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Today, Intel released its second quarter 2024 financial report. Not only did it turn from profit to loss, but its revenue and profits did not meet market expectations. Its net loss reached US$1.654 billion. At the same time, the third quarter performance guidance provided was also lower than market expectations, resulting in a sharp decline in its stock price.

Industry analyst Patrick Moorhead revealed that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger admitted in the earnings call that Meteor Lake had some production problems, more precisely, the problems came from yield or back-end production, which negatively affected Intel's profit margins when producing chips.

It is understood that there is a huge demand for Meteor Lake in the market, and Intel is forced to produce it in a "hot lots" manner, that is, mass-producing the highest priority chips and moving them to the front of the production line so that they can be packaged as soon as possible. Although this is a good sign of strong demand, this approach will increase overall production costs because some other wafers must be returned so that Meteor Lake can get through.

The yield rate issues related to Meteor Lake come from the only part of the manufacturing process that Intel is responsible for, that is, the computing module manufactured using Intel 4 process. Under normal circumstances, if a single process node has multiple chips, the production cost can be spread out, thereby reducing the overall operating cost. Unlike other processes such as Intel 7, currently only Meteor Lake in Intel's product line uses Intel 4 process, which is a dedicated part. In addition, the accelerated production to meet market demand has further pushed up costs and affected profit margins.

Intel also previously stated that insufficient packaging capacity also affected the supply of Meteor Lake.