Intel’s future will be based on Intel 18a. Pat Gelsinger has said as much. If 18a is better than the competition, which it is projected to be, then their chips and their fab will be popular and Intel should recover well. If it is anything short of the best process Intel is in big trouble.
I am personally bullish on Intel long term under the current leadership, but man are they taking a beating.
Projected to be better by Intel and Intel alone. Intel has disclosed virtually no details of Intel 18A on any industry-standard metric: perf / W with an Arm core, transistor density; precise perf & density improvements over Intel 4, 3, and 20A.
TSMC is far, far more transparent than Intel—which is backwards. Intel is who needs more customers. Intel's silence on 18A's specifics is not inspiring.
Qualcomm resoundingly rejected Intel 18A, according to the Wall Street Journal, due to Intel missing multiple promised 18A milestones.
>Qualcomm, which designs chips and outsources manufacturing, wanted to work with Intel, and assigned a team of engineers to work toward making mobile-phone chips at Intel’s factories. It was particularly interested in a cutting-edge chip-making technology that Intel hopes will be the most advanced in the world by late next year.
>In early 2022, Intel’s foundry arm sent a delegation to Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters, where they met with CEO Cristiano Amon. Then Intel missed a June performance milestone toward producing those chips commercially. It missed another in December.
>Qualcomm executives concluded Intel would struggle making the kind of cellphone chips they wanted, even if it succeeded in making high-performance processors. Qualcomm told Intel it was pausing work while it waits for Intel to show progress, according to people involved in the discussions.
Without Qualcomm, Intel has only found one real customer after a half-decade of hype: UMC's design subsidiary Faraday is an "evaluation [sever] platform" with Arm Neoverse cores, while Microsoft is making a vague "custom" chip.
Faraday won't even sell those CPUs (it's an ASIC firm primarily) and Microsoft couldn't be bothered to give a single word of detail of what they are producing.
I'm not hopeful, yet, until someone actually ships a key product on Intel 18A.
I am personally bullish on Intel long term under the current leadership, but man are they taking a beating.