$INTC (+1.8%) There is no end to Intel's misery, because shortly after CEO Pat Gelsinger left the company, reports point to an enormously high defect rate in the Intel 18A process, in which Panther Lake will actually be manufactured next year.

Intel wanted to invest a total of more than 100 billion US dollars in advanced chip factories in order to seriously compete with TSMC $2330 serious competition with TSMC and to produce chips for giants such as $NVDA (+2.01%) Apple $AAPL (+1.34%) and Qualcomm $QCOM (+2.48%) in the future. These plans have already come to a standstill due to the company's financial difficulties, as the group has already put its plans for a chip factory in Magdeburg on hold. Mass production using the Intel 18A process (1.8 nm) was nevertheless due to start at the beginning of 2025, and the first processors manufactured using this process are said to have been ready for production as early as August.

Finding customers could prove difficult, however, as Reuters reports that a test run with Broadcom $AVGO (+0.31%) failed. Broadcom engineers are said to have examined an initial wafer manufactured using the Intel 18A process and concluded that the process was not yet ready for mass production. This is mainly due to the enormously high defect rate - according to information from Chosun the production yield is currently less than 10 percent, which means that more than 9 out of 10 chips produced have defects. This not only reduces production capacity by the same factor, a high defect rate also has a huge impact on costs.

Officially, Intel maintains that Intel 18A is ready for production and achieves a "good" yield; mass production is scheduled to start next year as planned. As Intel currently has most of its own products, such as Lunar Lake, manufactured by TSMC, it is unclear whether the company will be able to find enough customers to fill all its factories. Not least because it takes a lot of capital to port a chip from production at TSMC to another process at Intel and, according to Reuters, it takes around three months before the first wafer can roll off the assembly line - too long to risk coming to the conclusion, like Broadcom, that the process is not (yet) suitable for its own purposes.

Sources Reuters, Notebookcheck