Another one bites the dust. , Intel's customer foundry business could largely give up on its all-important 18A node. Instead, Intel will retain 18A as an internal node for chips like its and shift the focus to promoting its 14A for external customers.
If true, this follows Intel's , along with limited roll outs of Intel 4 and Intel 3 (Intel has never and likely will never make any consumer CPUs on those nodes). As things stand, you have to go back to 10 nm, rebranded Intel 7, to find a node that the company used across its full portfolio of enterprise and consumer chips. In the meantime, Intel has been paying Taiwanese foundry TSMC to make CPUs like its Lunar Lake laptop and Arrow Lake desktop chips.
For now, this all remains a rumour. Moreover, Reuter's track record when it comes to Intel's operations [[link]] isn't exactly flawless. The , something which has yet to materialise.
However, it's certainly true that Intel has yet to announce a healthy list of customers for 18A, with the company has been able to tout. As the months [[link]] and indeed years tick by, that surely becomes more problematic.
By now, the assumption is that most customers for next-gen [[link]] cutting edge nodes will have decided between Intel's 18A node and TSMC's upcoming N2 node. The fact that Intel hasn't been able to announce significant contracts for 18A certainly doesn't bode well.
The question then becomes one of Intel's ability to deliver a future node customers do want. As things stand, and for whatever the reasons, be it the quality of its nodes or the tools it provides to customers to use those nodes, Intel hasn't been able to convince many chip designers to use Intel 4, Intel 3, Intel 20 and now, it seems, Intel 18A. So, the emphasis moves to 14A.
At some point, however, you have to think Intel needs a win. It can't keep investing billions in new nodes that get limited or no use. For years now, we've been told that 18A is all important. . If it turns out 18A isn't all it was cracked up to be, it's hard to see how that isn't a major problem for Intel.

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