Intel 3 Represents an Intel Foundry Milestone(eetimes.com) |
Intel 3 Represents an Intel Foundry Milestone(eetimes.com) |
The next CMOS processes that are being developed by Intel, i.e. 20A, 18A and 14A will be considerably different, by making transistors where the gate surrounds completely the channel.
Only after Intel does that successfully they can claim to have reached again parity with the best at CMOS manufacturing.
It is not clear whether the first such process, 20A, is still intended to be used for any commercial product.
When 20A was first announced, it was said that it will be used to manufacture Arrow Lake, starting in the second half of this year.
Meanwhile, Intel has decided to retarget Lunar Lake (Q3 2024), Arrow Lake S (Q4 2024) and Arrow Lake (Q1 2025) to some "3 nm" TSMC processes, outsourcing thus their production.
The successor of Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, Panther Lake (H2 2025) is said to use the 18A CMOS process, bringing back to Intel the production of consumer CPUs.
This may mean that the 20A CMOS process will be skipped completely for commercial products, after being used only for batches of test chips, needed to develop the new technology, which is the basis for the improved 18A and 14A processes.
> What Intel accomplished was a major process node transition from Intel 4 to Intel 3 in less than a year with the next two processes nodes, Intel 20A and Intel 18A, scheduled to enter production by the end of 2024.
This is quite hard for a layperson to follow, am I correct that the process sequence is:
Intel 7 -> Intel -> 4 -> Intel 3 -> Intel 20A -> Intel 18A -> ?
Is there logic to the naming?
Which I think is ironic as AMD has been more accurately reporting TDP (Intels measurement of that metric is their expected average, where AMDs is actually peak).
I think they're scared about what happens when we get passed nanometers, even though they're not claiming nanometers it's clear thats what they're trying to evoke, and they're assuming they can go smaller, so that's where the "A"s (meant to closely resemble "Angstrom" without actually saying it) come from.