Intel “Tick Tock” Alive Again, Company Announces New Intel 18A Node (1.8 nm Class)

The “tick tock” product development cycle, which enabled Intel to develop a new silicon fabrication node every alternating year, a new microarchitecture every alternating year, and interleaving the two in such a way that each new microarchitecture is built on two successive nodes, and each node is used for building two succeeding microarchitectures, is back. The company has, for the first time in over 6 years, mentioned the tick-tock development cadence in its Investor Day presentation.

When laying out its upcoming foundry nodes following the current Intel 7 (10 nm enhanced SuperFin), the company mentioned its successors, starting with Intel 4 (7 nm EUV-based), which offers electrical properties and transistor densities in the league of 5 nm-class nodes by TSMC. Intel 4 debuts with “Meteor Lake” mobile architecture slated for the first half of 2023, with mass-production of wafers commencing in 2H-2022. The Intel 3 node is targeted for a year later in late-2023, with the server processor that succeeds “Sapphire Rapids” being developed for this node. Following this, Intel, along with several other foundry companies, enter the tricky sub-2 nm class.

The Intel 20A (20-angstrom) node is being designed for a specific category of Intel processors slated for the first half of 2024. Later that year, the company will debut the Intel 18A (18-angstrom) node. Intel unveiled the new “Arrow Lake” client microarchitecture being developed on the Intel 20A node, with product-launches expected in 2024, and wafer production in 2023. The company appears to be de-coupling its server, client desktop, client-mobile, GPU/XPU accelerators from each other, with the development of specific nodes for each. These will then be combined in some shape or form as hardware IP blocks on purpose-built multi-chip modules, such as the upcoming “Ponte Veccio.”