Intel Foundry Hits 18A Process Milestone With Next-Gen Chips Up And Running
Intel's 18A process isn't just a shrink of existing technologies. The company is including two major fabrication advancements with 18A, those being RibbonFET gate-all-around FETs and the PowerVia back-side power delivery technology. You can click those links to learn more about those innovations, but the important part for laymen is that both should offer improved power efficiency and clock scaling. Notably, Intel will be first to market with these technologies if it can continue to meet its targets.
Panther Lake is the family of mobile processors coming after this year's Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, while Clearwater Forest is the successor to the Sierra Forest all-E-core Xeon parts that launched back in June. Both families of chips are expected to use "Darkmont" E-cores, which are a revised form of the Skymont cores launching with Lunar Lake. No word on exactly what changes are coming in Darkmont, but Skymont is a tremendous departure from Crestmont, the architecture used for E-cores in Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest, and you can read about that in our Lunar Lake deep dive.
Intel says that it has Panther Lake's memory controllers already up and running at the "target frequency," whatever that actually is, while Clearwater Forest will debut new Foveros Direct 3D chip stacking. According to the company's press release, Clearwater Forest will use a base die fabricated on Intel 3-T, upon which the 18A compute tiles will be stacked using through-silicon vias (TSVs).
Besides its own products, Intel has said that its first external customer is expected to reach product tape-out on Intel's 18A process in the first half of next year. No word on who that customer is, but the press release includes statements from both Cadence and Synopsys praising Intel's foundry efforts.
All of these parts are expected next year. In the meantime, we're hoping to see Lunar Lake any day now, Battlemage shortly after, and then Arrow Lake toward the end of the year.
