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According to DigiTimes, Intel has switched course on its 14nm deployments, and is now preparing to hold off on product launches until Q4 of this year. We recommend taking this rumor with a grain of salt — DigiTimes’ oft-quoted “industry sources,” have been spectacularly wrong at least as often as they’ve been right — but Intel’s own comments on the matter have fallen short of a complete denial.

We reached out to Intel PR and were told the following:

“We continue to make progress with the industry’s first 14nm manufacturing process and our second generation 3-D transistors. Broadwell, the first product on 14nm, is up-and-running as we demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum in Q3’13. We’re now planning to begin production this quarter with shipments to customers later this year.”

No one doubts that Intel is currently building Broadwell chips; the company has said as much. The market is rather concerned, however, about whether Intel is going to be shipping those chips in the not-too-distant-future.

Hurting an already slumping market

A Broadwell delay at this juncture could hit the entire PC market hard. As PC sales have slumped, industry analysts have looked to Intel for reassurance that the long-term technology picture is still rosy. Intel’s continued execution of its 14nm roadmap and its plans for future nodes are more important than ever. Delaying Fab 42 in Arizona wasn’t necessarily a problem, because it didn’t challenge the idea that 14nm was still on the way — just the locations at which Intel would deliver it.

With PC replacement cycles slowing, OEMs are hungry for next-generation technologies that bring x86 power consumption more in-line with tablets and drive thinner, lighter form factors. Pushing Broadwell back would hurt that narrative. It gives TSMC and GlobalFoundries more time to ramp their own 20nm production, gnawing away at Intel’s nearly two-year lead time on next-generation foundry technology.

A 14nm slip now could push back Intel’s plans for a massive push into the tablet business in 2014 and gives ARM devices that ship on 20nm this year a potential leg up on performance-per-watt comparisons. Granted, these are only possibilities — we don’t expect to see shipping 20nm SoCs until the back half of the year, for one thing — but by pushing x86 to 14nm in the front half, Intel was stealing a march on the ARM businesses by positioning itself as the early technology leader.

Under ordinary circumstances, we’d call this kind of miss a relatively simple technological issue. Next-generation lithography, after all, is hard and getting harder, with spiraling costs and unattractive scaling rates. Right now, though, an Intel delay could whack virtually every OEM and PC manufacturer in the market. It’ll be interesting to see if AMD gets punished for this as well — Rory Read pointedly split with Intel during the last conference call, when he projected that the APU side of AMD’s business could still decline by as much as 10%, versus Intel, which predicted a mostly flat market.

Absent a stronger denial from Intel, we’re inclined to think there’s some truth to this. And that’s enough to make the market awful jittery.