldn’t find it
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The Xeon Sapphire Rapids product is composed of four “chiplets”, but unlike AMD they are too large for me to really call them chiplets. I have seen estimates that each chiplet is about 400mm^2, so with four of these there is a lot of silicon in one Sapphire Rapids unit. In addition, the “Xeon Max” version includes four stacks of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) so is even more expensive to produce.
As an aside, related to cost, Intel mentioned they have been using a 5 year depreciation cycle for capital. The existing “10nm” factories, which include Intel_7, have been in production for about 3 years so product cost still includes the full depreciation amount. OTOH, Intel 14nm factories are fully depreciated so those products are substantially cheaper to produce.
The expectation is when Intel starts shipping the first EUV products on Intel_4 and Intel_3 the wafer cost will be very high, so these products will have a very high cost structure. To help reduce this Intel has shifted to an 8 year depreciation cycle, which is pretty standard in the industry now.
Alan
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