Looks like Intel has quietly killed the 20A process, announcing that no Arrow Lake chip will use its first Angstron Era node
Intel has rather quietly announced that its upcoming Arrow Lake line of processors will not be the poster child of its 20A node after all, and will instead be entirely based on external foundry nodes. That effectively concludes work on the node and presumably cedes all Intel's next-gen chips to TSMC. These are worrying times for Intel, anyone associated with Intel, and, well, anyone who actually wants to see the PC market grow.
The announcement came in a press release it put out yesterday announcing 'Continued momentum for Intel 18A' which is seemingly coming at the expense of Intel 20A. Paul from Tom's Hardware gave us the heads up about it, while our Jacob was out at an Intel event with them.
Covering the essential cancellation of the 20A node in an upbeat release proclaiming the momentum of a node that is already having its own rumoured problems is probably as close to the dictionary definition of PR damage control as you're going to get in the tech market. For reference Intel 18A is in the testing phase right now, with wafers going out to Intel Foundry partners for evaluation. One of those partners, Broadcom, is reportedly not happy with its current progress, so says sources talking to Reuters about it.
So, maybe Intel's 18A node needs some help.
For its part, however, Intel is remaining bullish about the apparent success of 18A as a node in production.
«We have seen positive response across our ecosystem,» says Intel's VP of technology development, Ben Sell, «and are encouraged by what we’re seeing from Intel 18A in the fab. It’s powered on and booting on operating systems, healthy, and yielding well—and we remain on track for launch in 2025.»
All good then, no worries here. In fact it's all going so swimmingly that Intel doesn't really need to release an interim node and can skip over that letting another foundry make the silicon for its next chips…
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