Intel Puts The Process Horse Back In Front Of The Foundry Cart
It is beginning to look like Intel plans to milk the impending 18A manufacturing process for a long time. The 18A process is akin to a refined 2 nanometer process, which is funny because Intel never delivered a 2 nanometer process out of its fabs. In any event, 18A might stick around long enough for rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to open up some gaps again that give it a substantial advantage when it comes to etching silicon wafers if Intel can’t get outside customers for its future 14A process.
Intel famously flubbed its initial 10 nanometer and 7 nanometer processes, and that gave rival AMD the jump in the server CPU market and also meant that Intel could not field GPU accelerators that could compete against Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Intel skipped 5 nanometer and 4 nanometer processes, is using a mix of Intel 7 and Intel 3 (sorta like 3 nanometers) for the “Granite Rapids” Xeon 6 server processors.
It has been a rough ride for the Intel Foundry and the PC and server chip divisions of Intel that depend on it for manufacturing.
