Part of Intel's former CEO Pat Gelsinger's plan when he took over the company in 2020 was to make them the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer again. With the IDM 2.0 plan and Intel 5N4Y, he has a plan to accelerate Intel's chip production technology by upgrading Intel's semiconductor chip production nodes five times in four years.
The plan seems to be bearing fruit as their latest production process technology, the Intel 18A, now appears to be almost ready to be used for the purpose of manufacturing semiconductor chips developed by other companies.
The Intel 18A website has been updated with the statement "Intel 18A is now ready for customer projects with the tape outs beginning in the first half of 2025". This means that Intel can begin manufacturing any semiconductor chip design or process that uses the advanced 18A (18 Angstrom, or 1.8mm) process technology, with the first production arriving in the first half of this year.
This is not surprising. Several of Intel's own processors, namely Panther Lake, Nova Lake and Xeon Clearwater Forest, will be released using the Intel 18A process this year as well. This comes after the Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, Alder Lake and Rocket Lake series of processors were all manufactured by TSMC.
Late last year, it was reported that the production volume of semiconductor chips that can be used with the 18A process was very low. Broadcom was among the companies that said this when testing it previously.
With this new statement from Intel, and also how their own processors will be manufactured with the process, this may be evidence that the production volume of chips using this process has improved since the report was released.