INTEL’S CEO, Pat Gelsinger, is an engineer, and when he got the job back in 2021, he had an engineer’s solution to the company’s floundering development schedule. He released a roadmap that promised five nodes in four years. The plan hasn’t gone entirely smoothly: that Raptor Lake refresh wasn’t part of the deal, Intel 4 barely made it on time, and both the 20A and 18A ‘Angstrom era’ nodes seem in the balance.
In a few weeks, we’ll have another roadmap. Intel plans to get a trillion transistors on a ‘package’ by 2030. The company still plans to jump to the cutting-edge in barely four years. This year, we’ll allegedly see Intel 3 in volume, with 20A production supposedly by the end of the year. Part of the strategy has always been to build chips for others. TSMC is about to move into serious 3nm volumes—the target is apparently 80 per cent of all production this year to be its second generation N3E chips. Apple pretty much bought the first generation for its A17 Pro and M3 processors.
Anyway, TSMC’s roadmap has been updated to 2030. It shows 2nm in 2025, 14A by around 2028, followed by 10A in 2030. It also talks of trillions of transistors on stacked packages, and up to 200 billion on a chip. Intel’s plans come courtesy of ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, the EUV 0.55 NA, which is what you need to really move into Angstroms rather than nanometers. Pundits don’t expect TSMC to switch for a while yet. If Gelsinger’s promises looked like hubris, the next 12 months will be the real test. If Intel can hit its targets, it could be the most advanced chip producer in the world. But failure could be existential for the firm.