So… bad news good news department. Intel appears to be skipping over the 20a process to put more focus on delivering 18a. Another story today revealed that Broadcom decided 18a wasn’t satisfactory yet and decided not to use it at this time either. May need an extra quarter (at least) to come ready. A third story here suggests that it will be 2027 before Intel sees “meaningful” revenue from the fab division. (I’m not sure whether that means “meaningful sales” or “sales that can offset the vast expenditures needed to scale up.”) It’s ugly weather for Intel Foundry, that’s what I’ll say.
Will TSMC be a beneficiary? Almost certainly – what other choices are there?
Will AMD be a beneficiary? Hard to say. Creates extra pressure at TSMC that might compete for capacity AMD could use. Unless it’s all bleeding-edge capacity and AMD is still aiming for one node behind Apple et alia. Could also create a delay in Arrow Lake that would improve AMD’s competitive position on the desktop. On the whole I’d say it’s a net win but others may dig deeper and draw a different conclusion.
In a surprise move, Intel announced today that it no longer plans to use its own ‘Intel 20A’ process node with its upcoming Arrow Lake processors for the consumer market. Instead, it will use external nodes, likely from partner TSMC, for all of Arrow Lake’s chip components. Intel’s only manufacturing responsibilities for the Arrow Lake processors will be packaging the externally manufactured chiplets into the final processor.
Intel says its crucial next-gen ‘Intel 18A’ node remains on track for launch in 2025. It has now shifted its engineering resources from 20A to the newer 18A node, which the company says was spurred by the strength of the yield metrics for 18A. Intel again noted that it had reached a sub-0.40 D0 defect density (def/cm^2) for 18A, a critical measurement of the yield rate for a process node. A process node is usually considered production-worthy and healthy once D0 reaches 0.5 or below.
It appears that Intel will now leapfrog over its 20A process entirely and avoid the capital expenditures required to bring the node to full production. Eliminating the always-eye-watering ramp costs of a new node, particularly one as advanced as 20A, will surely contribute to the company meeting its cost-cutting goals.
The Intel 20A node was never planned for many products due to the company’s fast-track move to the more advanced 18A node as it races to meet its goal of delivering five nodes in four years, so building out an extensive 20A production would have limited returns. However, Intel’s 20A served as a vehicle for several new advances, like RibbonFet Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology, which is Intel’s first new transistor design since FinFET arrived in 2011. It also marked the debut of the company’s PowerVia backside power delivery tech, which routes power for the transistors through the backside of the processor die.
The original plan for Intel_18A was production starts in H1 2025, and the current plan is production starts this year. Broadcom does continue to be a customer, but perhaps was surprised by the low yields on the immature process. This is where the INTC chiplet strategy really pays off as they are already getting acceptable yields on the small Intel_18A panther lake chiplet.
Intel started breaking out Intel foundry as a separate business unit a few quarters ago and the profitability (LOSS) number was staggering and surprising. For IFS Intel sets the price of wafers at what a similar wafer from TSMC would cost. Intel has said they expect IFS to be at break even in 2027.
We will see…
Alan
The most recent is Zinsner talking at the citi conference. Gelsinger mentioned the actual defect density at the Deutche bank conference. Plugging in the leaked Panther lake die size, and the stated DD I got around 65% yield for Panther Lake. This is good enough to start, but clearly a lot of work left to do. TSMC has said from first production to mature yields takes about three years on these modern process nodes.
On a related note, I’m out shopping for a new laptop. Meteor lake is everywhere. AMD Strix is VERY expensive. I can order lunar lake, but it is not available until mid October. I suspect Intel wants to maintain a one year cadence on client product introductions, so I expect Panther lake available about this time next year.
Let us know what you get for a client machine @alan81 – I’ve bought a few in the last 18 months or so, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 models for 2022, 2023 and 2024. All AMD CPUs, the latter two Nvidia graphics and the 2022 AMD discrete graphics. Slick machines, if you remove the Asus Armoury Crate power management app that seems to introduce some basic instability. An open source utility called GHelper can do 90%+ of what Armoury Crate does and is much lighter weight, more stable etc… The 2024 is often compared favorably to a Macbook in terms of slick packaging, fit and finish etc… The world seems to be divided into “people who love the G14s” and “people who didn’t replace Armoury Create with GHelper”…
That Asus looks like a great gaming machine, but I use a 2 in 1, so went with the lenovo yoga. As a 14" system it is smaller and lighter than my old 14" dell 2 in 1, and has 4x the memory, 2x the SSD, and something like 5X the cores. So far, I am happy with it. The migration process was much more difficult than expected as Microsoft only migrates their apps. It took some time to get Chrome back to “normal” and load up my steam games.
So, which model was that? Intel or AMD based? (EDIT: though I suppose the 5x cores means you had 4 cores before and now have 20, which makes this Intel?)
For my use I did not care about the GPU or CPU, however vendors continue to handicap the AMD machines. I wanted the features of the Yoga 9 versus the Yoga 7, which forces an INTC CPU. The AMD machine is also limited to 16GB of ram, and I wanted 32. The 32GB/1TB yoga 9 I purchased at best buy was $300 off which was a pretty good deal.
Alan
So then, this one - “Yoga 9i 2-in-1 14” 4K OLED Touchscreen Laptop with Pen - Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with 32GB Memory - 1TB SSD"? But that would only have 16 cores. From what I see none of the Core Ultra 7 mobile chips have 20 cores:
Yeah, that is the machine. I misremembered (???) the core count… I thought the new one only had 10 cores. I am moving up from a dual core machine. As I mentioned, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the CPU since it was such a huge upgrade from the old Dell. I just weighed it, at 2 lb. 15 oz. The 400nit display was important as well.
Ah, thanks. Looks like a good machine, though I’d never buy a Lenovo laptop again after my experience with the poor support of the Ideapad 5 Pro 16" with a 6 core AMD Ryzen 5600 “Creator Edition” I bought two years ago. My next machine will be an ASUS or a Dell in a few years.
