Intel’s Q3 2022 earnings report is out and it looks like revenue is stagnant compared to the previous quarter, which is not terrible considering the decline in PC sales over the last few quarters. At least CEO Pat Gelsinger is optimistic about how things are progressing with upcoming products, and still believes that Intel could “regain transistor performance and power performance leadership by 2025.”
From what we have seen with the Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors, the Intel 7 fabrication process is holding its own against TSMC’s top nodes. Gelsinger reports that Team Blue is ready to move to superior nodes that make use of EUV lithography, such as Intel 4 for the Meteor Lake family and even to Intel 3 for server-grade Granite Rapids and Emerald Rapids CPUs, plus mentions a Sierra Forest family integrating only efficiency cores.
On Intel 4, we are progressing towards a high-volume manufacturing and will tape out the production stepping at Meteor Lake in Q4. The first stepping of Granite Rapids is out of the fab, yielding well with Intel 3 continuing to progress on schedule. Intel 4 and 3 are our first nodes deploying EUV and will represent a major step forward in terms of transistor performance per watt and density[...] We also saw strong milestones in the next three generations of server products. Emerald Rapids is showing good progress and is on track for calendar year '23. Granite Rapids is very healthy running multiple operating systems across many configurations. And with Sierra Forest, our first E-core product providing world-class performance per watt are both solidly on track for '24.
Gelsinger also states that the 20A and 18A nodes that will integrate Intel’s own spin on GAAFET technology with RibbonFET and PowerVia solutions are now taping out for intel’s own test chips and another “potential foundry customer” (none other than Qualcomm, as announced back in 2021).
Furthermore, Gelsinger is focused on co-opting an increasing number of fab-less companies through Intel’s Foundry Services and the CEO is “excited to welcome Nvidia to the RAMP-C program, which enables both commercial foundry customers and the U.S. Department of Defense to take advantage of Intel's at scale investments in leading-edge technologies.” Earlier this year, Gelsinger stated that IFS is open to making world-class CPUs and GPUs for competitors like Nvidia and AMD, so with Team Green’s addition to the “roster." this plan appears to be advancing quite nicely.
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