TRADE CHAT
FIVE NEW CHIP PRODUCTION NODES in four years. That was Intel’s plan to get back to technology leadership. It has now added a new 1nm lithography node to its roadmap, due in 2027. But here’s the thing: in terms of products to buy, Intel has achieved little of its original plan. So, what’s going on?
First, we need to understand the true implications of Intel’s existing plan for new chip nodes. In reality, it added up to far fewer than five nodes. Officially, the new nodes in question are Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 3, Intel 20A, and Intel 18A.
Intel 7 is really just a rebrand and tweak of its existing and troubled 10nm node, Intel 3 is derived from Intel 4, and the same applies to Intel 18A in relation to Intel 20A. In which case, at the time of announcing that seemingly ambitious five-nodesin-four-years roadmap, Intel was only committing to two fully new nodes: Intel 4 and Intel 20A.
But it was still pretty bold, given Intel’s terrible recent track record with new silicon. Back in 2012, Intel was planning on unleashing 10nm CPUs as soon as 2015. In reality, it didn’t launch a truly commercial 10nm product until September 2019 with Ice Lake. It was then over four years before it released a CPU on the next truly new node, known as Intel 4, when its latest Meteor Lake mobile chips stumbled onto the market at the end of 2023.
But Meteor Lake only contains a slither of Intel 4 silicon. Most of the chiplets that make up a Meteor Lake CPU are produced by TSMC, not Intel. Only the compute tile is an Intel 4 chip, so you could say that all Intel has achieved since CEO Pat Gelsinger took over the company and rolled out the new plan, at least in terms of chips to buy, is a tiny volume of Meteor Lake CPU dies on that Intel 4 node.
Sure, there have been other CPU launches, including Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, but those didn’t get Intel any closer to delivering on that roadmap, based as they are on older 10nm tech. Here we are in 2024, and Intel has until the end of next year to deliver.
The picture gets even weirder when you consider Intel’s most recently revealed plans for its chip fabs. At the Intel Found
