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Intel was once the world’s largest semiconductor company, but its market cap plummeted in recent years as the chipmaker fell behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and spent billions of dollars trying to catch up.
Now, Intel has entered high-volume production of 18A, the new chip node it says will turn things around.
The biggest problem? Convincing a big chipmaker to trust Intel with manufacturing on the new node. For now, Intel’s only major customer is itself. The company’s long-awaited Core Ultra series 3 PC processor, code-named Panther Lake, will come to PCs in January as the first major product made on 18A.
“It’s become an internal node for now,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group. “So many companies have made such massive investments into TSMC to ensure yield, to ensure capacity wafers that they just will not make the switch just yet.”
