Re: The i845 chipset, for example, is made on .18u.
Only for the 845, and only for its north bridge, not the south bridge. The size of the 845 north bridge is approximately 50mm2, so about 600 fit on an 8" wafer. Subtract edge loss and assume yields are pretty good on such a tiny die and you can expect something better than 500 parts per wafer.
If Intel sells 30 million P4's next quarter, has 2/3 of the chipset market for P4 and sells nothing but 845 chipsets for P4, that will require about 40K .18 wafers per quarter, next quarter, as an absolute maximum.
You posted: Intel has many fabs, but only a few of them are producing CPUs on the latest processes. Right now Intel has 1) Fab 20 in Oregon on .13u, 2) Fab D2 in California on .13u, 3) Fab 22 in Arizona on .13u, 4) Fab 14 in Ireland on .18u, 5) Fab 11 in New Mexico on .18u, 6) Fab 12 in Arizona on .18u, and 7) Fab 18 in Israel on .18u.
Message 16734827
Intel's larger FABs process 8K to 12K wafers per week, and their smaller ones are about 6K wafers per week. So let's take an estimate as 7k average, or 49k per week (times 13 weeks = 637K wafers available per quarter).
In other words, with 7 .18 FABs (or .18 moving to .13), they have 637K wafers available for production. 40 of those 637 would be used for the i845 northbridge next quarter if Intel sells 30 million P4s, about 6.3% of FAB capacity on which any significant money has been spent since 1998 will be tied up. (remember that Celeron, PIII, and most Xeons use .25 chipsets and that Intel isn't the only chipset maker out there). The actual number of chipsets needed is probably quite a bit lower, but so is total FAB capacity, since they must continue to spend on the FABs to ramp them to compete with AMD. |
