Comment by watersb

I think that people are still underestimating the technical merits of Intel's 18A fabrication process.

I haven't seen any competitor even try to address the backside power delivery of 18A. I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.

The design rules for the standard cell (sort of corresponding to the die area required by a transistor) for the Intel 18A seem to target dense, high performance designs. That's not a particularly meaningful insight - of course Intel wants to have the highest performance of all the fabs.

Intel's packaging expertise used to be a generation ahead, and indeed their server chips currently use a mad mix of chiplets and through-silicon visas for direct stacking, all heaped onto a reticule-limited monster interposer die. All of this expensive complexity might be sustainable as long as Intel can keep its enterprise customers happy. That hasn't turned out too well for them.

AMD has found a mass-market winner with mainstream gaming CPU with extra level 3 cache die stacked on top. Compared to Intel servers, it's brutally simple. But extremely effective in its consumer market.

But the Intel chiplets and packaging could be a great toolbox for M7 generation of Apple Silicon. Now that the M5 Pro and Max are multi chip packages, they more resemble the Intel and AMD designs, with chiplets dedicated to I/O or GPU.

(Speculation and dreams. That's all I got, and I'm writing it in the face of an absolutely psychotic autocorrect on a tablet.)

I find this rumor at least plausible.

As we all know, Intel used to be famous for their engineering and their ability to scale up a newer, smaller process with way earlier commercial viability. This all ended with the Sisyphean 10nm move that was years late and honestly Intel just don't seem to have recovered from it.

So Intel seemingly has underutilized fab capacity whereas the likes of TSMC and Samsung can probably produce every chip they make with demand to spare. Given the CHIPS Act that was passed under Biden, the Trump admin taking a stake in Intel and the environment of tariffs and a push for American manufacturing, everything seems to be lining up for someone to take advantage of Inte's physical fabs and American production and that could be Apple.

Wouldn't this help Intel compete?

If they have Apple's designs months prior to launch, rather than after launch.