Intel tweaks its 18A process with variants tailored to mass-market chips, big AI brains

Direct Connect Intel has revealed a pair of variants of its long-awaited 18A process node to make it better suited for, one, manufacturing mass-market processors and, two, complex multi-die semiconductors for – of course – AI.

First teased in mid-2021, the 2nm-ish 18A is set to finally enter volume production later this year with the launch of Intel’s Panther Lake client processor family. However, the node was only really intended for specialist high-performance use cases — think high-end CPUs and GPUs — with its forthcoming 14A process node set to be the chipmaker’s first truly mass-market node.

Unfortunately, while 14A promises to deliver a 15-20 percent performance per watt uplift, it’s still a few years away from volume production.

Faced with growing demand, particularly for American-made silicon, Intel has decided it needs something to satiate the masses a little sooner and has tweaked its original 18A formula with two new revisions ...