Wednesday, July 2nd 2025
Intel Considers Abandoning 18A Node for 14A Chipmaking Process
Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan is looking at a big change to how the company makes chips for others, Reuters reports citing people who know about it. The new plan might mean Intel stops offering its 18A process technology to other companies. This is different from the strategy of the former CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who had invested heavily in the 18A manufacturing process. Since assuming leadership in March, Tan has been working to reduce costs and find new approaches to revive the struggling chipmaker. By June, he began expressing concerns that the 18A process was failing to attract new customers. Abandoning external sales of 18A technology and focusing on its 14A process would require Intel to take substantial write-offs on the billions invested in its development. Industry analysts suggest these charges could reach hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars.
Intel plans to show the board these options later this month. However, a final decision is not expected until this autumn given the complexity and financial stakes involved. Even if they change plans, Intel will still keep its promises about 18A process including producing small amounts of chips for Amazon and Microsoft, and making its own "Panther Lake" laptop processors scheduled for late 2025. Along with standard 18A, Intel is creating two upgraded versions: 18A-P launching in 2026 and 18A-PT arriving in 2028.
Intel posted an $18.8 billion net loss in 2024, marking its first unprofitable year since 1986. Tan's alternative strategy centers on concentrating resources on 14A technology, a next-generation manufacturing process where Intel believes it can compete more effectively against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). This approach aims to attract major clients like Apple and NVIDIA, who currently use TSMC for chip production. Intel declined to comment on what it termed market speculation, stating that leadership remains "committed to strengthening our roadmap, building trust with our customers, and improving our financial position."
Source:
Reuters
Intel plans to show the board these options later this month. However, a final decision is not expected until this autumn given the complexity and financial stakes involved. Even if they change plans, Intel will still keep its promises about 18A process including producing small amounts of chips for Amazon and Microsoft, and making its own "Panther Lake" laptop processors scheduled for late 2025. Along with standard 18A, Intel is creating two upgraded versions: 18A-P launching in 2026 and 18A-PT arriving in 2028.
81 Comments on Intel Considers Abandoning 18A Node for 14A Chipmaking Process
It dont even think they matched TSMC yet. They say they do, but talk is cheap. Lets see actual products and their performance.
TSMC has proven track record with their nodes. If they say they will make 40k wafers of N2 in 2H 2025 i believe them.
I dont believe anything Intel says until i see actual products made on 18A.On paper yes, but so was 20A until it was canned.That's Nvidia being lazy, but still asking top dollar.Zen 5 launched in 2024, August. It's nearly a year old product at this point. Zen 6 will use N2 in 2H 2026/1H 2027.Mix of 2nm and 3nm depending on the segment. CPU's and HPC GPU's will likely use 2nm while consumer GPU's will likely use 3nm.Not many of them if Celestial is made by TSMC and the graphics tile in Nova Lake is also made by TSMC.
Only Nova Lake's compute tile and Panther Lake are likely 18A candidates. I doubt any external customers will use 18A as there's nothing announced. By this time there would be something as these things are planned years ahead.
Even that would be progress considering Arrow Lake was entirely made by TSMC excluding the interposer made on old 14nm Intel 16 node.
Also, go look at the sources for Zen 6 on N2.
ComputerBase, which referenced a forum post at AnandTech...I bet you don't see N2 until 2027. N3 is expected.You are talking about how they hopped, as I noted, without fully developing the Intel 4 and Intel 3 nodes.
They were just doing the bare minimum to get to the goal with 18A. That's the only way they could catch up. I already made note of this. They never fully developed for mass production any of those nodes because they were just milestones on their way to 18A.Intel has already announced Microsoft, Amazon, and the DoD as customers.Intel 16 is Intel's old 22nm optimized for foundry work, with FinFet added. MediaTek and UMC both use this node, and Intel + UMC are partnering to make a 12nm node.
9070 XT is 304W TDP. RTX 5080 is 360W TDP.
That's TDP difference of ~18% and RTX 5080 is ~20% faster.
If there is efficiency advantage it is so miniscule it might as well be unnoticeable.
For someone playing at 4K that 20% means going from 50fps to 60fps. While being a whopping 2% more efficient...
Frankly Nvidia should be ashamed at phoning home Blackwell. Using expensive G7 memory and still not being noticeably ahead.
And they even managed to screw up drivers somehow.As if sources for 18A's supposed success are more reliable...We will see.Like i said before - until there are actual products we wont know if it's any good. Cost, yields, volume etc.
You are obviously ignorant of another well known fact : All of these GPUs get less and less efficient as you move up the performance stack. Comparing two different performance tier GPUs from different vendors for power efficiency is very misleading and disingenuous.
AMD does not have a 5080 competitor. At. All.
Power:
Performance:
In power. And performance.I just replaced an AMD GPU with Nvidia. Not because of small power / performance differences, because of better performance : price ratio, and much better support for AI and DLSS 4.
What he is saying is he’s not going on a buying binge for tooling (capital expenditure) until the node is ready for production and has enough volume to bring up new fab lines (which costs billions of dollars) Intel always does first production in either Oregon or Arizona development fab lines. Once volume is up and the process is smooth then they do their “copy everywhere” strategy of cloning that fab line out to the other factories.
In simpler terms, Intel is conserving cash, not canceling their future. At least not yet.
Again. I fail to see this supposed power efficiency advantage Blackwell supposedly has over RDNA4.
The 8% advantage in the image you provided could very well be caused by different AIB models having different characteristics.
Im going by the official numbers in TPU's GPU database.Since when is 9070 XT a 3nm chip? They're both 5nm class chips. The differences between 4N and N4P are pretty miniscule.
Also 5070 Ti has 39% higher memory bandwidth thanks to G7. Yet is only 4% faster. Like i said - embarrassing.
Recent testing even puts that 4% into question as some updates (other than just drivers) seem to have improved RDNA4 performance: