From what I could gather while I was inside (2010-ish, but not directly involved with chip product lines) there was just incredible hubris company wide. "Intel Architecture is the best because we made it and we're the best" essentially.

They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the result of these efforts from what I understand). They were spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).

It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to interact with were business/people-people types that truly seemed to believe that the best product boiled down entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing campaigns (which were pure social status signaling, but with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs rather than being responsible for the market situation around IA in the first place).

Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water? Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of their own farts.

This isn't very surprising. Intel has already been making their GPUs at TSMC for quite a while now (I believe using N4). Porting and validating that GPU to Intel fabs would be expensive and take a lot of time.

There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute tiles to 18a as well.

Has it been confirmed that the compute section is exclusively TSMC? My limited searching turned up nothing definitive and wasn't clear about if there would be a mix of 18A and TSMC N2 in all processors or if this was a contingency plan for increased volume or if this was a fallback in case 18A falls through.

They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement

Apple farms out its displays to Samsung, a competitor. It's just how business is done.

Didn't they commit to that quite some time ago?

Do they have foundry customers? Serious question; I remember Gelsinger's IFS announcement and that they had some launch partners, but haven't seen much since.

I used to say "Never bet against Intel", it was because everytime they seemed to be behind they would pull something out and regain the loss in short order.

But so far nothing of the sort has happened for a long time. If feels like ever since Ryzen landed, they have been desperate to catch up but keep tripping on themselves. Losing Apple, while inevitable, has made them look even more irrelevant. They still do decent stuff for the most part but there isnt anything really exciting.

I do like what they are doing with Arc GPUs but it is clear those are loss leaders and it isnt really gaining that much traction.

Alas, this is a story where we will have a better understanding in five years from now.

The rumor is that Intel might not offer 18a to external customers rather than getting rid of 18a itself. A lot of this seems to be due to their design libraries still being quite proprietary and not much to do with the viability of the process itself.

It's not about how soon 14a and 10a come out, but rather about how good they are when they arrive. 14a will be competing against TSMC A16 in late 2026 and 10a will be competing with TSMC A14 in late 2027. The measure of Intel's success will be whether they are gaining or losing vs TSMC.

On the customer front, I think customers are probably necessary to offset the ever-increasing R&D costs and an extra year or two to work on making their libraries more standardized may be best for everyone.

They're not scrapping 18A. Panther Lake is slated to be manufactured on 18A. The rumors are about Intel giving up on finding Foundry customers for 18A, and instead targeting 14A for Foundry.