It seems as if Intel still is in need of 14nm fab capacity
and thus has reopened it’s 14nm chip fab in Costa Rica
where also the Pentium III had been fabbed years ago.
However it’s unclear why Intel doesen’t focus on 7nm.

AMD on the other side is running wild on 7nm and their processor lineup is quite impressive. Even with the recently appearing 4800HS in 3DMark it clearly shows what a shrinking of structure size can result in. The Ryzen 7 4800HS is a mobile workstation processor with the speed of almost a Ryzen 7 3700X Desktop processor which is already a really fast beast!

So it’s just astounding that Intel still keeps fabbing in 14nm. One could think that Intel still doesn’t have the necessary yield on 100nm(++) to compete with AMD and thus tries to compensate with 14nm processors. With the reopening of the Costa Rica Fab, Intel runs 4 fabs at 14nm: China, Malaysia, Vietnam and now Costa Rica.

The question also is, what’s up, Intel? Still no luck in 7nm or even output yield rate increase on 10nm(++)?

Intel already looses ground on their domain market, the server market. The Xeon processors are expensive and seem to be way slower than their AMD counterpart, the recently presented EPYC. Companies already seem to switch to AMD servers as they offer more power for the buck.

So if Intel still keeps dawdling like that, they’re gonna lose the race.