Intel (INTC-US) announced today (25) that it will cooperate with MediaTek (2454-TW) established a strategic partnership to shock the market; MediaTek only joined TSMC last year (2330-TW)(TSM-US) The third largest customer, the “iron coffee” for its foundry services, will bring a lot of pressure to TSMC as Intel is stepping forward and aggressive.
According to a survey by research firm statista, TSMC’s top three customers last year were Apple (AAPL-US), accounting for 25.4%, Super Micro (AMD-US) 9.2% and MediaTek 8.2%. After MediaTek originally ranked fifth, it quickly rose to third last year; however, before the third largest customer position was hot, it announced that it would transfer to Intel with a 16-nanometer process.
Intel did not disclose when it will start shipping MediaTek chips produced by the Intel 16 process, only that the finalization of customer chip designs will be completed this year, and the initial capacity increase will start early next year. As MediaTek gradually increases the number of wafers in Intel, the number of TSMC wafers may continue to decrease.
After Intel stepped into the foundry field last year, it announced that it had won orders from two major customers, Qualcomm and Amazon Web Services (AWS), forming an “American alliance”. However, Qualcomm (QCOM-US) Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala said in June this year that he was considering allowing Intel to manufacture chips as a foundry. Obviously, the cooperation between the two parties has not yet been finalized; Huida (NVDA-US) stated in March this year that it intends to cooperate with Intel to produce chips by its foundry. Intel also confirmed that the two sides are negotiating, but it is still nothing.
Since Intel’s current potential major customers include Super Micro, Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc., all of which are Intel’s direct competitors in the chip field, they may be relatively conservative and cautious regarding relying on Intel to manufacture chips; however, MediaTek and Intel have become strategic partners. Equivalent is the first index customer that does not have direct competition with Intel and chooses to cast the Intel camp, which is particularly concerned by the market.
Intel hopes to join the film production through MediaTek to significantly expand its production capacity, so as to train its troops on the foundry service (IFS). Although MediaTek currently only uses its 16nm and other mature process foundries, the industry believes that Intel will use the foundry service (IFS). Through the cooperation with MediaTek, the learning curve of the advanced process is shortened, and the technical strength can be quickly accumulated to catch up with the layout of TSMC and Samsung in the advanced process.
On the other hand, Intel has seized the major customer MediaTek this time, and is also retaking Apple’s order layout for the future. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger publicly expressed his determination to win back Apple’s orders in October last year, and he did not even rule out contract manufacturing for it. In terms of yield rate, I am afraid that it has to surpass the high specification level established by TSMC first.
