Intel goes from bad to worse, giving up on 20A for Arrow Lake

Intel has been floundering for a while now, but it has shown signs of resurgence with its Lunar Lake launch which the company says can go toe-to-toe with Arm. While Lunar Lake's production was outsourced to external fabricators, the company has been bullish on its commitment to producing its next generation of processors, Arrow Lake, on Intel 20A. Now, though, the company has announced that Arrow Lake will instead be produced with "external partners," going against the company's roadmap that it's been touting for years at this stage.

Intel says it's better in the long run

Straight to Intel 18A, apparently

Intel roadmap showing Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 3, Intel 20A, and Intel 18A.

Intel's roadmap for the last couple of years has been all about completing five nodes in four years, and the company says that it's still on track to do just that. Apparently, Intel 18A is seeing "early success," so the company will shift its resources into developing it further rather than focusing on completing Intel 20A. According to the company as well, "the journey to Intel 18A has been built on the groundwork laid by Intel 20A."

The problem for Intel is that no matter what, the skipping of Intel 20A is a bad look for a company that has already been seen to be massively struggling. Plummeting stock prices, unstable CPUs, and setbacks affecting its manufacturing business are just a handful of the problems currently plaguing Team Blue, and things are not looking to improve anytime soon.

Intel says that it's still on track for 18A to launch in 2025, which an optimistic outlook suggests could be because the company is genuinely seeing early success that it thinks is worth focusing on. Nodes are expensive to launch, and with Intel saying that 18A already has a defect density below 0.40 (below 0.5 is typically the standard), it would make sense to focus on it instead of trying to launch a whole new node only to replace it a year later. With that said, the optics aren't good for a company that has already been in dire straits over the last few months.

It's not all too surprising, though. Rumors had pointed for quite a while to Intel weighing up alternative options to producing all of Arrow Lake on its 20A process, with one rumor suggesting that only Arrow Lake's compute tile for the Intel Core i5 and below would be produced on 20A. Intel has mostly stuck to its roadmap with Intel 3 being used for Xeon fabrication and Intel 4 being used for Meteor Lake so far.