Analysts appear to be bullish about the potential of Intel’s future 14A process node. Describing it as “the real deal,” Patrick Moorehead, chief analyst at Moore Insights and Strategy, says that because Intel has laid so much groundwork with its 18A nodes, its 14A one should get off to a flying start.
Intel has had a tough time in recent years. It fell behind AMD in the consumer and enterprise CPU space, its graphics cards have struggled to gain traction, and it can’t find customers for its latest 18A node. But it has secured investment and backing from Nvidia and the US government, and it’s convinced Apple to use its fabrication facilities to produce future M-series chips. Now, analysts believe its process nodes could be real game changers.
“From everything I’ve seen—and all the Intel customers I’ve talked to—I’m very confident that Intel will use 18A to successfully produce tens of millions of leading-edge chips in the Panther Lake family and beyond in the near term,” Moorehead said (via PCGamer). “I believe 18A can stack up against any production node in its class in the world, so it really is getting Intel back to industry leadership.”
Credit: Intel
That’s big news for Intel’s 18A node, which is cutting-edge—equivalent to the best TSMC can put together—but it’s largely unproven, and there are no major customers stacked up to buy it just yet.
To Moorehead, though, it’s simple. Since Intel’s built it, the customers will come. And once they’re there, they’ll be on the hook for the even-better 14A node.
“That’s further toward the horizon for volume production,” Moorhead says of 14A. “But it has an increased likelihood of success because of the great work already done on 18A and 18A-P. Intel customers I’ve talked with who have seen this one say that 14A is the real deal.”
Indeed, it needs to be. Intel CEO Lip Bu-Tan has shifted the company’s efforts from the 18A node to the 14A one, and claims that it’s putting most of its eggs in that basket. So much so that he’s suggested that if Intel can’t make a commercial success of 14A, that might be the last process node it develops.
If the 18A node is as good as they say, that’s great news for Intel (and hardware fans), but it’s still unproven. Whether it will become so in time remains to be seen.