Intel Says Goodbye To 20A Node On Early 18A Progress, Confirms Arrow Lake Will Be Manufactured Externally

Intel has done a fair bit of talking recently over successes from its 18A process node, which rather brings up the question, "why bother with 20A at all, if 18A is already yielding well?" Apparently someone at Intel had the same thought, as the company has announced today that it is canceling the 20A node altogether and focusing its resources on 18A instead. But what about the products that were supposed to be on 20A?

Well, they're going to be built by someone else, and that someone else is almost assuredly TSMC. Intel doesn't go as far as to say that; the company's blog post announcing this decision is terse and simply says that Arrow Lake parts "will be built primarily using external partners and packaged by Intel Foundry."


Still, there's really no one else that has a functioning fabrication process with performance at the level required for cutting-edge CPUs and other processors. Intel having its own CPUs fabbed by TSMC might be off-putting for some, but the company says that 18A is on track for launch next year, which was indeed the plan going back a couple of years—at least, publicly, anyway.

So, is 20A just a loss for Intel? Not at all. The company's work on its 20A process helped it to integrate new fabrication technologies, including the "PowerVia" backside power delivery network as well as Intel's unique "RibbonFET" implementation of the Gate-All-Around (GAAFET) transistor design. Both of these advancements are integrated into Intel's 18A process, and will see use in future products like Panther Lake, the follow-up to Lunar Lake for mobile, as well as "Nova Lake," the successor to Arrow Lake on desktop.

Intel concludes its blog post by saying that "current Intel 18A defect density [is] already at D0 <0.40," meaning that the process is showing less than 0.4 defects per square centimeter—quite good yields for such a bleeding-edge technology. Hopefully, the results from its processor packaging plant are as solid. If so, we could truly see a revitalized Intel in 2025, especially considering the chipmaker's performance claims for its Lunar Lake CPUs.