Comment by fc417fc802
17 hours ago
> utterly ruin
I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? It's only luxury consumer electronics and the highest end corporate gear that use cutting edge nodes to begin with.
Disruption of the cutting edge would certainly wreak havoc on the pricing and specs of high end luxury electronics but that would hardly be the end of the world. I still use a desktop with DDR3 on a daily basis (granted the GPU is much newer with GDDR6) and my laptop is from the early era of DDR4 ...
> but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right?
No they don't. Even the US partnerships with TSMC aren't cutting edge.
TSMC and arguably Samsung have cutting edge fabs, no one else.
The Intel CMOS process 18A, which they have launched a few weeks ago, is the first after almost a decade that is somewhat competitive with TSMC and Samsung.
Good for Intel: their new manufacturing process has demonstrated a much better energy efficiency than the TSMC "3 nm" process that was used to make Intel Arrow Lake and Intel Lunar Lake.
Unknown: TSMC now has a "2 nm" process and the first products using variants of this process are being launched. It is unknown how TSMC "2 nm" compares with Intel 18A, but it is almost certain that the TSMC "2 nm" is better.
Bad for Intel: they had difficulties to achieve high clock frequencies in Intel 18A in comparison with TSMC "3 nm", so most Panther Lake models have lower clock frequencies than their Arrow Lake counterparts. Moreover, it is also pretty certain that for now Intel 18A has much lower fabrication yields than even the latest TSMC "2 nm" process.