Funky fresh hardware sports a price tag that makes my eyes water—so some companies are considering firing up production on older product lines again. Rumours suggest that Intel is next.
Apparently, Intel plans to increase supply of its 10th, 12th, 13th, 14th generation CPUs—that’s everything from 2020’s Comet Lake up to the latest 2023 iteration of Raptor Lake. This news comes via a machine translation of Chinese-language outlet IT Home, which in turn spotted the scoop on ChannelGate, the public WeChat account of rumour and leak site BoBantang.
It doesn’t hurt to keep a pinch of salt at the ready for hardware rumours like this, but it also wouldn’t be a totally unsurprising move from Intel. For instance, Tom’s Hardware reported during this year’s Computex that Intel is already planning to release another iteration of its Raptor Lake chip next year. The company has also committed to making older CPUs ‘abundantly available’ and keeping DDR4 support alive.
Speaking of that last-gen support, a number of motherboard and memory module manufacturers at Computex also confirmed to Tom’s Hardware that they were considering shifting production back to DDR4 platforms.
Along similar lines, Jensen Huang has previously said, to address hardware shortages, Nvidia “could possibly” resurrect older GPUs (as well as “bring the latest generation AI technology to the previous generation”). As recently as this week, new production runs of Nvidia’s much-loved RTX 3060 finally hit the shelves in Europe, though the price is arguably still a bit high.
As for AMD, Ryzen chief David McAfee said at the start of the year that the company was looking to “reintroduce” older products in order to “satisfy the demands of gamers that maybe want that significant upgrade in their AM4 platform without having to rebuild their entire system.” We saw that come to fruition with the return of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D for DDR4 platforms.
I don’t doubt many a CEO would be delighted to wring out a little extra value from older hardware—if they can get the production line back up and running, which is no small feat in itself. David McAfee himself said that bringing back the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was “Very hard, actually.”
He went on to say that AMD essentially “had to kind of re-engineer, re-qualify, and rebuild that product in a way, so that it could migrate from that old process that really wasn’t around anymore to the newer process.”
Intel’s Comet Lake would potentially require dusting off the 14 nm fabrication process, while everything else rumoured to make a return uses 7 nm (or Intel 7). It’d be arguably pretty inefficient for Intel to have been holding onto outmoded process machinery for years, so re-engineering its chips as AMD has makes more sense.
Whether Intel feels that’s worth the effort, though, time will tell with this particular rumour.
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