| Scrapping 20A was an excellent decision. That CMOS fabrication process was intended for a single Intel product, the laptop CPUs Arrow Lake H, which will now be made by TSMC. The costs for bringing that process good enough for mass production would have never been recovered. It is much better to channel all resources to improving the fabrication yields of the superior 18A fabrication process, which is intended to be used for many important Intel products, including server CPUs, and also for any external customers they will be able to lure. While Intel has used a slogan like "5 nodes in 4 years", two of those were actually half nodes, i.e. "Intel 3" is an improved variant of "Intel 4" and "Intel 18A" is an improved variant of "Intel 20A". It would have been much better for Intel if they would have also skipped "Intel 4", but they were in a hurry to launch Meteor Lake before the end of 2023 and "Intel 3" would not have been ready for mass production by that time, and they were still not convinced that they must completely outsource the fabrication of their CPU chips until they have a competitive fabrication process. With some difficulties, Intel has succeeded until now to meet all their milestones toward their stated goal of having a competitive fabrication process, i.e. 18A, and competitive CPUs, by the end of 2025. The main thing that can be criticized about their roadmap is that it had included too many intermediate steps, with not yet competitive fabrication processes and CPUs, which have required nonetheless a lot of development efforts, slowing the progress towards the real goal. Nevertheless, it is likely that most of the intermediate steps have been unavoidable, because without new products for a couple of years their sales would have been even lower and their losses greater. Only if Pat Gelsinger would have remained CEO until that time (one year from now) it would have been possible to assess whether he has been a bad CEO or a good CEO. |