TAIPEI -- U.S. chip group Intel is on track to deliver five upgrades to its advanced manufacturing process in four years, CEO Pat Gelsinger said on Tuesday as the company faces pressure to reassure PC and server-making clients that its technology will remain competitive.
Speaking at Intel Innovation Day in Taipei, Gelsinger said the company's most advanced chip design, the 18A, will move into the test production phase by the first quarter of 2024.
"For 18A, we have many test wafers coming out at this moment," the CEO said. "The invention phase of the 18A is now complete, and now we're racing to production."
This production node represents Intel's big bet to reclaim semiconductor manufacturing leadership by 2025. The company also announced it will use this production technology to make chips for outside customers such as Ericsson, instead of using it only for its own products.
Its two biggest rivals, Samsung of South Korea and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., are racing to put their own most advanced chips into production in 2025. These 2-nanometer chips are seen as being at a similar level as Intel's 18A.
Gelsinger said his company has been aggressively pursuing its "five nodes in four years" plan since he returned to the company in 2021. It usually takes at least two years for a chipmaker to move forward to a new production node.
"Well, here we are," Gelsinger said. "Two and a half years into that journey and guess what? It's happening, we are on track to deliver five nodes in four years."
Intel's road map calls for pushing forward chip production technologies from Intel 7 and Intel 4 to Intel 3, Intel 20A and Intel 18A. The first two nodes have already gone into production, with the company's latest PC CPU, code-named Meteor Lake, based on Intel 4 technology.
Gelsinger said Intel 3, which will be used for its next generation of server and PC chips, is now at the "debug" phase and will also go into production next year.
Reassuring clients of its advanced chip manufacturing prowess will be crucial for Intel to maintain its dominant position in the PC and server industries as the AI era ushers in even more competition. Rivals such as Qualcomm, the U.S.'s biggest mobile chip developer, are looking to grab market share from Intel in the PC segment, while longtime client Apple has transitioned from using Intel's CPUs to its own for Mac computers.
Both Qualcomm and Apple use Arm-based infrastructure to design their CPUs for laptops, rather than Intel's X-86 infrastructure, which dominates the PC market.
Gelsinger said Arm-based computers have not played a particularly large role in the overall PC market despite being around for seven or eight years, with the exception of those from Apple. "But Apple is Apple," he said. "They control the ecosystem."
While he played down the threat posed by PC chip developers in the Arm camp, he also said he sees Arm-based chips as a big business opportunity for Intel to grow its foundry, or contract chipmaking, business. Intel has announced a multi-generation agreement with Arm to enable chip designers to build chips using Intel's 18A production technologies.
"Arm is now putting their leading-edge [chip] design on Intel 18A and finding very good power performance results from those designs," Gelsinger said. Around 75% of the leading-edge foundry logic customers are using Arm-based chip design blueprints, according to the CEO.
"Every Arm [chip design] licensee, I want them to become [our] foundry customers going forward," he said. "As a result, capturing Arm's [IP base] opens up a lot of business opportunities for our foundry."
AMD, another Intel competitor, is rapidly gaining market share in the server industry, another of Intel's pillars for profitability.
Intel's new PC CPU Meteor Lake, also known as Core Ultra, will enable "AI PCs," according to the company, and comes with neural processing units (NPUs) to run complex operations on notebook computers. The Intel Core Ultra and the company's latest server CPU, Xeon, for data centers, launch next month.
AI personal computers will be "the next defining moment for the PC industry," Gelsinger said. Two longtime clients, Acer and Asus, are among the early users of the new Intel CPU. Chairmen of both companies attended Intel's event.
This is Gelsinger's second visit this year to Taiwan, where Intel's two PC clients are based and where its important supply chain ecosystem is located. Executives of other decades-old PC and server suppliers, including Quanta Computer, Wistron and Inventec, also attended the event.
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