No good times for Intel at the moment. AMD still going
to take the lead in desktop processors while the 3990X
is going to invade Intel’s server and workstation market.
And now there’s a production shortage just ahead.

Intel’s Cascade Lake SP are delayed as HPE has stated to their customers. And it seems that this shortage will stay active till the end of 2020. Customers who want to upgrade their servers will either have to wait or switch to the older Skylake SP generation of processors.

The problem with Skylake however is that their 14nm process isn’t good while Cascade Lake is completely at 14nm allowing higher base clock speeds. Additionally Skylake has no additional protections against Spectre and Meltdown as well as they’re lacking support for VNNI (Vector Neural Network Instructions) that improves performance in KI calculations and is part of the new extension set of the AVX-512 (Advanced Vector Extension) instruction set.

As Intel has initially concentrated production on the Xeon processors (as their profit margin is way higher than with normal Desktop processors!), production shortage news only were about Consumer processors. It is said that the actual Comet Lake processor line (Core-i-i10000 series) are actually manufatured at Samsung as Intel has no more capacity to spare!

An indicator that Intel has underestimated AMD?