Thursday, September 5th 2024
Intel 20A Node Cancelled for Foundry Customers, "Arrow Lake" Mainly Manufactured Externally
Intel has announced the cancellation of its 20A node for Foundry customers, as well as shifting majority of Arrow Lake production to external foundries. The tech giant will instead focus its resources on the more advanced 18A node while relying on external partners for Arrow Lake production, likely tapping TSMC or Samsung for their 2 nm nodes. The decision follows Intel's successful release of the 18A Process Design Kit (PDK) 1.0 in July, which garnered positive feedback from the ecosystem, according to the company. Intel reports that the 18A node is already operational, booting operating systems and yielding well, keeping the company on track for a 2025 launch. This early success has enabled Intel to reallocate engineering resources from 20A to 18A sooner than anticipated. As a result, the "Arrow Lake processor family will be built primarily using external partners and packaged by Intel Foundry".
The 20A node, while now cancelled for Arrow Lake, has played a crucial role in Intel's journey towards 18A. It served as a testbed for new techniques, materials, and transistor architectures essential for advancing Moore's Law. The 20A node successfully integrated both RibbonFET gate-all-around transistor architecture and PowerVia backside power delivery for the first time, providing valuable insights that directly informed the development of 18A. Intel's decision to focus on 18A is also driven by economic factors. With the current 18A defect density already at D0 <0.40, the company sees an opportunity to optimize its engineering investments by transitioning now. However, challenges remain, as evidenced by recent reports of Broadcom's disappointment in the 18A node. Despite these hurdles, Intel remains optimistic about the future of its foundry services and the potential of its advanced manufacturing processes. The coming months will be crucial as the company works to demonstrate the capabilities of its 18A node and secure more partners for its foundry business.
Source:
Intel
The 20A node, while now cancelled for Arrow Lake, has played a crucial role in Intel's journey towards 18A. It served as a testbed for new techniques, materials, and transistor architectures essential for advancing Moore's Law. The 20A node successfully integrated both RibbonFET gate-all-around transistor architecture and PowerVia backside power delivery for the first time, providing valuable insights that directly informed the development of 18A. Intel's decision to focus on 18A is also driven by economic factors. With the current 18A defect density already at D0 <0.40, the company sees an opportunity to optimize its engineering investments by transitioning now. However, challenges remain, as evidenced by recent reports of Broadcom's disappointment in the 18A node. Despite these hurdles, Intel remains optimistic about the future of its foundry services and the potential of its advanced manufacturing processes. The coming months will be crucial as the company works to demonstrate the capabilities of its 18A node and secure more partners for its foundry business.
72 Comments on Intel 20A Node Cancelled for Foundry Customers, "Arrow Lake" Mainly Manufactured Externally
Depends on what they mean "primarily" of course. Until now they have said cores chiplet is Intel and 20A.
Newer node will be better, but if things go as they are now - you will just see a bit higher performance with the same "maxed out" voltages and power usage.
Why ?
Because it sells (and most don't care about power usage or to run CPUs in their perf/power sweet spot).
serious blow In my confidence they would be ok, they are worse than Samsung at the moment
That's the good scenario.
The bad scenario takes in consideration the fact, Broadcom not being enthusiastic about Intel's manufacturing in it's current phase and also seeing Intel "relying on external partners for Arrow Lake production" instead of moving it to it's own 18A manufacturing node. That probably means that Intel, not just Broadcom, is still unsure about 18A quality or scheduling. Until Intel comes out with a mass producing product at 18A, their manufacturing will continue being a huge question mark, years behind TSMC and even Samsung.
I'm sure there are some differences in perspective from different partners in the food chain here.
Interesting :) Then again the writing was on the wall, when Intel roadmaps something, its really just an educated guess that everyone knows they won't deliver on.
The fact of the matter remains that no processor that was potentially affected should have ever shipped to a customer, even, if not particularly considering that Intel was aware that they were functional and could "potentially" become a problem down the line. In my opinion, the company should've relabeled all known potentially affected samples as "Intel Confidential" qualification samples with the ES bit set and handed that batch out to just about anyone in the tech field in an unusually generous grant program, really, just give them out like candy instead, at least they could make the disaster into a ton of good will with the community at large, waive any liability and avoid a lot of heat and negative press. Even if most ended up on Aliexpress down the road, it wouldn't have been as bad of a headache to deal with, since it'd all be "under the rug" and "on the down low", plus if anyone said anything they could wash their hands claiming they were ES chips not intended to be marketed or sold to end users and "any issues never affected production units, <insert boilerplate standard statement about ES chips>" yada yada.
You have to purchase a late-2022 early production run chip manufactured at a very specific plant where the problem occurred at the time to be affected by it, early 2023 chips should already be immune. My i9-13900KS is mid-2023 production unit and it's been stable throughout this entire ordeal, although I have run it with a minor undervolt from day one.
They never planned Arrow Lake for being on their own internal Intel 20Å (at least not internally and in secret), but it was already designed to be exclusively TSMC-sourced.Except that the very difference in regards to Intel here is, on others like Samsung and TSMC, it's rather imminently communicated quickly, publicly and fully transparently, instead of being sit out and kept shut about for two years straight …Right … And the via-oxidation-issues are proven to totally not help increasing the impact of the other voltage-related disasters and speed up electro-migration.At least we can agree on that, chap! Fair enough.That would've required to have someone with a brain over there in the first place, to engage in such clever actions. You do know that we're talking about Intel here after all, right?
Intel … a degrading shop already way over the hill (after being the king of it in previous times for way too long), which apparently loves to constantly shoot themself in the foot and immediately after, trigger-happily looks down the barrel on purpose again, for finding out how the previous blow-up and fall-out afterwards could happen.