Intel's 18A 'hallelujah' moment is the biggest bet the company has ever made
Despite Intel seemingly already struggling to stick to its latest round of radical roadmap promises, what with Meteor barely making its 2023 launch window, here comes CEO Pat Gelsinger sextupling down on the whole «five nodes in four years» thing and admitting that the culmination of that relentless schedule is the biggest bet the company has ever made.
In an interview with Stratechery, Gelsinger is speaking specifically of 18A, the production process that qualifies as number five in Intel's accelerated roadmap. Intel 7 we already have in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs, Intel 4 arrives at the end of the year with Meteor Lake, then's there's 20A and last and most definitely not least, it's 18A.
Asked if 18A is Intel betting the company, Gelsinger was remarkably unequivocal. «Betting the entire company? I don’t know that I’d go all that way, but this is the biggest bet we have ever made as a company because it also puts incredible stress on the financials of the company,» he said, explaining that Intel is «racing through capital» as it chased its ambitious roadmap.
But why is 18A rather than any of the other landmarks along the way so important? Well, that's all about backside power or what Intel calls PowerVia, which in the simplest possible terms means supplying power to the transistors from below rather than above. Which kinda begs a «so what?» response. Well, here's what according to Gelsinger.
It comes down to the problems caused by feeding power down through the multiple layers of wiring and interconnects that sit on top of the transistors in a modern chip.
«When you look at a metal stack up and a modern process, leading edge technology might have fifteen to twenty metal layers. Metal one, metal two…and [then] the
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