The original "5 Nodes in 4 Years" roadmap released in mid 2021 had 18A entering production 2H 2024. So it's already "delayed". The updated roadmap has it coming in Q3 2025 but I don't think anyone ever believed that. This after 20A was canceled, Intel 4 is only used for the Compute Tile in Meteor Lake, Intel 3 only ever made it into a couple of server chips, and Intel 7 was just renamed 10nm.
I have next to zero knowledge of semiconductor fabrication, but “Continued Momentum” does sound like the kind of corporate PR-speak that means “people haven't heard from us in a while and there's not much to show”.
I also would never have realized the 20A process was canceled were it not for your comment since this press release has one of the most generous euphemisms I've ever heard for canceling a project:
“One of the benefits of our early success on Intel 18A is that it enables us to shift engineering resources from Intel 20A earlier than expected as we near completion of our five-nodes-in-four-years plan.”
The first iteration of Intel 10nm was simply broken -- you had Ice Lake mobile CPUs in 2019 yes but desktop and server processors took another two years to be released. In 2012 Intel said they will ship 14nm in 2013 and 10nm in 2015. Not only they did fail to deliver 10nm Intel CPUs but they failed Nokia server division too, nearly killing it off in 2018, three years after their initial target. No one in the industry forgot that, it's hardly a surprise they have such trouble getting customers now.
And despite this total failure they spent many tens of on stock buybacks https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/stock_buyback no less than ten billions in 2014 and in 2018-2021 over forty billions. That's an awful, awful lot of money to waste.
Most of the stock buybacks happened under Bob Swan though. Krzanich dug the grave of Intel but it was Swan who kicked the company in there by wasting forty billion. (No wonder he landed at a18z.)
Yes, yes, yes, of course, the infamous CPU released just so Intel middle managers can get their bonus. GPU disabled, CPU gimped, the whole thing barely worked at all. Let's call it the 0th iteration of 10nm , it was not real, there was like one laptop in China, the Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICN, which paper launched.
