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adamsvystun | 3 years ago

> The most important decision was shifting to extreme ultraviolet lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much too expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple’s commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for the iPhone.

Can somebody here correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was that Intel did commit early to EUV, with initial plans to start high volume manufacturing in line with other fabs (initial schedule was to introduce EUV in 2017 [1], it just got postponed many times), but they just failed in their execution.

[1] https://wccftech.com/idf13-intel-ship-10nm-chips-2015-7nm-ch...

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Throwawayaerlei|3 years ago

I think your citation is 9 years old. What I've always heard is what they called 10 nm was non-EUV. You are correct that what they called 7 nm was going to use EUV, pretty much had to, but 10 nm catastrophically failed and the company responded very poorly to that.

Not that long ago I remember reading, forget at what confidence level, that their old 7 mn was believed to have the potential to leapfrog their 10 nm and save the company, but others said they had some problematic things in common (not counting the very poorly run company!) that made that unlikely. In any event what was 7 nm did not ride to the company's rescue.

adrian_b|3 years ago

Their 7 nm process has been renamed now as "Intel 4" and there is a presentation of it at Anandtech, which looks more credible than the fake presentations of the 10 nm process of some years ago.

The first product using this process, Meteor Lake, is expected 1 year from now.