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"There's been a lot of rumors out there that 18A isn't going well. And then I've seen the diehard Intel defenders say it's going great. Look, I've heard mixed things from people at Intel. Full disclosure. Some of them say it's going well. Some of them say they have no uh reliability that 18A is going to be good. But I'm going to use Occam's Razor here and say if Intel is only using 18A for the like non ultra like non-branded mega budget entry stuff, I don't think that tells me that 18A is going well at all. I mean, I would have thought they'd at least use it for the i3 budget configuration, but doesn't seem like it everybody."
My take: If Intel Products won't back 18A in any meaningful way, it's another nail in the coffin of advanced node development at Intel in the USA. Sadly. But I understand why it's happening: Intel can transition to fab lite, (which is where they are today), eventually they will stop the huge expense of advanced node development, shed the fabs, and survive, while Samsung and TSMC can't do that. Intel has a relatively graceful survival option. The only flaw is it runs counter to National Security, which it absolutely does. But National Security is a separate topic from survival.
My take: If Intel Products won't back 18A in any meaningful way, it's another nail in the coffin of advanced node development at Intel in the USA. Sadly. But I understand why it's happening: Intel can transition to fab lite, (which is where they are today), eventually they will stop the huge expense of advanced node development, shed the fabs, and survive, while Samsung and TSMC can't do that. Intel has a relatively graceful survival option. The only flaw is it runs counter to National Security, which it absolutely does. But National Security is a separate topic from survival.
Do you really think Intel has a chance against Nvidia and AMD as a design only house? Not to mention the dozens of start-ups gunning after Nvidia or the cloud companies making their own chips?
Do you really think Intel has a chance against Nvidia and AMD as a design only house? Not to mention the dozens of start-ups gunning after Nvidia or the cloud companies making their own chips?
I don't think so. I'd rather have two competitors than 200, and have the whole country cheering you on. I also can't think of one Intel chip design that I'd put in a leadership position.
IMO, Intel needs to figure out how to be a profitable competitive foundry. I don't think there's any other worthwhile future.
Do you really think Intel has a chance against Nvidia and AMD as a design only house? Not to mention the dozens of start-ups gunning after Nvidia or the cloud companies making their own chips?
We're finding out that no, they can't. The Intel 7 stuff outsells the tile stuff which is all TSMC. People want the monolithic Intel products at the lower price points. Nevertheless, the Nova Lake strategy doubles down on TSMC. Time will tell I guess.
MLID in his typical fashion looks for the juicy take of this being more of “18A is bad” news. But what if we look at the whole game in context:
You have Intel still going full in on flagship mobile products in Panther Lake for end of 2025 early 2026, and AFAIK there is no news that Intel is outsourcing any datacenter CPUs. Is this just that 18A has a plan for fab capacity and ramping and the big client desktop chips weren’t a part of it? If 18A was in real trouble you would have already been long hearing that Diamond Rapids among others were taping out on TSMC as well.
Yeesh, it must be a pressure cooker in Intel right now. LBT needs to somehow convince whatever employees are left to put their heads down and focus and tune out the noise. Not sure that works when your coworkers are being let go left and right and the stock price is in free fall. At least shares have big upside now
