There is no benefit of Pat's work thus far so giving him any credit right now is premature. All we know for the time being is that Pat keeps hyping the next big thing (right now it's 18A and Panther Lake/Nova Lake) and people keep defending him by saying that everything Intel has delivered since he stepped in as CEO was already decided before he took the helm.
Fine. I better not hear these excuses by December 2025. I mean it!
Rubbish. Pat has set Intel in a new direction that has a future. If not for him, Intel would be churning out 7nm wafers for the foreseeable future, Intel 4 would have launched in 2026, all their cpus would still be monolithic. And their entire future would have been reliant on TSMC. Turning around such a big sinking ship takes time and effort. And thanks to him, Intel is still alive and is able to compete a bit with competition. Apparently, it looks like it's fashionable to trash talk Intel these days.
18A is the big thing, while Panther Lake/Nova Lake are minor.
The only thing relevant is that Panther/Nova should be get more blocks built from intel foundry.
If they manage to build enough 18A capacity on time and
if they can bring the yields up, 18A can make one hell of a difference (but too many ifs as of now).
18A is the thing Pat has been hyping before Intel 4 was even in customer hands. It's the most important thing Intel has done (for Intel) for as long as I've been following hardware. It's the make-it-or-break-it measurement of his entire tenure as CEO. Everything between when he took office until 18A has been mostly projects already in the pipeline and him cutting costs to tread water.
18A is not simply "the next thing he's hyping". It will determine if he still has a job or not. He still has a job because the most important change he's enacted can't be measured until 18A launches.
Not just his tenure. It's a make-it-or-break-it moment for Intel itself. If 18A doesn't deliver on time, Intel as we know will cease to exist.
Agree.
I still wonder about this strategy though. Put everything on the line to pay for an exponentially more expensive and complex process. Hmm.
Lets say it works and 18A is all that and a bag of chips. It isn't like it is going to blow N2 out of the water like some historic Intel nodes have in the past. In fact, it will be better than N2 in some respects and worse in others from what I can gather. Still, the point remains, what then? Mortgage the company again for the next node which may be even more expensive?
Pat mentioned many times that bringing manufacturing in-house actually increases their margins. So, in some way, their own foundries tend to be more beneficial for them than shelling out billions of dollars to TSMC every year.
Apparently Daniel nenni from semi wiki think 18A is good from the sources he has inside industr
Got this from X but too interesting to let it go by: "The design service and design enablement is still fairly weak at Intel right now, but the technology is just way too good." He noted Samsung's MOL had issues, but no comments on TSMC.
semiwiki.com
Wow! Thats the first real big positive sign we've actually seen regarding 18A.
If 18a is that good, intel will get decent foundry orders. Then next nodes would be less harsh.
The real question would be if 18a can compete with n3 with quality+cost.
18A does not compete with N3. It competes with N2.
Come on. Intel is never leaping ahead of the fab industry again. The other competitors (mainly TSMC) gained wayyy too much experience and expertise during the languishing era of Krzanich.
There's no leaping ahead in terms of foundry profits. They clearly said they aspire to be second by 2030. But they can match the competition in terms of leading edge tech. In fact 14A will be the world's first High-NA node.