Intel bigs up its latest 18A chip node as fit for external customers but probably not Nvidia, for now

Cats and dogs. Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Now we've seen everything, etc. Of course, we've known about the Intel-Nvidia collab for a while. One big question is whether it will involve Intel actually making Nvidia GPUs in its foundry. For now, it seems not, despite Intel shifting its marketing pitch on the new 18A node this week. Intel now says 18A is no longer fit only for Intel's own chips. It's good enough for customers, too.

Intel CFO Dave Zinsner has been talking to the usual financial analyst types at the Morgan Stanley Conference this week, and probably the biggest news coming from his comments is an upgrade to the status of Intel's 18A node. That's the new silicon that just debuted in Intel's impressive Panther Lake laptop CPU.

"While Lip-Bu [Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan] was thinking that we probably should focus on 14A as a foundry node and make 18A really just an internal node, now that we’ve seen some real progress there, I think he’s now starting to recognise that this is actually a good node to offer to external customers as well. We’ve been getting some inbound interest in 18AP as a foundry node," Zinsner said.

That's quite a big change from when Intel relegated 18A to a node only fit for making Intel's own chips, with 14A instead being the node it would promote for its foundry customers. If 18A can also be a customer node, that's big news for the foundry half of Intel's business, which is meant to be making an ever greater contribution to Intel's bottom line. It gives Intel a broader offering for customers and, presumably, should mean Intel can bring customers on board more quickly, given 18A is in full production now, producing chips for sale, but 14A is still in development.

But who might be Intel's new customers for the 18A node? One obvious candidate is Nvidia. After all, Intel and Nvidia have announced broad collaborations to combine Intel CPUs with Nvidia GPUs in both AI servers and consumer PCs, the result of which will be "revolutionary products", according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. So, could it make sense if part of that deal involved Intel manufacturing those Nvidia GPUs?

Possibly, Zinsner emphasised that the deals are about product, not manufacturing. Responding to the implication that some observers thought the deal would include manufacturing, he said, "It was a product-driven engagement between the two CEOs. It was, as you say, a lot of customers looking for an x86 solution, and, you know, I think NVIDIA wanted to be able to offer that. Of course, for us, it’s great to marry our CPUs with their GPUs. They’re the best in the business for sure."

Of course, that doesn't mean Nvidia won't be an Intel Foundry customer. Indeed, Lip-Bu Tan has made it clear he won't be announcing foundry customers, instead telling investors that when Intel ramps up its investments in "glass substrate" and "CapEx equipment," that will be a sign that Intel has won some customers.

Anywho, the tentative conclusion here is that things seem to be going in the right direction for Intel of late, albeit after years of missteps, including buggy CPUs and numerous delayed process nodes. Panther Lake looks like a winner, 18A is getting better, and the Nvidia deal is surely an overall positive.

As for what all this means for ye olde consumer PCs, well, there are mixed signals. On the one hand, Su spoke of supply constraints due to massively increased demand for CPUs, which isn't good. On the other hand, she also said "we are very, very well positioned from a supply standpoint to meet a large percentage of that demand."

What's more, AMD's latest server Zen 6-based CPU, codenamed Venice, is being built on TSMC's most advanced N2 node. That's not a rumour, that's according to AMD. What we don't know is what node AMD will use for its Zen 6 consumer CPUs.

AMD desktop and laptop CPU chiplets are currently built on TSMC N4 silicon. So, using N3 rather than the latest N2 would still provide a full node jump but also mean that consumer CPUs aren't competing with those new Venice server CPU chiplets for the most advanced TSMC N2 silicon.

The bottom line, as ever, is that we just don't know for now. All this AI demand certainly helps when it comes to giving AMD lots of resources to spend on engineering new chips, including chips for gaming PCs. But it also makes everything more expensive.