[nabla9]

I think Gelsingers plan is sound, but they have only one try left after they desired to skip 20A to save money. It's 18A or bust. If 18A is not success, Intel will drop out of manufacturing. If 18A does well, Intel is back making money next to TSMC.

So far 18A seems to be a success. Already sub-0.40 D0 defect density and launch at some time 2025Q3 and fully ramped up in 2026.

Fabs will bleed money 2024 and 2025, there is no way around it.

[KK7NIL]

20A was just a stepping stone to 18A, dropping it was more of a tactical than a strategic decision, I think people are reading too much into it.

[bgnn]

This is kind of normal in the industry too. Some nodes are skipped by the fabs, some are skipped by the customers even (TSMC 20nm, 7nm etc). If there's not much customer traction why bother.

[nabla9]

They skip the node means no customer demand an no incoming money. If 18A is merely meh, they run out of money, and 14A never happens. Someone else buys the assets and Intel will not compete with Samsung or TSMC.

[KK7NIL]

> They skip the node means no customer demand an no incoming money.

Not really, it also has to do with timing, fab space, extra cost of maintaining that node, etc. I don't want to get into details as I work on 20A/18A development but I'll say that they share the same major process, 20A is just an earlier version. So it's not like Intel is dropping the process, it's just deciding to put it into production later.

There's some more information here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/con...

[ac29]

20A was an internal only node, so the only potential "customer demand" was from Intel itself. If they are confident enough to release their 20A products on 18A instead, there is no real reason to keep 20A in development.