VR-Zone has printed some roadmaps that begin to tell the story about the woes of Intel’s 14nm Broadwell line. SemiAccurate has been following this story for a while and there is more to it than the roadmaps suggest.
The first part of the story is the obvious, as VR-Zone shows, Broadwell is realistically a 2015 product now. On the raw news side it does appear that Intel will meet its goal of 2H 2014 for Broadwell shipments, but only technically. It will be shipping ULV and ULS variants of the line in the waning days of 2014 so that meets their stated goals. Technically but not functionally, our sources say that the quantities of those parts will be a trickle for a while, not enough for a MacBook Air but enough for any other ultrabook type device, but likely only one. This is the backhanded way of saying that category is moribund.
Intel is promising February for the 2C variants of Broadwell on paper but our sources say that they are not going to have realistic quantities for OEMs until March at the earliest. Similarly the July 2015 dates for the 4C variants are not seen as high quantity at first, this is dire news for a CPU that should have been out in January of 2014. 18 months means that by the time Broadwell 4Cs are out, Sky Lake should have been very close to replacement. Chips tend to age about as well as fish and 18 months is well past the tolerable point.
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Disclosures: Charlie Demerjian and Stone Arch Networking Services, Inc. have no consulting relationships, investment relationships, or hold any investment positions with any of the companies mentioned in this report.
Charlie Demerjian
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