Intel Temporarily Suspends Shipments of Sapphire Rapids MCC, Impact on Q2 Shipments Limited

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Intel has recently discovered bugs in its Sapphire Rapids (SPR) Xeon Server CPU, which began mass production in 1Q23. In response, the company has temporarily suspended shipments and initiated testing on all affected products. TrendForce reports that the problematic model currently experiencing issues is the SPR MCC 32-Cores. The majority of affected customers are concentrated in the corporate sector, prompting Intel to proactively halt shipments of SPR MCC SKUs. Fortunately, other models such as the 20/24C and 36C and higher remain unaffected.

Further investigations reveal that the impact of this situation is limited. As enterprise server OEMs extend the support lifespans of older platforms, the adoption rate of SPR MCC has significantly slowed down in 2023. These latest CPU issues may also deepen concerns among corporate clients and reduce their willingness to adopt SPR. In terms of scale, the suspended shipments in 2Q23 account for less than 1% of the total volume of Intel DP server CPUs, resulting in a minimal impact on Intel’s server CPU shipment performance.

Server DDR5 platform issues arise, the projected penetration rate is only 13.4% for 2023

Overall, the adoption rate of DDR5 is still affected by clients extending the product cycles of older models and postponing the introduction of new models. TrendForce estimates that the adoption rate for server DDR5 in 2023 will be approximately 13.4%. Furthermore, it is expected that DDR5’s adoption rate will not surpass DDR4 until the end of 3Q24.